About eight o’clock that evening, Mr. Waddy sent Chin Chin to inquire of Diana’s health. On his return, Chin Chin made a circuit to a shop he knew of. His object was lager beer, a washy beverage, favoured by Chinamen, Germans, and such like plebeian and uncouth populaces. Feeling sleepy after his draught, he gradually subsided into a ball and sank under the table. Except, perhaps, Box Brown and Samuel Adams, packed some years ago by John C. Colt, corner Broadway and Chambers Street, no being is known, bigger than an armadillo or a hedgehog, capable of such compact storage as a slumbering Chinaman. Chin Chin under the table was therefore not perceived by two men who came in to get beer and mutter confidences over it. He, however, waking and craftily not stirring until he could do so without disturbing legs endowed with capacity to kick, heard this secret parley. He could not recognise the legs, but could the voices. As soon as he was released, he ran to the Millard, and gave his message to Mr. Waddy; then, in consequence of the beer-shop discoveries, he crept along like a quick snake to his master’s hired stable. The night was very dark, the clouds obstructing the moon. Chin Chin’s mission and his plan were perfectly suited to his crafty Malayan nature. He knew the stable intimately. He had often found it a handy place to snooze away the effects of beer or gluttony--larger and more airy than his usual habitation, and much less liable to rude invasion. He had prepared a secret means of ingress and egress; now, after a quick glance around, he glided along to one corner, moved a board slightly and crept inside through the crevice thus revealed. In the stable were Mr. Waddy’s three horses. Pallid stood next to a vacant stall. A roughly contrived manger, with no division, passed through all the stalls. The back door of the stable opened upon a yard, separated by a low fence from a dark lane. There was a locked door through this fence; both the stable doors were also locked. Pallid recognised the Chinaman and whinnied a welcome nearly as articulate as the other’s reply. Chin Chin’s plan was already laid. He did not seem to need light to execute it. He groped about for a billet of wood in a spot he knew of, and drawing a fine fishing line from his pocket, made it fast to the billet, which he then threw over a beam running the length of the stable. He drew the billet up to the beam by his line, and holding the end, wormed himself in under a heap of hay that filled the stall next to Pallid’s. He found that, without changing his position, he could pass his hand into the adjoining manger. It seemed he had a fancy of possible danger, for he took from his breast pocket a perilous piratical knife and laid it in the manger at his side. “Pigeon--all same--Hi yah!” said he, with gleaming teeth and a grin.