“The room where the body was found is one of several that have been dug out beneath the basement and is used entirely by opium smokers. “Chief of Police Leslie has ordered all available detectives on the case and arrests are expected at any moment.” “Which means,” finally grumbled Lanagan, “that I get no day off to-morrow to split a quart of Chianti with mine host Pastori. “Swanson,” he ran quickly back in his mind, “is president of the Seamen’s Bank; director of the Cosmos Club; director of a dozen corporations; trustee of his church; sound as a nut at sixty-five; solidly established in the old conservative families of Nob Hill, with a family of married children likewise solidly established in the solidest kind of respectability and a wife who is a silvery-haired saint if there ever was one. “Yet he, a man who probably didn’t know such a place as Chinatown’s Palace Hotel existed until that night, is found dead in the lowest sink of that hole. The extremes of the social system met in his end and the place of it.” The Chinatown Palace Hotel of the days just before the fire gave that quarter of San Francisco obliteration, the one thing that could cleanse it, was a sorry second to the pretentious hostelry on Market Street. A ramshackle structure, illy lit through its crooked corridors and musty rooms with ancient gas jets, it looked more, in its complete dirt and dinginess, like an exaggerated rabbit warren. Three stories above ground and one or two below, cut up into rooms, the largest not more than eight by ten, the smallest just large enough for a bunk and an opium layout, it had survived by some miracle the health authorities to hive in musty murk the off-scourings of a city. Once, when Portsmouth Square was the civic centre, it had harboured the kings of the early gold days. The rooms were larger in those days; the front suites that gave ease to the idling, new-made Croesus had long since been cut up into five, six, seven, or eight, as the increasing congestion of the quarter threw an increasing swarm of vermin to its recesses. Save for white “dope fiends,” known in the vernacular of the police as “hops,” “cokes,” or “morphs,” users of opium, cocaine, or morphine, it was inhabited solely by Chinese, some of them coolie labourers, but the most of them likewise “fiends.”