“Look here, Ching Lee, why didn’t you tell somebody what you knew?” McCarty addressed the Chinaman who stood aside, silent and seemingly impassive. “Why did you let Orbit go on with his crimes when a word to us would have put him where he could do no more harm?”
“Mr. Orbit is rich, of a great family and power in high places, and—he is a white man.” Ching Lee responded in his unemotional singsong tones. “I too am of high degree and not without honor in my own land but I was forced to leave it and here I am a poor man, a servant without friends or influence—and I am yellow. Who would believe my word against his when I had no proof? I would have been cast into your prison but even there Mr. Orbit would have reached me and silenced my tongue. There was the little Fu Moy to consider, my nephew who is to be educated and go back with much to teach my people; I could not leave him without protection. I could only wait for you, who are white men, too, to see what lay before your eyes.”
“There’s something in that!” McCarty conceded. “Isn’t that the bell? If it’s the men we’ve sent for bring them right up.”
“It is possible that he have shoot himself before we arrive here,” remarked Jean. “There is a pistol which he keeps always in a drawer of the little table beside his bed and to-day when he thrust me aside at the door of the card-room to rush out and learn why all those men with shovels have come I feel it in his hip pocket as he pushes his way past. It is loaded always; that I know, for more than once I have looked at it.”
Dennis glanced questioningly at McCarty who shook his head.
“He’s taking his body with him where he’s gone,” he reminded the other in an undertone. “He’ll not do that with the shot of a gun!”
Ching Lee reappeared with the two experts armed with tools and bags. After a cursory examination of the steel door one of the latter turned to the inspector.
“Can’t be done in less than an hour unless we take a chance and blow it off, and you said there might be explosives behind it that would wreck the block,” he announced. “I don’t promise to do it in that time but we’ll work as fast as we can.”
“Let’s go and have a look at that diary in the meantime,” suggested McCarty. “Jean thinks there are more doors beyond like this one and it may be night before they’re open! The boys can let us know when they’ve got through.”
“All right.” The inspector turned, addressing the two officials. “Want to come along? If it really is his diary, it ought to be about the strangest document that ever fell into the hands of the department.”