"Even madness will not explain that!" Li Sin shook his head.
There was the incident during the period of the Boxer chaos in Yuen-Lau, when Dreghorn and an associate had tortured an old mandarin, hoping to make him unearth treasure. They had given him the torture of the bowstring, and the water torture, and the torture of red metal at his feet.
"And he an old man," Li Sin thought, "four-score and five!"
There was the incident in Mombasaland when the fiendish natives had captured a lone hunter of ivory, had crucified him on the ground, smeared with honey for the ants, delirious under the smashing sun. Dreghorn could have rescued him, for he was well armed and had a large party of natives. But he contented himself with stealing the man's ivory and leaving him there to die.
"That is one thing for which there is no punishment," Li Sin thought. "No punishment is equal in horror."
Li Sin read another incident, and he read no farther. It was the story of Marie Tirlemont, called Flancs-de-neige, whom Dreghorn had brought with him from Maxim's in Paris, down to the Congo. She had ceased to amuse Dreghorn a hundred miles south of Leopoldville, and he had abandoned her alone, in a village of black beasts.
And now Dreghorn, Li Sin mused, wanted to marry. He wanted to marry this fair little American girl, pure and delicate as the petal of a primrose, light and shimmering and gay as iridescence on water—to make a home with her, to have her bear children.
He called for Hong Kop.
"What is the profit of crime, Hong Kop?" he asked.
The Cantonese thought for a moment.