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.
The figure of a woman was beneath the ray of sunlight now, cutting off its warning of the coiled spectre of dissolution. She stooped over the kang, lifting the bricks, laying them aside with a careless impatience. A cavity grew, and from it presently, with a sigh of gratification, she plucked a silver ingot—followed it with others, until a mound of them, too heavy for her own strength, lay at her feet.
Allister watched her in amazement. Was she unaware of the snake? Or was she, like Ssu Yin, its master, immune to ophidian fear?
She stood up, turned toward Allister, as if at some psychic warning of his presence, and he recognized her as the woman of the temple yard—the Crimson Lotus, Ssu Yin's tea-house siren.
Doubtless her apprehensions heightened her error, but in the half-light it must have been easy to mistake Allister's immobile figure for the darkly vengeful one of Ssu Yin.
She cried out, took an involuntary step backward, tripped upon a sycee ingot, and a bared arm, thrust outward to break her fall, met the serpent's fangs.
IN THE nine-toned sing-song of a Cantonese who is at peace with himself, Ssu Yin entered his hovel incanting a bar of that old song of Cathay, "The Millet's in Flower."
He paused at the door of his inner room, in the middle of a note, and allowed the details of the tableau to etch themselves upon his brain.
Across the kang lay his woman—his Crimson Lotus—inert, lifeless. Upon her still breast, its viridescence blending strangely with the soft tints of her silk tunic, was piled the deadly pyramid of the coiled serpent—flat, arrowy head drawn back awaiting the impulse to strike, glistening red tongue stirring with forked vibrations, and phosphorescent eyes blaring with a sinister fury.
Within reach of its fangs was crouched Allister, one hand touching, with a suggestion of pity, the face of the woman, the other, clasping a sil-
(Continued on page 190)
