serve his purpose, suppressing others which might incriminate him.
“All right.” Jordan whirled his chair toward his flat-topped desk. “You keep in touch with Mr. Greaves here, and we'll work with you. Of course you're after the reward—”
Again Burke interrupted, doggedly, obstinately:
“Not altogether, Chief, I could have made more by setting in with Lee Hin. I’m an honest man, and I don’t take to this kind of job. But of course I'll accept whatever money there is in it.”
Charlie Greaves escorted Burke to the outer office and, with a feeling of relief, saw him depart.
“Well, Charlie, this is one end of the business that I call nasty,” Chief Jordan said, as the inspector re-entered the inner office. “I'd give five dollars for a chance to kick that scoundrel all the way out of here and down into the street!”
“I'll raise you five: I'd give ten!” Greaves replied. “Of course, he’s in on this thing, but he'll fix it so that we can’t do a thing to him!”
Jordan nodded.
“Sure! And we've got to take up with even a cur like this, when he has anything definite to offer. All right—you keep tab on him and let me know if anything develops.”
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!”
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.
Only on one matter had there been any disagreement between them: Lee Hin felt strongly on the subject of opium smuggling. He would not positively forbid the young fellow to mix in this illegal traffic, but he was gradually bending him to his way of thinking, as much by his silent will force as by his occasional incisive criticism.
NIGHT had fallen, and with it a fog shifted over the rocky shore and out upon the broad channel. Yellow lights flashed here and there, and the mournful voice of the fog signal kept up its doleful iteration.
Jerry shook himself and peered down toward the little cove. His skiff lay there on its side, well above the reach of the rising tde.
Through the mists there came a low, resonant, deep-throated whistle. Jerry stood up abruptly and entered the front room of the shack. From one corner he took a lantern with a strip of red bunting tied over the chimney. This he lighted and carried down to where the skiff lay. On the end of a six foot stake, with a forked end, Jerry hung the lantern. Then he took from his pocket an electric flashlight, snapped it a few times to be sure bulb and battery were in good condition, and finally returned the flashlight to his pocket and pulled the skiff down into the water.
Five minutes after he had pulled away from the shore, he would have been invisible to anyone standing at his point of departure. The skiff was painted a slate gray; and, save for the whitish blotch of the man’s face in the darkness, there might have been nothing there but a partially submerged log floating out to sea.
The whistle came again, much nearer. Between the skiff and the shore the cough of a motor boat sounded. Jerry let his oars rest, with their dripping blades an inch above the water. The launch passed on, and he resumed his rowing.
The fog lifted. He could see it hanging over the distant city, a lurid, angry glow where the illumination of the streets struck against it.
