Walker of the Secret Service

by Melville Davisson Post

Bow Bell threw himself forward from the iron drum of the tramp with a great cackle of laughter.

“Gawd!” he cried. “Could you beat it! A look-in, and then to be snapped up like that! Gawd!” He rocked himself on the deck, his hands clasped about his knees. “I can see ’em,” he stuttered. “Oh, my word!” He continued to rock in his paroxysms of laughter. “And they couldn’t touch a girlie or a cash piece. Gawd! what a neat little hell!”

He turned toward his companion.

“And what did you do, you fat, old crook? What did you do? Stay on for a little of the loot the American wouldn’t take?”

Colonel Swank resumed his narrative as though there had been no interruption.

“I remained,” he said, “though not entirely at my own initiative. The old Viceroy had drawn the conclusion from some remarks of Major Dillard that the white cross which the monks had put up before the gate of the Monastery was a protecting symbol of the great Christian religions, and that in some manner its effect on Major Dillard had produced the result which followed. This impression doubtless arose from the fact that in his order to the Prussian officers Major Dillard had directed that the cross should be permitted to remain. It was his idea doubtless that this religious symbol would help to protect the Monastery from the remainder of the Expeditionary Force. They might take it to be a hospital, or some missionary place of refuge. But the Viceroy got the idea that it was to the sacredness of this symbol that he owed his protection, and he began to inquire of me upon the point. Why was the cross a sacred symbol in our religion?

“I explained it to him: that, Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah of the Christians, had been crucified on a tree, and that this cross was symbolical of that crucifixion; of that vicarious atonement for the sins of the world. He did not understand the metaphysics of my explanation; but he understood its physical essentials; that the God of the Christians had been crucified on a tree, and that this concrete representation was, therefore, sacred, as the images of Buddha in his eternal calm, with the lotus flower in his hand; that the cross meant to all Western religions what the image of Buddha meant to Asia.

“He understood crucifixion. It was a torture of death known to the Chinese; but reserved only for the lowest criminals. It had been supplanted in later years by the lingchi, or death of a thousand cuts; but it was an old practice, and the archives of his province contained ancient paintings of it. He interrogated me minutely upon the details of this crucifixion, and I gave him an accurate picture of it: The Man of Sorrows crowned with thorns, and nailed to the cross. But in the translation I made use always of the Chinese word for tree. A lack of precision in language which had presently a definite result.”

Again Bow Bell spat upon the deck.

“The hell you did,” he said. “You sanctimonious old crook. You ought to have had your tongue cut out. No missionary society would put up with you for a minute. You used to be a faro dealer in Hongkong until you got too cursed crooked for even a Chinese gambler to stand you.”