Yee Wing looked around the circle. He spoke no word, but there was a terrible light in his blood-shot eyes. Then, he turned about and went down the stairway. Again, his right hand was in his wide left sleeve, his left hand in the right one.
The Collector of Monies, making leisurely toward his favourite barber-shop, was conscious of a figure—almost a shadow, so uncertain was it—that appeared and disappeared behind him. He stopped every few feet to look over his shoulder. But, through the ever moving procession of the pavement, he could see no one that seemed to be following.
At the barber-shop, he took a stool lazily. First, a square napkin dipped in hot water freshened face and palms; next, a few hairs were pulled from his jowl, and the ear-spoon was wielded. Then he composed himself for a head-shave. The razoring begun, he watched a group of gaudily dressed children, shouting and gamboling before the door, and as he watched he fingered a long-stemmed pipe, caressing its ivory mouthpiece with his lips.
Of a sudden, through the group of children, to the great brass bowl at the shop entrance, came a figure. Its dress was ragged and dirty, its queue unkempt. Its right hand was thrust in a wide left sleeve, the left hand in the right one.
As Chow Loo looked, the right hand was drawn from the sleeve and extended toward him. Between two blood-shot eyes was the black bore of a revolver.
Careless of the razor, he sprang up, the keen blade taking him in the scalp. But even as he leaped came the bullet—straight to the mark.
A hue and cry arose, there was a great running, and gathering, a medley of questions, a medley of answers, the jostling and the commands of uniformed “foreign devils.” Chow Loo tottered forward, and dropped beside the great brass bowl. And there, gazing fixedly up at a lantern that was swinging gently to and fro above the door, the life of the Collector of Monies went out of him.
When Yee Wing arrived at Sather, he found Wah Lee lying in a strip of shade behind the dove-cotes. The old man got up at once, relinquished a key, folded a few belongings into a handkerchief and departed down the road to Fruitvale.