Quong Lung motioned to the girls to withdraw, and when he was alone with Ray he said: “Jim, I shall hang unless you help me.”
“You must be in a bad fix, indeed, Quong Lung, if you depend on my small arts to help you. Explain.”
“Certain papers implicating me are in the possession of one of my blood-hounds, who has shown himself recalcitrant and ungrateful—the damned dog! By means of the battery yonder, which you rigged up for me, I frightened the brute considerably this morning, and he will be here again two nights hence with such of the papers as his fears may compel him to part with; but if his courage should revive, as it may, and if he should come without the documents, I want to put him under the stress of telling me where they are to be found, and then I desire that he should never speak again!”
Quong Lung darted a look full of dangerous meaning at Ray.
“Why don’t you employ your regular bull-dogs to attend to this unpleasant affair, Quong Lung?”
“Because their methods are coarse and their weapons clumsy.”
“But it is deuced risky to be an accessory before the fact in a murder case, my friend.”
“No, no, Jim, not murder! Call it, rather, ‘the sudden death of an unknown coolie, from unknown causes.’”
“And the consideration for me?”
“Two hundred dollars now,” said Quong Lung, laying a pile of notes on the platform on which they were smoking, “and two hundred more after the thing is over.”