In Lee Hin’s shack two lights were burning. One was in the front room, furnished with a square pine table (on which stood the first light) and two steel cots covered with drab army blankets.
The second light was in Lee Hin’s study, at the back of the shack. On a high stool, before an enameled bench, which ran the entire length of this second room, sat Lee Hin himself. He was clad in white, from head to foot, and over his mouth and nose he wore a mask of padded cotton.
The part of his face that was visible outside of this mask was keen and animated. His dark eyes glowed, and there was a double furrow of concentration between them. He was stooping over a glass slide, on which he had just dabbed a drop of a milky culture from a test tube. He worked fast, adding a minute drop of stain, then dropped a cover glass into place and slipped the slide upon the revolving stand of his microscope.
This done, Lee Hin looked up at the young man standing at the other side of the room.
“Better not come too close, Jerry,” the Chinaman warned, with a singularly tranquil and impersonal voice. “You know—there is death in the air of this room sometimes. I’m willing to risk my own life, but not the lives of my friends.”
In spite of the impersonality of his voice, there was a subtle magnetism about the Oriental: a radiation of power, which marked him as a born leader of men. His eyes warmed with the mellow light of friendship as he raised them to Jerry Ward’s face.
Jerry shuffled nearer the door, glancing suspiciously at the rows of culture tubes stacked in orderly ranks at the back of the enameled bench.
“I never can make out what the devil you want to tinker with them crazy little bugs for, Hin,” he observed discontentedly. “If I had as much jack as you got—”
“Money is not all there is in life, Jerry,” Lee Hin interrupted. “There is friendship—and service! I am doing this for my country. Her fisheries represent a tremendous source of wealth. The fungology and the bacteriology of fishes—it is an inexhaustible subject!”