But what had any Oriental tomorrow to do with him? Here there were promises only of more lethal hours that did not relieve so much as they accented the deepening miseries leading toward an indubitable end.
Tomorrow——
He sprang up suddenly, the effort startling his heart into wild uncertainties. The recurrence of a feeling of resentment, long nourished, supported him.
“Ssu Yin, the superstitious dog—rich—preaching to me in nasty proverbs and feeding me this spawn of hell when he might be sending me home!”
The thought took possession of him, made him stealthy and steel-nerved. He would take the money—Ssu Yin owed it to him, the heathen ingrate; this time he would have a share in that hoard of sycee beneath the bricks of the kang.
He crept into the other room, fearing to find Ssu Yin there, a delay to his plot. But Ssu Yin was not in the room; the house seemed empty even of servants. The seller of opium probably was at his daily tryst, Allister thought, in the teahouse of the Beatitudes.
For the moment Allister had forgotten the serpent, and it was only in the act of turning his darting steps toward the kang that he remembered. In that instant a ray of sunlight revealed the still creature, eternally somnolent, as immobile as the stones against which its gelid coils were ranged.
The old fear seized him, and with it the rage to kill; but his weakness returned, and he was incapable of that. He remained as motionless as the snake, thinking of its reputed iniquities. The opium den of Ssu Yin was not without a reputation for crime. It had had its murders, strange deaths that baffled the native doctors of both “inside” and “outside” anatomy.
The serpent, he knew, was master of man in a duel of eyes, and Allister felt relief at a sound of interruption. Someone had entered the house. The shock loosened his limbs, and he crept back to his foul bunk, waiting for the philosophical gibes of Ssu Yin, sick with revulsion at thought of his intended theft.
His ears told him in a moment, however, that the wary step and the listening caution of the one who had entered, were not Ssu Yin’s. Presently there were hurried movements, unwonted sounds, a breathless intenseness that took audible form, in the outer room. Stealthily, Allister moved nearer to see.