Li Mow Gee was not the type of inscrutable, omnipotent gambler who somehow manages to control fate and carry out the purposes of destiny, such as appear to be many of his race. He prided himself upon being a “son of T’ang”—that is, a man of the old southern empire whose ancestry was quite clear and unblemished through about nine centuries.
He was a slant-eyed, yellow-skinned, wrinkled little man of fifty. He had a bad digestion and an irritable temper, he was much given to rice-wine and wives, and he possessed an uncanny knowledge of the code of Confucius, by which he ruled his life—sometimes.
Upon the day after Reginald Carefrew arrived in Sabang the estimable Li Mow Gee sat in his private back room, which was hung with Chien Lung paintings, whose subjects would have scandalized Sodom and Gomorrah. Li Mow Gee sucked a three-foot pipe of bamboo and steel, and watched a kettle of water bubbling over a charcoal brazier. At the proper moment he took a pewter insert from its stand, slipped it into its niche inside the kettle, and watched the water boil until the pewter vessel was well heated. Then he poured hot rice-wine into the thimble-cup of porcelain at his elbow, sipped it with satisfaction, and clapped his hands four times.
One of the numerous doors of the room opened to admit a spectacled old man who was a junior partner of Li Mow Gee in business, but who was also Venerable Master of the local lodge of the Heaven-and-Earth Society. As etiquette demanded, the junior partner removed his spectacles and stood blinking, being blind as a bat without them.
“As you are aware, worshipful Chang,” said Li Mow Gee after some preliminary discourse, “my father’s younger brother has become an ancient.”
Mr. Chang bowed respectfully. A son of T’ang never says of his family that they are dead. But Mr. Chang had heard that Li Mow Gee’s father’s younger brother had committed suicide, with the intent of sending his avenging ghost after one Reginald Carefrew.
“You are also aware,” pursued Li Mow Gee, refilling the steel bowl of his pipe, “that the brother-in-law of my friend Huber Davis has arrived in Sabang for a short visit. As a man of learning, you will comprehend that I have certain duties to perform.”
Mr. Chang blinked, and promptly took his cue.
“You doubtless recall certain canons of the law which bear upon the situation,” he squeaked blandly. “It would give me infinite pleasure to hear them from your lips.”
Li Mow Gee had been waiting for this. He exhaled a thin cloud of smoke, and quoted from his exact memory of the writings of the Confucian canon: