His way led him always through squalid alleys; narrow, dark alleys, where there were no shops, and no coolies going by with heavy baskets swinging from their carrying-poles; but where, from tiny, barred windows, the faces of young Chinese girls looked out—ivory-yellow faces, wondering, wistful.
Before them, passing and repassing, his own face upturned, went Yee Wing.
The slave women gazed down at him with little interest, their dull eyes, their sullen mouths, bespeaking the spirit that is broken but still resentful. He could not call to them, could not question, for among them was surely a spy. He could only pass and repass. Then, to another dark alley, with the same barred windows, the same wistful faces. Enter one of these places, he dared not, if he hoped to live to save her. The Sam Sings guarding the slave trade—those quick-working knife-men who are as quick to get away from the “foreign devils,” police—had her under guard. He must find out where they were keeping her—then match their cunning with his own.
When the little money he had was exhausted, he visited a relative—visited him secretly, toward dawn of a morning thick with fog. For anyone who helped him, if it were known, would suffer swift and certain punishment. Here he replenished his pocket. Then, off again. He ate seldom and sparingly, he slept only in snatches, hidden away under steps or in a big, empty dry-goods box down in the wholesale section.
The end of that week saw him rattling through Burlingame and Palo Alto on his way to San José. There, in the “Garden City,” three days were spent in walking and watching. Then, on to Sacramento, where, half-starved, he stumbled out of the great, roofed station, and made toward the Chinese quarter. Finally, he proceeded north to Portland.
One cold night, a fortnight after Yee Chu’s disappearance, he reached San Francisco once more. It had rained in the north, and his cloth sandals were pulpy, his wadded, cotton coat was soaked. His head was unshaven, too, his queue unkempt from long neglect. He was sallow and green-hued.
But there was no surrender in the blood-shot eyes. He began again to haunt the streets of Chinatown. And, late one night, in Waverly Place, under a blowing street-lamp, he met one of the two he sought; he came face to face with the Collector of Monies.
Yee Wing’s right hand was tucked in his left sleeve, his left hand in the right one. The Collector of Monies had reached to a hind pocket of the blue broadcloth trousers. But across the grimy court, in the light of a second lamp, a uniformed figure was idling and swinging a heavy club to and fro on a thong. His eye was upon them.
They stopped short, each alert. The face of the Collector of Monies was placid, though he marked the bulging sleeves of the Powder-man. Yee Wing was, outwardly, calm too. But his thin upper lip, upon which grew a few straggling hairs, twitched uncontrollably.
“Where is she hidden?” he demanded.