“We haven’t sent him any laundry this week,” declared Ruth. “Are you sure it’s a laundry check?”
Luke looked at it again. Then he started in surprise.
“Why, no!” he exclaimed. “It isn’t a laundry check, and it isn’t written in Chinese characters, as I thought at first! It’s a note to you, Ruth!”
“A note to me, Luke?”
“Well, perhaps not to you exactly. It’s to all of you. Wait, I guess I can read it.”
He stepped from beneath the shadowy apple tree into the stronger moonlight and held up the paper with its black characters. Then he read, and afterward Ruth perused the queer note which said:
“Korner Hous gals pay Hop Wong 100 dols
Hop Wong mak grat much money gals.”
For a moment neither Ruth nor Luke spoke. With heads close together they again read the queer note, while Sammy, Tess and Dot stood idly there, rather awed by the strangeness of it all.
“Hum,” murmured Luke, “I wonder if he wrote this himself or got some one to do it for him.”
“Hop Wong can write a little English,” said Ruth. “A very little, as perhaps you have noticed,” she went on to Luke. “He told me once he had gone to a Mission School.”