“Then you’re the man,” she cried. “Come! Help me take the body ashore, for we must get him to Chinatown as quickly as the Lord will let us.” He waited till she had jumped into the boat and had laid her hand to the corpse, and then he snatched for the paper and waved it in the air. “Did you say it was a scrap of red paper you lost?” She sprang at him and looked closely. “This is the very piece I wanted! Wong Yet is one of them!” she cried. “Now my poor husband can be avenged! God bless you, Professor; you have proved your part of the message is true, and I reckon I’ll prove mine. Find the other half of this piece of paper for me, you can do it easy with your spirit guides, and I’ll give you a thousand dollars for it!” They stooped over the dead Chinaman, and, with Professor Vango at the shoulders and the quadroon at the knees, the corpse was carried up the landing stage and along the pier to the shed. Here was hitched a pitifully dirty white horse harnessed to a disreputable covered laundry-wagon, spattered with adobe mud. Into this equipage they loaded the remains, piled the case in the rear, and buttoned down the curtains. Then the woman mounted with Vango to the seat and drove for the Potrero. As they turned into the San Bruno Road, the quadroon began her promised confession. She could not proceed calmly, but was swept with alternate passions of sorrow and rage. The medium, however, unmoved by her suffering, eyed her craftily, watching his chance to feed upon her superstitious hopes. THE STORY OF THE QUADROON WOMAN I reckon you don’t guess a coloured person can hate white folks as much as white folks hate niggers, but they do, sometimes, and I despise a white man more than if I were a sure-enough black woman. My Daddy was born fairer than a good many white trash. Some folks never knew he was a mulatto. My ma died when I was born. Daddy wanted me to be educated, so I was sent to the Tuskegee Institute, where I learned nursing. After that we lived a little way out of Mobile, and we were right happy for a good while. Well, about two years back, there was an awful crime committed near our place, and all the whites went pretty near crazy. You don’t have to be told what it was, and you know what law amounts to at such times. Any coloured man that is once suspected has no show at all. Daddy was innocent, of course, but if he’d been guilty, I’d have stood up for him just the same. He was put in jail, and they got up a mob to lynch him. I got wind of it just in time. There was a sheriff’s deputy who was fond of me, and he and I managed to get Daddy out and started West.