“I can’t tell you where he is,” the boy answered, “but I know he hangs out in Chinatown. You go down there, and near the end of Pell Street is a Chinese grocery, with a funny image in the window. The image has a red stone in one eye, and none in the other. I know, ’cause I went with Peter once, when he was going to have me join a gang of fellers, only my mother wouldn’t let me. They used to meet over that grocery. Maybe he ain’t there now, but he used to be. You’ll see the image in the winder. The gang he belongs to was called the Red Eye Gang.”
Thanking the lad for his information Larry hurried away. He felt that at last he was on the trail, and wanted to follow it up at once. He made his way to Chinatown, and was soon in that section of the city where so much crime abounds.
He had seldom been there, for only the older reporters were sent on stories in that locality. It was not altogether safe in daytime, and at night it must be a bold man who would venture there alone.
At first all the streets seemed made up of groceries and Chinese laundries. Pell Street appeared to be one continuous string of them, and each one seemed to have some sort of an image or idol in the window.
“I guess I’ll have my own troubles picking out the place,” thought Larry. “They all look alike. However, I’ll be on the watch for the one-eyed image.”
He had almost reached the end of Pell Street when, in the window of a small store, that seemed to be trying to hide away from sight between two larger ones, he spied a big wooden idol in the window. Before it burned a number of Joss sticks, and, as Larry placed his nose against the pane, he discerned dimly through the smoke that the image had one eye, made of a red stone, but that the socket of the other was empty, giving an odd expression to the grinning face.
“This must be the place,” thought Larry, his heart beating rapidly with hope. He looked up at the windows. They were screened with red curtains, and seemed never to have been washed. There was a door leading to a hallway at one side of the grocery entrance. Larry resolved to try the store first. He found a fat Chinese smoking behind a counter.
“Wha’ bloy wan’?” inquired the Celestial. “Glot nice clulumbler, melon sleed, ginger loot, nuts. Wha’ bloy want?”
“I didn’t come to buy anything,” Larry explained, speaking slowly, so the almond-eyed one could understand him. “Do you know anybody named Peter Manton? He’s a boy I’m looking for. Do you know Peter Manton?”
The answer of the Chinese was no less prompt than it was startling. He leaped to his feet, dropping his pipe to the floor, and seizing a heavy vase from the counter threw it straight at Larry’s head. The boy ducked only just in time, and the ornament was shattered against the wall.