Jesse, his face red with the torture of the accomplished jiu-jitsuing he was receiving, stormed at and cursed the Japanese in fo'c'sle terms as he saw Louise pass toward the rear door the Japanese had indicated. She nodded affirmatively to Mutsu when he told her that he would be at the Savoy that evening to see that she had arrived there safely; then she passed through the rear door leading into the hall, went down the thickly-padded stairs without awakening the bald and bland Gaskins, who dozed in a hall chair; and had the luck to hail a taxicab almost in front of the house.
Laura was at the hotel, and in a panic of worriment about Louise, when the girl got back. Louise told Laura what had happened in a few words, then fainted, falling back heavily upon a couch, for the first time in her life—after the danger was all over, with the usual feminine whimsiness.
That night the following cable message to John Blythe was flashed under the sea:
"Come immediately. You are needed here. Laura."
CHAPTER XIV
The mutiny of Mutsu, culminating at so opportune a time for Louise, was the result of an enmity for his employer which had been slumbering for a long time in the mind of the Japanese valet. It had its origin in Jesse's treatment of several women and girl victims for the entrapment of whom Jesse had invoked the unwilling services of his Japanese man. Mutsu had been employed as an attendant at New York clubs long enough to know the meaning of the word "thoroughbred" in its vernacular application to men; and he knew very well that the "thoroughbred" man did not go in for the sort of women-corraling machinations to which Jesse devoted more than half of his time. Thus formed and grew Mutsu's contempt for his employer as a coward who preyed upon the defencelessness of inveigled women; and his contempt had reached a focal point when, after having been made the instrument to accomplish the enmeshment of Louise Treharne, he had returned to the Curzon Street house to find her in a peril with which he had become all too familiar since entering Jesse's service. Louise's beauty and palpable purity had touched a sympathetic chord in the Japanese; so that, after accomplishing his vigil, his knowledge, based upon experience, of the indignities and perhaps worse to which she was bound to be subjected by his employer had impelled him, in a sudden surge of Oriental wrath, to follow her after he had seen her start for the Curzon Street house.
Mutsu had no difficulty in making a leisurely departure from Jesse's establishment and service after having released Louise from his employer's toils. He retained his tendon-stretching jiu-jitsu hold on Jesse until he was sure that Louise had reached the street, while Jesse, literally foaming at the mouth in his rage, cursed him with an almost Arabic variety and profusion of epithets. Then Mutsu, suddenly releasing his employer, darted to the center of the room and faced Jesse with a teeth-exhibiting smile that was also half a snarl.
"Now I quit," said Mutsu, briefly. "I am glad for a quit. I despise-hate your typical. You not come near me—" as Jesse, rubbing his sorely-stretched arm, made a step toward him—"or I break your two-both arms. I pack. You pay me. I quit permanent-forever."