On his hands and knees he crouched, and began crawling, an inch at a time, toward the French window, dragging the automatic over the thick satin carpet. He reached the window. It was still ajar. Far, far below twinkled the lights of Hong Kong, of ships anchored in the bay, and the glitter of Kowloon across the bay. Out there was life!
A board creaked near him, toward the heart of that darkened vault. He spun about, aimed blindly, fired!
The floor shook as an unseen shape collapsed and writhed within reach of his hand. In his grasp, was the oily, thick queue of a coolie.
And suddenly, as he groped, the wall spat out angry tongues of corrosive red flame.
A white-hot iron seemed to shoot through the flesh of his left arm. The pain reached his shoulder. His left arm was useless--the bone cracked!
Groaning, he pushed himself back. His knees struck the sill, slid over, and he felt the coarse, peeled paint of the veranda. He reached the ledge--dropped to the ground, and in dropping, the revolver spilled from his hand as it caught on a projecting ledge of the floor, bounded off into the darkness.
He groveled to retrieve it, muttering as his hands probed through the tufted grass.
Light glimmered in the room above. There occurred sounds of a struggle, of feet scraping, a muffled oath, a short scream.
Peter leaped back, looking up, prepared to dash for the road.
A yellow light within the room silhouetted the slender figure of Romola Borria against the French window. Her arms went out in frantic appeal to the darkness, to him.
"Wait!" she cried in an awful voice. "I love you! Wait!"
At that confession, a hand seemingly suspended in space was elevated slowly behind her. The hand paused high above her head. A face appeared in the luminous space above her head, an evil face, carved with a hideous brutality, wearing an ominous snarl; and above the writhing lips of this one was a black growth, a mustache, pointed, like twin black daggers.
Emiguel Borria, ardent tool of the Gray Dragon? Emiguel Borria, husband of the girl Romola?
Emiguel Borria, in whose lifting hand Peter now caught the glint of a revolver, attempted to crowd the girl to one side. But she held her ground, and then this woman who had on a half-dozen successive occasions tricked and deceived Peter, who had deliberately and on her own confession lured him into this trap, upset, womanlike, the elaborate plan of her master.
In a frenzy she spun upon Emiguel Borria, seized the white barrel of the revolver in her two hands and forced it against his side. Tiny red flames spurted out on either side of the cylinder and smeared in a smoky circle where the muzzle was momentarily buried in the tangled black coat. And Emiguel Borria seemed to sink into the great room and entirely out of Peter's sight.
Romola leaned far into the darkness.
"Run! Run! For your life!"
And as Peter started to run, out of the compound for the dubious safety of the cloistered road, other men of the Gray Dragon, posted for such a contingency, let loose a shower of bullets from adjoining windows.
But the gods were for the time being on the side of Peter. These shots all went wild.
Shuddering, with teeth chattering and eyes popping, Peter dove through the matted hedge, dashed into the street, and down the street, lighted at intervals with its pin-points of mysterious light.
He came to the incline station, and his footsteps seemed weighted, dragging. And the clock in the station, as he dashed past, showed one o'clock.
He plunged down the first sharp twist of the hair-pin trail, fell, picked himself up dusty and dizzy, with his left arm swinging grotesquely as he ran.
And behind him, riding like the dawn wind, he seemed to feel the presence of a companion, of a silent rickshaw which rattled with a grisly occupant; and a voice, the voice of Romola Borria, shrill and terrible in his ear, cried: "Wait! Oh, wait!"
But the spectre was more real than Peter could imagine.
It was quite awful, quite absurd, the way Peter stumbled and plunged and fell and stumbled on down the hill; past the reservoirs which glittered greenly under their guardian lights.
How he managed to reach Queen's Road in that dreadful state I cannot describe. He dashed down the center of the deserted road, with rudely awakened Sikhs calling excitedly upon Allah, to stop, to stop!
But on he sped, straight down the center of the mud roadway, past the Hong Kong Hotel, now darkened for the night, and past the bund.
Would the sampan be waiting? Otherwise he was now bolting headlong upon the waiting knives of the Gray Dragon's men. No sampan in the whole of Victoria Harbor was safe to-night, but one. Would the one be waiting? Upon that single hope he was staking his safety, his dash for life.
He sped out upon the jetty.
Where could he seek refuge? The Persian Gulf? The King of Asia? The transpacific liner lay far out in a pool of great black, glittering under sharp, white arc-lights forward and aft as cargo was lifted from obscure lighters and stowed into her capacious hold.
Yet he must go quickly, for in all China there was no safety for him this night.
A shadow leaped out upon the jetty close upon his heels. But Peter did not see this ghost.
The sampan coolie, asleep upon the small foredeck of his home, shivered and muttered in his strange dreams. By his garb and by the richness of the large sampan's upholsterings Peter guessed this to be the craft sent to him by the small Chinese girl.
Peter leaped aboard, awakening the fokie with a cry.
