Once that lane had been for her the evilest channel in which she had seen life move. Now her torment swept her onward into its currents. She must get a little—secretly—ever so little, to help her through the woods.
She moved like a sleep-walker, a glazed look on her haunted face, among the little stalls, muttering what she wanted under her breath. Nobody must see her on such an errand in such an unspeakable place. The yellow half-shaven heads leered at her like grinning skulls, and pretended not to know what she wanted. They were uncannily wily, exercising their super-evil intuitions. The laws were very strict. They must make sure of her.
She feared them terribly. The old shadow, like the hangman’s cap, pressed down over her mind as it had done before. She knew what a welter of evil desires her youthful body evoked up and down the street—but she had forgotten her body, everything but this goading of the furies.
She pursued her way among the stalls. It was here and they should not outwit her. The yellowed skulls thrust themselves upon her, their fishy eyes intimating all the wickedness in the world. At one shop the Chinaman appeared to understand. She had put a paper bill upon the counter. He lifted the board that barricaded him behind the counter, and beckoned her to follow. The rear of the shop was black and musty. The Chinaman opened a trap door, and ducked down under the ground. He emerged in a moment with a small package which he held out to her. Julie started forward to get it. The creature’s arm swung out and clutched her. She screamed, but one of the yellow paws dropped over her mouth. Her whole life seemed to go out of her in a final wave of fright. She knew what would happen to her down in that black cavern.
She wrestled against him. He put his hand upon her throat. She could feel to her spine the chill of those yellow fingers compressing her throbbing breath. As she fought away from him, the jade medallion jerked out of her dress. She could feel it on her bosom dancing about wildly. The hold on her throat relaxed. The creature had caught at the amulet with one hand. The girl took wild advantage of his distraction to wrench herself out of his grasp. Diving under the counter she hurled herself into the open street. Nobody was following her, but she fled, with a sobbing cry, through the dust down the center of the street, the denizens of the stalls thrusting out their heads like cobras to stare after her.
She continued to run even after she had gotten into safe districts, on and on like a mad thing. Natives stopped to stare at the white woman run amuck. In her tumult of brain she saw but one vision. Down under the floor of this city, where its black beating heart lay filled with the monstrous passions of men, where a motley evil crew from all the coasts of the East trafficked in human life and flesh, down there she was fated to sink. She had seen her end written on every one of those opium-devastated skulls. Even now she would have been hurled to a rung below hell if the Chinese charm had not diverted her assailant. She had not been saved by her own will nor yet even by an oriental fetish, but by the emblem of one man’s love. She remembered the things she had swept aside to go into that horrible street. Nothing had weighed in the madness of the moment—a moment of hideous impulse that had twisted in devastation every fiber of her being and left it a wrecked thing whose roots a tornado had splintered.
“They that go down to dust!” ran in her fevered brain.
She hurried along, her body shivering, though it was a hot day. Suddenly she saw she was nearing her objective, and stopped to run her feverish, trembling fingers through her pale hair. As she stood in front of Señor Reredo’s drug store her heart beat so loudly she feared that he might suspect what was in it.
The Botica, after the native fashion, was broadly open. No barrier must interpose between the native and his passion for the street. The Señor, his slim legs, terminated by red slippered feet, curled around the rungs of a high chair, was reading El Progresso, a native organ. He rose when he saw Julie and asked how he could serve her.
She wanted some more of that lotion for tan that he had put up for her. It was more efficacious than anything else she had ever used. She complimented him upon his ability as a chemist; if he should go into business in Spain that ability would be recognized. The Señor, gratified, admitted that here among the “Indianos” was no sphere for a man’s brains. They expanded into a discussion of different panaceas. Julie suddenly put her package down on the counter and soberly regarded him.