“All but two of the men were able to run quick to the river, but Eldridge and one named McDougal ran into this place, trying to hide. They ran into the temple before they were captured. There was a little building, but now it is ashes and much sticks of burnt wood. In that building those two men were locked to be killed next day. The red-headed man was a demon, I tell you. Walls could not hold him. In the night he set fire to the building, and it was a great blaze. But he was caught and punished.” “Ye left him for dead, and he came to,” growled O’Shea. “And so McDougal got away!” “I can tell you more secrets,” wailed Charley Tong Sin, but his services as an informer were suddenly cut short. The huge man in the chair had raised his voice in a tremendous call for help to his followers without. Otherwise he had sat composed, glaring at O’Shea. It was his hand that slew Charley Tong Sin as a traitor. He was on his feet, the heavy chair raised aloft. He swung it with amazing ease. It was no longer a massive article of furniture, but a missile in the hands of a man of gigantic strength. His movements were not clumsy. The chair flew through the air. O’Shea dodged, but Charley Tong Sin flung up his arms, taken unawares. The impact would have brained an ox. The whirling mass of teak smote the terrified comprador on the head and chest and he crumpled to the pavement. He was as dead as though he had been caught beneath the hammer of a pile-driver. The tableau was an extraordinary one. O’Shea stood staring at the broken body of the young Chinese. The man in the crimson robe stirred not from his tracks. Implacable, unafraid, he had executed the last sentence of _The Sect of the Fatal Obligation_. The people outside were clamoring at the doors, and O’Shea heard the thud and crash of some kind of an improvised battering-ram. He sighed and found the thought of death at their hands very bitter. But he would not go alone. He faced the great and terrible Chung and slowly raised the revolver. The arch-assassin bade him wait with a gesture so imperious, so mandatory, that O’Shea hesitated. The bearing of the man held some large significance. His dark, evil countenance expressed rather sadness than wrath. He slid a hand into the folds of his robe and raised the hand to his mouth. Whatever it was that he swallowed wrought its work with swift and deadly virulence. Swaying like a tree about to fall, he strode to the marble altar and fell across it with his head buried in his arms. In this posture he died, in front of the image of the glowing Buddha, whose graven lineaments seemed to express the unholy ambitions and emotions of his own soul.