He paused, glanced keenly at his companion, then abruptly changed the topic:
“I see you have not changed your clothing, my friend. I know only too well what that means. The Shanghai is due in this evening. Jerry, can’t you see how this is going to end? Let me tell you something: that false friend of yours, Burke, is even now scheming to get the best of you. Do you know what is in his mind?”
Jerry shook his head, defiance and wonder in his eyes.
“I will tell you. He has fallen in love with Irene—with your girl. In his malignant pig brain, he is thinking how he can get you out of the way. I can feel it whenever he comes near—he radiates hatred like a pestilence!”
Jerry laughed uneasily.
“You’re buggy, Hin,” he replied. “Burke won’t try to put no Indian sign on me—he daresn’t. He’d pull himself in, if he shoved me!”
Lee Hin turned to his microscope.
“What is willed to be, will be,” he observed sententiously. “No man can overcome his destiny.”
Jerry tiptoed out of the room presently, much after the manner of an embarrassed gentleman with a hiccough trying to get quietly out of church. He felt ill at ease. There was something about Lee Hin——
He reflected, as he seated himself on the bench outside of the shack and stared out toward the open sea, that this Chinaman was a novel sort of employer. During the six months or better that Jerry had worked for him, pulling the oars in the skiff while Lee Hin fished with variously baited hooks at the end of his long, sea-green line, the Chinaman had never given him a curt word or an uncivil order. He had treated Jerry as an equal, discounting the white man’s early dislike of Orientals and his later uneasy recognition of Lee Hin’s intellectual superiority. From that first moment to the present, there had been an impersonal gentleness about the Chinaman that had reduced Jerry to a position of almost worshiping obedience.