It had been made by a leather sole and heel. The outline was pointed and narrow. Into O’Shea’s quickened memory there flashed the picture of Charley Tong Sin stretched upon the cabin floor of the _Whang Ho_ steamer, his patent-leather shoes waving gently as he went to sleep under the soporific influence of a knock-out blow. He felt absolutely certain that this particular print had been left by the fashionable footgear of the vanished comprador. The voices had guided him aright. It was here that Charley Tong Sin had come ashore after making his way up the River of Ten Thousand Evil Smells in some kind of a native boat. There was one chance in a million that O’Shea should have halted to wait in this precise spot where his eyes might see the thing. He dragged himself to his feet and scanned the melancholy landscape. There were no villages in sight; only the marsh and fields and a vast mound of débris to mark the place where once had stood a city. Even the walls surrounding it had been levelled. It was scarcely more than a wide-spread excrescence of broken brick and tiling partly overgrown with vegetation. The landscape could have held no more desolate reminder of the wreckage left in the wake of the Tai Ping rebels. It was plausible to surmise that this was the real Wang-Li-Fu, the city which O’Shea had set out to find. The squalid village much lower down the river might have been founded by refugees who gave the same name to their new abode. And the villagers had been too ignorant to explain the blunder. To them there was only one Wang-Li-Fu. How Charley Tong Sin must have laughed at leaving O’Shea and his men to waste themselves in a chase that led nowhere. It was a pallid, unshaven, tottering ghost of Captain Michael O’Shea that mustered strength to walk very slowly in the direction of the ruined city. Once he paused and became irresolute, but a little way beyond he found the imprint of a narrow shoe of European workmanship on the soft bank of a ditch. His stumbling steps led him, as by an unerring divination, toward the highest part of the great mound of débris where tall trees grew from the crumbling masonry. His painful advance became less difficult when he found a path from which the obstructions had been removed. Presently he stood looking across a cleared space in the midst of the ruins, invisible from river or highway. In it were several small buildings and one much larger. The timbers set into its walls were carved and gilded, the curving roof of dull red tile. There was no living thing in sight. This isolated community was so situated that it was wholly concealed from strangers, and the natives of the region were apt to shun the blasted city as haunted by demons. No watchers were posted to guard against intrusion.