The wheezy old whistle of the Persian Gulf told the world in unmistakable accents that sailing time was nigh. The Persian Gulf was not a new boat or a fast boat, and she sailed in the intermediate service south of Java. Yet she was stout, and typhoons meant very little to her as yet.
"Why not?" demanded Peter in the tones of an interlocutor.
The coolie simply lifted the flap of his blue tunic, and Peter was given the singular glimpse of a bone-hafted knife, the blade of which he could guess lay flat against the man's paunch.
Still the Chinese smiled, without avarice. Plainly he was stating the case as it was known to him, reciting a lesson, as it were, which had been taught him by one skilled in the ways of killing and of espionage.
The facts of this case were that Peter Moore should immediately postpone or give up entirely his trip to Hong Kong for reasons best known to the powers arrayed against him. And strangely enough, Hong Kong was one of the two cities in China where Peter had pressing business.
It made him furious, this knowledge that the man of Len Yang had picked up the trail again.
So Peter glanced up and down the deck to see if there would be any witness to his act, and there was only one, a passenger. The Chinese was still smiling, but by degrees that smile was becoming more evil and sour. He was perplexed at the wireless operator's furtive examination of the promenade deck. Yet he was not kept in the dark regarding Peter's intentions much longer than it would have taken him to utter the Chinese equivalent of Jack Robinson.
With an energetic swoop, Peter seized him by the nearest arm and leg, and in the next breath the coolie was shooting through an awful void, tumbling head over heels like a bag of loose rice, straight for the oily bosom of Batavia's harbor!
So much for Peter's slight knowledge of jiu-jitsu.
He was angrily at a loss to account for the appearance of this trailer, for he had been watchful every moment since escaping from the green walls of that blood-tinted city, and he was positive that he had shaken off pursuit. Yet somewhere along that trail, which ran from Len Yang to Bhamo, from Rangoon to Penang, and around the horn of Malacca, his escape had been betrayed.