They found the village tavern, consisting of several detached buildings set in a large court-yard. The agitated landlord kow-towed himself almost black in the face, and in trembling accents expressed his desire to bestow all his goods upon the warlike foreigners if only his miserable life might be spared. He summarily ejected a few native guests of low degree, who fled without delaying to argue the matter. The invaders set the tavern coolies to sweeping and scrubbing the filthy buildings and took charge of the kitchen with its row of earthen fire-pots. There was no lack of room for men to sleep three and four in a row upon the _k’angs_, or brick platforms used for the purpose, and the ragged quilts were hung outside to air. In short, the tavern was transformed into a camp which had no serious discomforts. Having taken care of his men, Captain O’Shea found leisure to ponder over the situation, a process which left him with a headache. He rambled unmolested from one end of the village to the other, searching for clues that might link themselves with the Painted Joss and the tragedy of Bill Maguire. There were two small, dilapidated temples, one of them inhabited by a few Buddhist priests in yellow robes. O’Shea was permitted to enter them and explore to his heart’s content. They were nothing more than village shrines, however, in which the perfunctory rites were held and offerings made--such places as might have been seen in a thousand Chinese towns. Nor did the village itself, excepting for an air of general decay, differ from the hamlets of a dozen provinces. “I have a harrowing suspicion that Charley Tong Sin made a monkey of me,” ruefully sighed O’Shea, “or maybe I have been all wrong from the start. The Chinese proposition has too many twists in it for a white man to fathom.” As a person of considerable confidence in his ability to master difficulties, his self-esteem had been dealt a hard blow. His imagination had pictured a large, stirring climax of his pilgrimage, and here he was all adrift in a wretched little village of no consequence whatever, the last place in the world to find the headquarters of a secret organization so mysteriously powerful as to cast its sinister shadow throughout China, and even across the seas. And yet the evidence had been by no means vague and misleading. Beginning with the fragmentary revelations of the demented sailor, coming next to the disclosures of poor McDougal’s diary, he had been led straight to the town of Wang-Li-Fu, on the River of Ten Thousand Evil Smells. He had felt that the hand of destiny was guiding him. Returning to the tavern yard O’Shea found his men cheerfully making friends of the villagers and accepting the situation with the ready adaptability of true soldiers of fortune. They looked to the leader for orders, but he had none to give them. He had been placed in the ridiculous position of providing wages and rations for a perfectly superfluous expeditionary force.