Mason looked at the picture of three men seated on the high stern deck of a big junk. The camera had been focused upon the faces. Back of them was a hazy sheet of water, the dim line of a bank, and the fuzzy outlines of an out-of-focus pagoda rising against the sky. The men were smiling affably at the camera with that peculiarly inane expression with which one obeys the command to “look pleasant.” On a table before them was a huge teapot. Three Chinese cups were nestled into the distinctive hole-in-the-center saucers which furnish a sturdy resting place for Chinese soup-bowl cups. Behind the group, standing a little to one side, looking solicitously down at the man in the center, was a Chinese who was undoubtedly Gow Loong. The man in the center was Elston A. Karr, more robust, twenty years younger, but still with that same cold-eyed concentration glittering from his eyes, that ruthless, indomitable purpose stamped upon his face. There had been change in the twenty years. He had lost weight. His skin had stretched taut across his cheekbones, and there were puffs under his eyes; but there could be no mistaking Elston Karr.
The man on his right was the man shown in the photograph produced by Doris Wickford. There could be no doubt of that, and the two photographs must have been taken at about the same time. The partially bald head, the snub nose, the long lower lip with the deep calipers stretching down from the nostrils, the cleft chin, the bushy eyebrows, the protruding batlike ears were unmistakable.
The third man in the photograph caught Mason’s eye. He was a thick-chested, heavy-necked individual with thick lips that were twisted into a smile, but even in the photograph it was apparent that the eyes were not smiling. They were the sort of eyes that wouldn’t smile. They were staring in sullen contemplation at the lens of the camera. It was as though the man had been brooding so long upon some sinister scheme that his thoughts had stamped themselves indelibly upon his face.
“Who’s this man?” Mason asked.
Karr said, “A Judas — a dirty traitor — sold us out for his pieces of silver — almost brought about my death.” He looked up at Doris Wickford and said, “He was responsible for the death of your father. I shan’t forget him — ever.”
There was something in the way he said that last that was as whisperingly ominous as the sound of a carving knife being sharpened on a steel.
Mason compared the photograph in the book with that produced by Doris Wickford. Slowly he nodded his head, then asked, “Got any more pictures of Tucker?”
Karr jerked his head to Johns Blaine, and Blaine, turning the leaves of the photograph album, paused four times more to show Mason photographs. Always there were the photographs of the same four men: Karr; his partner, Tucker; Gow Loong; and this heavy-set, sullen-faced man who had apparently betrayed them.
Abruptly Karr said to Miss Wickford, “I want to check up on you. Where you lived, what you did, whom you knew.”
“Of course. You realize I was rather a child when Dad left, but I have rather distinct memories. I can tell you the houses we lived in — some of them, at any rate. Would you mind telling me whether my father left any considerable amount of property?”