In the Dead of Night

by John T. McIntyre

He tottered out of the room through a curtained doorway, leaving Kenyon looking after him, a smile upon his face.

“You old rat,” muttered the American amusedly. “Yes, you are very nice, indeed; I’ll venture to say that that shrunken arm of yours has in its day driven many a knife home into some poor devil’s back.” He looked curiously about, his keen eyes missing nothing. “Hong Yo takes many precautions when he receives visitors. I wonder why?”

He waited for some time, but Sing Wang did not return. Then he became aware of the murmur of voices engaged in altercation, some deep toned and angry; others shrill and wickedly pitched. Then in the midst of it came a woman’s scream. His heart, for a second or two, stopped beating; he recalled the girl who had entered the “Far East,” and the impressions that she had awakened came back to him like a flash. Without an instant’s hesitation he tore aside the curtains and leaped with long, soft-footed, pantherish bounds up a narrow stairway in the direction of the sounds.

At the head of the stairs was a door which stood partly open; thrusting this wide, Kenyon found himself in a sort of square hall from which opened many other doors. They were all closed, but from over one a bright light shone through an open transom. It was from behind this door that the voices came; Kenyon softly grasped the knob and gave it a turn; but the door was fastened. Pausing a moment, wondering what he had better do, he heard a single high-pitched, but wavering, voice, demanding.

“Forrester! I want Forrester! He is the man that brought me here first. I don’t know the rest of you in this matter. He wrote to me at Butte to come to New York; I had a good thing there, but he said that he had a better one. And when he got me into that damned hole, Selden’s Square, he done me up.”

“By heaven, it’s the man from Butte!” was Kenyon’s mental exclamation.

“If you want this person, Forrester, why do you come here?” came the voice of Hong Yo. There was no mistaking the hollow tone, and the slow, precise English. “We have told you that there is no such man here, and that we know nothing of him.”

“Don’t take me for a fool,” spoke the voice of the man from the mines, “I know what he wrote me. I know the game and the players. You say you don’t know Forrester, eh? Well, let the girl speak; her eyes tell me that she knows different.”

There was a broken-backed chair in the hall; Kenyon placed it at the door; when he stood upon it his eyes were on a level with the transom.

In a large chair directly opposite sat Hong Yo. His emaciated figure was almost lost in the folds of a flowing, flowered robe; his yellow claws were clasped before him; more than ever his fleshless face and shaven crown made him look like a death’s-head; his rat-like eyes still shone from their narrowed, puckered slits. Near the Chinaman sat the man whom Kenyon at once recognized as the one Webster had described to him at the Waldorf. Before them, leaning weakly against the edge of a table, stood the one whom the ex-lieutenant of Nunez had seen in the public room of the Far East; despite his bandaged head and the evident pain he was suffering, his front was a bold one. But what riveted Kenyon’s attention was the girl who was being held in a chair at one side. Sing Wang and two hard-faced coolies guarded her; and a handkerchief was tied about her mouth.