The Mark of the Knife

by Clayton H. Ernst

"Now," said Ted, looking at Wolcott Norris, "is the time for you to spin us a yarn."

"Yes," replied the mining engineer gazing at the three of them with an expression that they later remembered, "I guess this is the time to spin you a yarn."

To their surprise he got up abruptly from his splint-backed chair and went out to his bedroom. As he returned he was thrusting something into his coat pocket.

"After I got through Jefferson," he said, when he was sitting in front of the fireplace once more, "I went to technical school to study engineering—mining engineering—which meant that when I started out to work I traveled round the country from one place to another, and within a short time I had a commission to go to China. When I went I took some one with me."

Wolcott Norris paused and for a minute or two gazed straight before him. None of the three listeners interrupted the silence; there had been a quality in the mining engineer's voice which had made them feel that they were about to hear something unusual.

"Here's her picture," he said, and took from his pocket the object he had placed there on entering the room a few moments before. He handed it to Teeny-bits, who bent forward a little so that the glow from the firelight fell on the photograph. Neil Durant and Ted Norris leaned toward him and the three of them saw the likeness of a young woman with smiling eyes and fine, clear features.

"Mighty nice looking," said Neil Durant. "She reminds me of some one I've seen before, I can't think where."

There was a slight unsteadiness in Wolcott Norris' voice when he spoke again, but he overcame it and went on with his story rapidly.

"We were married just after I got my new job, went out to San Francisco and sailed for China on the Japanese steamer Tenyo Maru. It was a wonderful world to us then—more wonderful than I can describe to you. Rain or shine, every day was a perfect day, and we sailed on and on in that little old steamer out across the Pacific until we came at last to Asia. For several months we were in Shanghai at the headquarters of the company, then they sent me up into the province of Honan to a little place called Tung-sha on a tributary of the Yangtse in a country that was pretty wild.

"There was gold and copper back in the hills and the company intended to carry on extensive operations if the ground proved worth while. How strange it seemed to us to find a bit of a foreign colony—a handful of Americans and British and French, missionaries and representatives of the company—set down in a region that for no one knows how many thousand years had belonged to the yellow men. You go about in China and you see those old, old temples and the weather-worn houses and the ancient hills, bald and bare, and you feel as if antiquity were casting a spell over you. A person who hasn't lived among the Chinese can't imagine what a strange, superstitious people they are; more than any other race on the face of the earth they are bound to the past—and I suppose when we came up there to Tung-sha and began to dig tunnels in their hills we were breaking the precedent of the past. Still we didn't really expect any trouble—and for many months all went smoothly. Some wonderful things happened up there in that out-of-the-way corner of the world. We lived—Marion and I—in a three-room bungalow with a roof that sloped like the roof of a temple, and here that first springtime something very fine came into our lives—a son was born to us. He was a husky little youngster—and maybe he couldn't yell!"