"Don't you come none of it wi' me!" roared Smith, in a voice of amazing
gruffness, and shook an artificially dirtied fist under the Chinaman's
nose. "Get inside and gimme an' my mate a couple o' pipes. Smokee
pipe, you yellow scum--savvy?"
My friend bent forward and glared into the other's eyes with a
vindictiveness that amazed me, unfamiliar as I was with this form of
gentle persuasion.
"Kop 'old o' that," he said, and thrust a coin into the Chinaman's
yellow paw. "Keep me waitin' an' I'll pull the dam' shop down,
Charlie. You can lay to it."
"No hab got pipee--" began the other.
Smith raised his fist, and Yan capitulated.
"Allee lightee," he said. "Full up--no loom. You come see."
He dived behind the dirty curtain, Smith and I following, and ran up a
dark stair. The next moment I found myself in an atmosphere which was
literally poisonous. It was all but unbreathable, being loaded with
opium fumes. Never before had I experienced anything like it. Every
breath was an effort. A tin oil-lamp on a box in the middle of the
floor dimly illuminated the horrible place, about the walls of which
ten or twelve bunks were ranged and all of them occupied. Most of the
occupants were lying motionless, but one or two were squatting in their
bunks noisily sucking at the little metal pipes. These had not yet
attained to the opium-smoker's Nirvana.
"No loom--samee tella you," said Shen-Yan, complacently testing Smith's
shilling with his yellow, decayed teeth.
Smith walked to a corner and dropped cross-legged, on the floor,
pulling me down with him.
"Two pipe quick," he said. "Plenty room. Two piecee pipe--or plenty
heap trouble."
A dreary voice from one of the bunks came:
"Give 'im a pipe, Charlie, curse yer! an' stop 'is palaver."
Yan performed a curious little shrug, rather of the back than of the
shoulders, and shuffled to the box which bore the smoky lamp. Holding
a needle in the flame, he dipped it, when red-hot, into an old cocoa
tin, and withdrew it with a bead of opium adhering to the end. Slowly
roasting this over the lamp, he dropped it into the bowl of the metal
pipe which he held ready, where it burned with a spirituous blue flame.
"Pass it over," said Smith huskily, and rose on his knees with the
assumed eagerness of a slave to the drug.
Yan handed him the pipe, which he promptly put to his lips, and
prepared another for me.
"Whatever you do, don't inhale any," came Smith's whispered injunction.
It was with a sense of nausea greater even than that occasioned by the
disgusting atmosphere of the den that I took the pipe and pretended to
smoke. Taking my cue from my friend, I allowed my head gradually to
sink lower and lower, until, within a few minutes, I sprawled sideways
on the floor, Smith lying close beside me.
"The ship's sinkin'," droned a voice from one of the bunks. "Look at
the rats."
Yan had noiselessly withdrawn, and I experienced a curious sense of
isolation from my fellows--from the whole of the Western world. My
throat was parched with the fumes, my head ached. The vicious
atmosphere seemed contaminating. I was as one dropped--
Somewhere East of Suez, where the best is like the worst, And there
ain't no Ten Commandments and a man can raise a thirst.
Smith began to whisper softly.
"We have carried it through successfully so far," he said. "I don't
know if you have observed it, but there is a stair just behind you,
half concealed by a ragged curtain. We are near that, and well in the
dark. I have seen nothing suspicious so far--or nothing much. But if
there was anything going forward it would no doubt be delayed until we
new arrivals were well doped. S-SH!"
He pressed my arm to emphasize the warning. Through my half-closed
eyes I perceived a shadowy form near the curtain to which he had
referred. I lay like a log, but my muscles were tensed nervously.
The shadow materialized as the figure moved forward into the room with
a curiously lithe movement.
The smoky lamp in the middle of the place afforded scant illumination,
serving only to indicate sprawling shapes--here an extended hand, brown
or yellow, there a sketchy, corpse-like face; whilst from all about
rose obscene sighings and murmurings in far-away voices--an uncanny,
animal chorus. It was like a glimpse of the Inferno seen by some
Chinese Dante. But so close to us stood the newcomer that I was able
to make out a ghastly parchment face, with small, oblique eyes, and a
misshapen head crowned with a coiled pigtail, surmounting a slight,
hunched body. There was something unnatural, inhuman, about that
masklike face, and something repulsive in the bent shape and the long,
yellow hands clasped one upon the other.
Fu-Manchu, from Smith's account, in no way resembled this crouching
apparition with the death's-head countenance and lithe movements; but
an instinct of some kind told me that we were on the right scent--that
this was one of the doctor's servants. How I came to that conclusion,
I cannot explain; but with no doubt in my mind that this was a member
of the formidable murder group, I saw the yellow man creep nearer,
nearer, silently, bent and peering.
He was watching us.
Of another circumstance I became aware, and a disquieting circumstance.
There were fewer murmurings and sighings from the surrounding bunks.
The presence of the crouching figure had created a sudden semi-silence
in the den, which could only mean that some of the supposed
opium-smokers had merely feigned coma and the approach of coma.
Nayland Smith lay like a dead man, and trusting