The last time Ng Ch’u had seen him had been nearly forty years earlier in the squat little Manchu-Chinese border town of Ninguta, in the hushed shelter of an enameled pagoda-roof that mirrored the sun-rays a thousandfold, like countless intersecting rainbows--endless zigzag flashings of electric blue and deep rose and keen, arrogant, glaucous-green, like the shooting of dragon-flies and purple-winged tropical moths. There had been murder in the other’s, the Manchu’s, eyes; murder in the hairy, brown fist that curled about broad, glistening steel. But on that day he, the despised Chinese coolie, had had the whip-hand. “A Manchu you are!” he had said; and his eyes had glistened triumphantly through meager almond slits. “A Manchu indeed! A Pao-i bannerman, an aristocrat--sloughing your will and your passions as snakes cast their skin, brooking no master but yourself and the black desert thunder! And I am only a mud-turtle from the land of Han.” He had sucked in his breath. “But--” he had continued; had slurred and stopped. “But?” “But--there is one thing, perhaps two, which the Huang T’ai Hou, the Empress, the Old Buddha, does not forgive--not even in a Manchu, an iron-capped prince!”--and a few more words, sibilant, staccato, and at once Yang Shen-hsiu had sheathed his dagger with a little dry, metallic click and had walked away, while Ng Ch’u had returned to his home. There he had kowtowed deeply before an elderly peasant woman with bound feet, gnarled hands, and shriveled, berry-brown features. “Mother,” he had said, “I am going away to-day. I am going away _now_. I--and the Moon-beam!”--pointing into the inner room at a lissom, blue-clad form that was bending over the cooking-pots. “Why, son?” “There is Yang Shen-hsiu, the Manchu!” “But--I thought--” “Yes. I know. But a Manchu never forgets. And some day--perhaps to-morrow--his passion and his hatred, since he is a fool, will vanquish his fear. On that day--by Buddha and by Buddha--I shall not be here. Nor shall the Moon-beam!” Nearly forty years earlier--and now he saw him again. For just the fraction of a second, the unexpected sight of those glittering, hooded eyes--for he was conscious of Yang Shen-hsiu’s eyes even before he saw the rest of the face: the thin nose beaking away bold and aquiline, the high cheekbones that seemed to give beneath the pressure of the leathery, ruddy-gold skin, the compressed, sardonic lips brushed by a drooping Mandarin mustache, and the flagging, combative chin--for just the fraction of a second, the unexpected sight of those sinister eyes, rising quickly like some evil dream from the human maelstrom that streaked down Forty-second Street, threw Ng Ch’u off his guard. It conquered in him the long habit of outward self-control which he had acquired in a lifetime of tight bargaining, of matching his algebraic Mongol cunning against the equal cunning of his countrymen.