He mentioned again and again “_the painted joss_,” and occasionally coupled it with reference to “_the stinking river_.” Stress seemed to be laid also on the proper name _Wang Li Fu_. Many of the other fragments O’Shea discarded as worthless. Some of them related to routine duties on shipboard. He hazarded a guess that the sailor was a married man. At any rate, he had left a “Mary dear,” and it was a plausible conjecture that he had promised to bring home “a big wax doll.” When Maguire became silent O’Shea made for the kitchen and hammered on the door. “Is that you, Cap’n Mike?” responded the perturbed accents of Johnny Kent. “If it’s Bill, he can stay out till breakfast’s cooked. I don’t want my stove drownded again.” Reassured, he cautiously admitted the shipmaster who pounded him on the back and shouted: “Bill has been leakin’ language from every pore. ’Tis all snarled up most comical, but I seem to get hold of a loose end now and then.” “Hooray, Cap’n Mike! It’s just as I said. When you hit him over the ear it sort of jarred his brain loose. It ain’t fetched clear yet, but he’s begun to make steam in his crazy fashion. What does he say?” “Wait till I tow him in to breakfast and maybe he will start up again.” But Maguire ate in silence and O’Shea could not persuade him to pick up the rambling monologue. Johnny Kent therefore escorted the sailor to the garden, gave him a hoe, and thriftily set him to work. He fell to with the greatest good-will and showed an aptitude which betokened an earlier acquaintance with this form of husbandry. After a discussion of some length the engineer exclaimed: “You’re a bright man, Cap’n Mike, but you haven’t knocked around the Chinese ports as much as I have. Bill mentioned one or two things that I can elucidate. Paddy Blake, eh? So he knows Paddy Blake. The blackguard runs a sailors’ rum-shop in Shanghai. It’s just off the Bund, as you turn up the street that’s next to the French Concession. I’ve rolled the dice for drinks there myself and blown my wages and mixed up in some free-for-all fights that would have done your heart good.” “’Tis a glimpse into the fog, Johnny. Maybe this rapscallion of a Paddy Blake would know poor old Bill if he had a description of him. We can guess at some of the rest of it. Bill went up a Chinese river somewhere and got in black trouble ashore. It had to do with a temple and a joss.” “One of them big carved wooden idols, Cap’n Mike, painted all red and yellow and white.” “And it looks to me as if he stumbled into a headquarters of this bunch of thugs that has been dealing out sudden death to prominent Chinese citizens, Johnny. Anyhow, he ran afoul of some kind of a ‘head-devil,’ as he calls it, and was left for dead.” “Then it’s possible that Bill knows the secret of this organization of cock-eyed murderers,” excitedly cried the engineer. “The same notion is in me own mind,” replied O’Shea.