“Not Mongolian; but if you are born in China, live there always, what are you then?” He showed his fine white teeth in a grin.
Looking her up and down, taking in her costume that told she was “one of them,” he said in a tone quite low and aside:
“I’ll be free in half an hour. What about a cup of coffee? I’ll tell you about these things.”
“All—all right.”
“See you then?”
“Sure.”
As she wandered out into the sunlight, something told her she had started one more friendship that would end in adventure. What she did not know was that she was about to be given one more chapter in the history of the mysterious Oriental chest and its temple treasures.
An hour after leaving the temple, she found herself seated at a narrow table in a dark little corner of a nearby coffee house, drinking black coffee and following every word of this most astonishing young man. His name, she had discovered, was Erik Nord. He had lived all his life in China and, as he expressed it, had “adventured all over the place.”
“We’d gone into Mongolia, that cold, barren land where no one is wanted,” he was saying. “The man I was with—I shall not tell you his name—had been commissioned to gather up a lot of this art treasure that is so rapidly disappearing from the decaying temples.
“There was a long-eared Chinaman who came near doing me in! Big knife and all that.”