"You givee me back Wun Lung glost?"
"Yes—go ahead."
This assurance, with the sight of the broad coin and the disappearance of the pistols, worked wonders with the hitherto quaking and evasive laundryman, and in his best English and most straightforward manner—circumlocutory as it was—he related the particulars of an interesting tale.
It appeared that Wun Lung—whose mortal remains the ingenious contrivance captured had been meant to simulate—had been the proprietor of a laundry on Dupont Street, a profitable spot, the site of which appealed to Michael O'Brien, a local politician, as very desirable for the location of a saloon, but his offer to purchase was declined and his threats disregarded. The disappointed Irishman therefore proceeded to extreme measures, broke up the laundry and shot the owner, who was Sing Lo's employer, but was promptly released with a five-dollar fine by a compatriot on the bench, on the ground of self-defence. When O'Brien established his residence and saloon on the dead Chinaman's premises, a junior Wun Lung conceived the ingenious idea of frightening the murderer away with the "ghost" of his victim. The ghastly dummy was constructed and sent flying up and down the hill at midnight, being attached to and removed from the cable by Sing Lo and his fellow-laundryman, Ah Wing, while Wun Lung himself roused the saloon keeper from drunken slumber by a sharp tapping on his window by means of a "tick-tack," as boys call an ingenious combination of string, pin, and nail. The appeal to the fears of O'Brien and the identity of the spectre were emphasized by the solitary bleached hand of the apparition, the departed Wun having had but a single arm during the latter years of his life.
"Why did your friend make this contrivance of nickel?" asked Nelson, with the instinctive inquisitiveness of his legal training.
Sing Lo grinned as he replied:
"Wun Lung say, 'Put-um nickel in slot, Ilishman see-um glost.'"
With an additional dollar, designated by Nelson as "witness fees," and with his late employer's ghost under his arm, the Chinaman was released and drifted out into the darkness of Chinatown.
Half an hour later, Joyce was on his way to the home of his friends. He paused a moment at Dupont Street, and there, near the corner, read the following sign:
