While waiting for his report I lounged around the hotel and steered my casual conversation with the _habitués_ toward the subject in which I was most interested. Soon I began to hear weird stories of a woman pirate who, while never molesting honest merchantmen, preyed mercilessly and successfully on the Chinese and Malay pirates, just as Norton and I were doing. It was said that she was exquisitely beautiful of face and diabolically black of heart; that she led her band of cut-throats in person and gloried in the shedding of black and yellow blood by the barrel. Her recreation from wholesale butchery was found in the companionship of occasional white men whom she ran across and who gladly accompanied her to her retreat, located no one knew where, only to be killed when she wearied of them. According to these tales, which I at first regarded as purely imaginative, she travelled in a steam yacht of phenomenal speed and had never failed in her desperate exploits. Though she had been in the business for years no one in Hong Kong had ever seen her and she was known only as the “Beautiful White Devil,” which name, from all accounts, was well suited to her. It occurred to me at once that if such a woman really did exist it might have been her ship that came to our assistance on the night of our battle with the Malays on the deck of the British bark, and whose captain I had attended under strange circumstances, and I saw visions of a meeting and perhaps closer acquaintance with her; but they were only fleeting fancies, for I could not make myself believe the tales that were told me. Not but what I wanted to believe them, and tried to, for next to adventure I loved a beautiful woman; if the two could be combined, the result would be an absolutely ideal condition, even though the feminine fancy did run to murder; but my reason told me I was dreaming of the impossible.