“No, you wouldn’t,” Goggles bantered. “We’ve stowed Irons O away with the baggage in the wings.”
“All the same,” Johnny advised, “keep an eye out for him, and don’t take any wooden quarters at the gate. Goodbye and good luck!”
These last words had fairly stuck in his throat. How he wanted to join them on that trip! But that was impossible.
“Probably be exciting enough right here in old Hillcrest,” he now told himself philosophically. He was not wrong.
He had turned his steps toward home when the many-colored lights from the windows of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce fell upon his eye.
“I’ll just go in and have one more shot at that rich and wise old Wung Lu,” he told himself. “May be more to his thoughts than appears on the outside.”
He entered the big room just as he had done many times before. He found the rich and wise one sitting, as was his custom during the evening hours, contemplating the fat and smiling Buddha that stood against the wall.
Tonight, as he crept into a corner, Johnny thought there was in the smile of the Buddha something crafty and dangerous. This, of course, was pure imagination. The Buddha, which had been carved from the trunk of a great tree many centuries ago, had never been known to utter a word.
Johnny did not care so much for the Buddha. Banners and dragons interested him more. He liked to think of small Chinese ladies working over the banners that hung on the walls—days, months, perhaps years, drawing marvelous pictures in silk, stitch by stitch. “Every banner says something,” Wung Lu had told him once. Tonight, as he sat staring at a blue and white banner, Johnny was seized with a desire to know its meaning.
“Pardon me, Mr. Wung Lu,” he broke in upon the wise one’s meditations at last, “what does that banner say?”