John Bradley shook his head. “Not information. I have no information—none. But I have my suspicion, and I believe it is well based.”
“Built on Chinese rock!”
“Well—yes—in part. And I have a great deal of respect for Chinese rock. As for being unfair, that is the last thing I’d be willingly. And I have tried to look at this from every side. A man likes to respect confidence; with a priest it is a duty, solemn and imperative. But if I chose to blab, I have not one concrete fact to state. A Chinese woman, I will not tell you her name—if I know it—comes to me in the middle of the night, getting into the grounds somehow over the wall or up the hill, certainly not through the gate, and begs me to find some way of getting Basil Gregory’s people out of China. She urges me to let them lose no time in searching for him, because no searching will find him; and they, she insists, are in danger that will grow deadlier every hour they stay on here. I did not know that Basil was missing until she told me; it’s two nights ago. I had been expecting him to call—to complete some talk we’d begun——”
“About a girl?”
“But I was not particularly surprised that he delayed keeping an appointment that was not very definite. Basil was always a procrastinator. The woman does not know where he is or what has happened to him. Take that from me. She said so, and she was speaking the truth. It is part of my business to know when people are telling the truth and when they are lying to me. She had some suspicion—what it was I have no idea, or whether it was right or wrong—but she would tell me nothing, except that she risked her life to warn me that at all costs the Gregorys must go from China, and go now.”
“And leave poor Mr. Basil to his fate?”
Bradley made a gesture of baffled helplessness.
The clerk’s lip curled. “You have a poor idea of my intelligence. I know it all now—all that you know—and what you suspect.”
“Then you do not know much,” the other retorted hotly.
“No,” Holman admitted grimly. “Not much to chew on, and nothing at all to go upon. Ah Wong comes to you in the middle of the night—it was Ah Wong; she is devoted to Mrs. Gregory, and quite indifferent to Mr. Basil, dead or alive. You learn from her, or from some one else, the next morning, of the visit three days ago to Wu’s garden at Kowloon, and off you go to Kowloon to dig it all out. You said you went to Kowloon to try to interest your friend Wu in the case, because he is the one man who can do anything that can be done in China. Now, you did not go—excuse me, Mr. Bradley—to Kowloon to try to interest Wu in the case; you went to find Mr. Basil.”