She cackled with laughter and stole a quick look at the young American. The old man bared his purple gums in a horrid grin and nodded his shaven head many times. “Sometimes men are that way,” mumbled he. “It is wisdom to be so. When a youth I had seven wives.” They chuckled and grinned like a couple of gleeful ghouls; then the old woman took up the candle and made her way back by the way she had come. The old man turned to Kenyon and motioned for him to be seated upon a mat under the lamp. He bowed and smiled in what was meant for an affable manner, while he said in his native tongue: “Dog of an unbeliever, thou who art too mean to excite the anger of even the least of the gods, sit there.” Then in English he added: “Velly nice ‘Melican’ young man! Hong Yo will come in glate hully up. Me Sing Wang; velly old and velly nice.” He tottered out of the room through a curtained doorway, leaving Kenyon looking after him, a smile upon his face. “You old rat,” muttered the American amusedly. “Yes, you are very nice, indeed; I’ll venture to say that that shrunken arm of yours has in its day driven many a knife home into some poor devil’s back.” He looked curiously about, his keen eyes missing nothing. “Hong Yo takes many precautions when he receives visitors. I wonder why?” He waited for some time, but Sing Wang did not return. Then he became aware of the murmur of voices engaged in altercation, some deep toned and angry; others shrill and wickedly pitched. Then in the midst of it came a woman’s scream. His heart, for a second or two, stopped beating; he recalled the girl who had entered the “Far East,” and the impressions that she had awakened came back to him like a flash. Without an instant’s hesitation he tore aside the curtains and leaped with long, soft-footed, pantherish bounds up a narrow stairway in the direction of the sounds. At the head of the stairs was a door which stood partly open; thrusting this wide, Kenyon found himself in a sort of square hall from which opened many other doors. They were all closed, but from over one a bright light shone through an open transom. It was from behind this door that the voices came; Kenyon softly grasped the knob and gave it a turn; but the door was fastened. Pausing a moment, wondering what he had better do, he heard a single high-pitched, but wavering, voice, demanding. “Forrester! I want Forrester! He is the man that brought me here first. I don’t know the rest of you in this matter. He wrote to me at Butte to come to New York; I had a good thing there, but he said that he had a better one. And when he got me into that damned hole, Selden’s Square, he done me up.” “By heaven, it’s the man from Butte!” was Kenyon’s mental exclamation. “If you want this person, Forrester, why do you come here?” came the voice of Hong Yo. There was no mistaking the hollow tone, and the slow, precise English. “We have told you that there is no such man here, and that we know nothing of him.”