The coast was clear for two hours. Hung Wapu went in and locked the door, above which a green paper-lantern swung gently to and fro in the soft night wind. Hung Wapu passed through the store to the chop-house, where several dozen Chinese were squatting on the ground dining on unmentionable Chinese delicacies, which consisted of anything and everything soft enough to be chewed. No one watching the vacant expression of these people would have dreamed for a moment that anything was wrong; no one observing these chattering, shouting sons of the Celestial Kingdom would have guessed that anything out of the ordinary was on foot. They kept on eating, and did not even look up when several Japs stole, one by one, through their midst and disappeared through a door at the back. The Japs apparently attracted no attention whatsoever, but a keen observer would have noticed that Hung Wapu placed a little saki-bowl on a low table for every Japanese visitor that had entered his shop. The Japs all went through a side-door of the opium-den into a large room, where they took off their outer clothing and put on uniforms instead. Then they lay down to sleep either on the mats on the floor or on the bundles of clothing which were stacked on the floor along the walls of the room. Hung Wapu now accompanied one of his Chinese guests up the cellar-steps to the street, and sitting down on the top step began to chat in a low voice with his apparently half-intoxicated countryman. At the same time he polished about two dozen little saki-bowls with an old rag, afterwards arranging them in long rows on the pavement. The animated traffic in the narrow alley gradually died down. One by one most of the gas-lamps closed their tired eyes, and only the green paper-lantern above Hung Wapu's door continued to swing to and fro in the night-wind, while similar spots of colored light were visible in front of a few of the neighboring houses. Far away a clock struck the hour of midnight, and somewhere else, high up in the air, a bell rang out twelve strokes with a metallic sound. A cool current of air coming from the harbor swept through the hot, ill-smelling alley.