“Please!” she murmured. “There is no one else. You must help us. Tell me--father will be coming back.” And then Griggsby Doane heard his own voice saying quietly: “The boat deck is the only place. You will find a sort of ladder near the stern. If you can--” “I will go up there.” “It will be only just after midnight that I could arrange to be there.” His excellency returned then. And Doane took his leave. He had been but a few moments in his own cabin when two actors of his excellency's suite appeared, each with a lacquered tray, on one of which was a small chest of tea, wrapped in red paper lettered in gold and bearing the seal stamp of the private estate of Kang Yu, on the other an object of more than a foot in height carefully wound about with cotton cloth. Doane dismissed the lictors with a Mexican dollar each and unwrapped the larger object, which the servant had placed with great care on his berth. It proved to be a _pi_, a disk of carven jade, in color a perfect specimen of the pure greenish-white tint that is so highly prized by Chinese collectors. The diameter was hardly less than ten inches, and the actual width of the stone from the circular inner opening to the outer rim about four inches. It stood on edge set in a pedestal of blackwood, the carving of which was of unusual delicacy. The pedestal was, naturally, modern, but Doane, with a mounting pulse, studied the designs cut into the stone itself. That cutting had been done not later than the Han Dynasty, certainly within two hundred years of the birth of Christ. CHAPTER IV--INTRIGUE |THE _Yen Hsin_ would arrive at Kiu Kiang by mid-afternoon. Half an hour earlier. Doane, on the lower deck, came upon a group of his excellency's soldiers--brown deep-chested men, picturesque in their loose blue trousers bound in above the ankles and their blue turbans and gray cartridge belts--conversing excitedly in whispers behind the stack of coffins near the stern. At sight of him they broke up and slipped away. A moment later, passing forward along the corridor beside the engine room, he heard his name: “Mr. Doane! If you please!” This in English. He turned. Just within the doorway of one of the low-priced cabins stood a pedler he had observed about the lower decks; a thin Chinese with an overbred head that was shaped, beneath the cap, like a skull without flesh upon it; the eyes concealed behind smoked glasses. “May I have a word with you, Mr. Doane?” The mate considered; then, stooping, entered the tiny cabin. The pedler closed the door; quietly shot the bolt; then removed his cap and the queue with it, exposing a full head of stubbly black hair, trimmed, as is said, pompadour. The glasses came off next; discovering wide alert eyes. And now, without the cap, the head, despite the hair and the seriously intellectual face, looked, balanced on its thin neck, more than ever like a skull.