'Such is the case, Lo Eng,' replied Philipson, his eye twinkling. The boy looked down at his demurely folded hands. 'There is no house in Shanghai for me to guard now,' he murmured. 'The car was destroyed too.' 'Eh? That's the way the wind blows, is it? Very well, we shall be glad of such a trusty servant, I have no doubt. You will go down and stay on board the launch with Ah Sing now, and wait for orders.' As soon as Lo Eng was out of the room, Philipson took Poyning's hand and shook it. 'I am eternally beholden to you, Poyning,' he said warmly. 'You have handled this business not only with discretion but with a most commendable quantity of pluck. You had better lie down now till breakfast is ready. After that, we will go into the future.' 'Well,' said Philipson to me, when we were alone, 'what think you? Should we take the youth into partnership?' 'Seems to me,' I said, 'the question is, will he take us?' Philipson had unlocked the suit case by the key Poyning left with him, and was unwrapping the instruments from several yards of cotton wool. Both came out quite undamaged. 'I am inclined to think,' said Saunders Philipson deliberatively, 'that that _is_ the more correct way to put it.' CHAPTER VI HOW WE JOURNEYED TO THE OBSCURE TOWN OF KIAI When Poyning came in to breakfast, much renovated, we sat down to one of the jolliest meals I ever remember. Philipson steered clear of the subject of our forthcoming journey yet, but kept up a brisk fire of yarns of his former experiences in the East; and I for one had to admit that if I flattered myself I knew something about the great yellow lands from Ladakh on the roof of the world to Kamchatka of the frozen north, my knowledge was mere schoolboy geography to Saunders Philipson's. Then we pushed away our plates and lit up, and Philipson plunged into the business ahead of us, laying the whole story before Poyning exactly as I had heard it myself. The junior partner listened with the sort of negligent alertness he had shown when taking his orders for the Shanghai commission, but I could see, underneath this, that the story excited him a good deal more than it had me. 'Well, there you are, Poyning,' concluded our leader, 'You know all the ascertained facts now. It will be a dangerous, death-or-glory business--but at least a profitable one, if my suspicions are well founded.' The boy shrugged his shoulders. 'Diamonds would be an agreeable incidental, certainly,' he said, 'but I should be perfectly ready to risk my life going to that valley if there were no mention of gems in the legend at all.' Poyning said this in such a serious and decided tone that you might almost have fancied he meant more than he said. 'Then you're with us?' queried Philipson. 'I am,' said Stephen Poyning firmly.