Gow. . . .The glib-terror of a smile crinkled his tight skin, then slid back to the covering of his skull.
Yong Lo shook the sleeping Lee Gow.
"Lee Gow!"
The sleeper grunted, and his mouth dropped open with the comatose indifference of one drugged.
"Lee Gow! Get up! Yong Lo want you to kill somebody."
Yong Lo shook the torpid fugitive.
Lee Gow's face showed not a whit of understanding.
Beholding the Chinese sleeper, Yong Lo saw the corner of a paper peeping from under a cover in the bunk.
Deftly Yong Lo withdrew this paper. Creeping to his gambling parlor, Yong Lo unfolded and read what Lee Gow had scrawled. An icy smile glazed his face as he finished reading. Once again he read it:
Butch Killian:—
Don't tell cops me hiding here. Me tell truth, Yong Lo put winnings in fake chandelier bowl of bunk room in back. Chandelier on chains, like pulley. Turn crank, chandelier go up, go down. I tell truth, like yesterday about crooked roulette wheel. You write how we get money. Yong Lo he not savvy you me work together. You not tell police, we get Yong Lo cash.
—Lee Gow.
At a secretary in the gambling chamber Yong Lo destroyed Lee Gow's note, and wrote another one:
Butch Killian:—
You be last man leave here tonight. You come back later, ring bell at store door. Me send Yong Lo out to answer bell before he undress from red black mandarin robe. When Yong Lo open door, you choke him, kill, throw him down manhole of sewer on corner. Me wait in hall you come back from manhole. Me open door for you, you follow me, we get cash, divvy, skin out. Money in chandelier back of gambling room. Seventy thousand. —Lee Gow.
Folding the message he had just written, Yong Lo slipped back into the darker bunk room—and replaced the folded paper under Lee Gow's bunk cover.
All next day Yong Lo hovered near Lee Gow, preventing the fugitive double-crosser from reading the message he now carried concealed on his person.
That night, just after Butch Killian's bullying voice boomed in the gambling room, Yong, through curtained glances, saw Lee Gow, under cover of peeking, dexterously push a wad of paper into the keyhole of the door.
Yong Lo recalled how each night Lee Gow hung about the door, and now he understood.
Passing through to the gambling room that night, to take his place on the big chair, Yong noticed the paper had been removed from the keyhole.
Yong Lo let Butch Killian win five heavy stakes. Then Yong got back every dollar, and took every cent the human tiger put on the table, until a bit before closing time Butch Killian had placed nine thousand dollars on the red simonis cloth, and had seen the black croupier rake them in at each gentle, decreeing tap of Yong'sfan.
Yong saw the rage cooking in Killian's body.
The maddened man clenched his fists deep in his empty pockets, and the fire in Killian's wild eyes faded, as he stood there a beefy mass. Yong saw the man draw a crumpled paper from his pocket. He saw Butch Killian read the note again; saw Butch Killian sneer cruelly. Then Killian left and the house closed.
LEE GOW and Yong Lo were jabbering in the bunk room, when the store annunciator suddenly snared on the wall.
Lee Gow's eyes widened. Yong Lo took the tiny scissors from his nostrils where he was trimming black hairs,
