Three days, and the message of the mended candle-stick was left. That night, in the shadow of the monument, the opium fiend disclosed to Yee Wing the prison place of his wife.
The Powder-man took his hands from his wide sleeves. Then, on swift foot, he made off to the great, stone yamen of the police.
“Plenty piecee bad man hab got my wife,” he told the head man.
“Chinks?” asked the “foreign devil.”
“Yessee.”
“Then w’y doan yez jerk out their pigtails?” the other demanded,—but not unkindly, for the thin face and the strained eyes made him conscious of something like pity.
Yee Wing told his story, in the best pidgin-English he could command.
That same night, a gong-wagon came rattling its way into Chinatown. The Sam Sings who lounged at corners here and there watched its progress with unconcern. The wagon was an hourly visitor, since here, hutched with the careless Oriental, and out of the sight of the clean, was the city’s scum—criminal and unfortunate together.
But all of a sudden there was the sound of sandalled feet on the run, for the out-post men were scattering to cover. The patrol had turned into a certain squalid alley, had stopped before a certain door, above which—black Chinese characters on a scarlet ground—was pasted the legend:
THE MOONLIGHT RESTS IN WHITE
PURITY UPON THE GARDEN OF ROSES