Dark knobs arose from the low cabin hatchway, and by the yellow lamps of the jetty Peter made these out to be the heads of the maid from Macassar and her old grandmother.
A dong was burning in the cabin, and Peter followed the girl into the small cabin of scrubbed and polished teak, while the old woman gibbered in sharp command to the fokie.
Crouching like a beast at last cornered, Peter, by the shooting rays of the dong, glared dazedly into an angry red face, a face that was limned and pounded by the elements, from which stared two blue, bloodshot eyes.
The girl said nothing as she nestled at his side, and Peter permitted his head to sink between his hands.
Yet, strange to say, the red-faced man did not fire, made no motion of stabbing him.
Peter looked up, snarling defiance.
"You've got me cornered," he whispered harshly. "It's after one o'clock. The parole is up. Why prolong the agony? Damn you, I'm unarmed!" He shut his eyes again.
Again there was no premonitory click, no seep of steel upon scabbard.
The red-faced man seized his shoulder, shook him.
"Say, you young prize-fighter," he sputtered, "you drunk? Crazy? Or just temporarily off your nut? Who in thunder said anything about prolonging the agony? What agony are you talking about? Why the devil 've you been dodging me all over South China to-day? You dog-gone young wildcat, you! I've got an assignment for you. The King of Asia's wireless man is laid up in the Peak Hospital with typhoid. I want you to take her back to Frisco! Blast your young hide, anyhow!"
The wizen face of the girl's grandmother appeared in the hatchway. She seemed annoyed, angry. She said something in the Cantonese dialect, which Peter did not understand.
"A sampan is following," translated the girl in her tiny voice, "but we are nearly there. In a moment you will be safe."
"Where?" demanded Peter, staring over the red-faced man's shoulder for a glimpse of the other sampan.
"The King of Asia," she told him. "In a moment, birahi, in a moment."
Her tones were those of a little mother.
But Peter was staring anxiously into the red face, trying to decipher an explanation.
"I told the red-faced one to be here, too, at midnight," the girl was whispering in his ear. "He came. He is a friend. Your fears were wrong, birahi."
The sampan lurched, scraping and tapping along a surface rough and metallic.
The yellow face of the old woman again appeared in the hatchway. A bar of keen, white light thrust its way into the cabin. It came from somewhere above. No longer could Peter hear the groan and swish of the sweep, and the cabin no longer keeled from side to side. He guessed that the sampan was alongside.
The old woman motioned for him to come out.
"I am not coming aboard; I am going back to my hotel," said the red-faced man. "You will not leave this ship? You will promise me that?"
"I will promise," said Peter gravely. "You, I presume, are Mr. J. B. Whalen, the Marconi supervisor?"
The red-faced man nodded. As if by some prearranged plan, Whalen, after slight hesitation, climbed out of the cabin, leaving Peter alone with this very small, very gentle benefactor of his. He wanted to thank her, and he tried. But she put her fingers over his lips.
"You are going to the one you love, birahi," she said in her tinkling little voice. "Before we part, I want you--I want you to----" and she hesitated. "Come now, my brave one," she added with an attempt at briskness. "You must go. Hurry!"
Peter found the side ladder of the King of Asia dangling from the upper glow of the liner's high deck. He put his foot on the lower rung and paused. A vast number of apologies, of thanks and good-byes demanded utterance, but he felt confused. The slight relaxation of the past few minutes had left him exhausted, and his brain was encased in fog.
He remembered that the little maid from Macassar had wanted him to do something, possibly some favor. The glow high above him seemed to swim. His injured arm was beginning to throb with a low and persistent pain. And the climb to the deck seemed a tremendous undertaking.
"You were saying," he began huskily, as she reached out to steady the ladder. "You wanted me----"
"Just this, my brave one." And she reached up on tiptoes and kissed him ever so lightly upon his lips. "When you think of me, birahi, close your eyes and dream. For I--I might have loved you!"
Half-way up the black precipice, Peter stopped and looked down. For a moment his befuddled senses refused to register what now occupied the space at the ladder's end.
The sampan was no longer there; another had taken its place, a sampan long and as black as the night which encompassed it.
Wide, dark eyes stared up across the space into his, and these were set in a chalky-white face, grim, fearful--startling!
It was Romola Borria. Her white arms were upheld in a gesture of entreaty. Her lips were moving.
Peter descended a step, and stopped, swaying slightly.
"What--what----" he began.
"He is dead!" came the whisper from the small deck. "I killed him! I killed him! Do you hear me? I am free! Free! Why do you stare at me so? I am ready to go. But you must ask me! I will not follow you. I will not!"
And Peter, clutching with a sick and sinking feeling at the hard rope, found that his lips and tongue were working, but that no sound other than a dull muttering issued from his mouth. Momentarily he was dumb--paralyzed.
"I am not a tool of the Gray Dragon," went on the vehement whisper. "I am not!"
And to Peter came full realization that Romola Borria was lying, or endeavoring to trick him, for the last time.
"Go back--there," he managed to stammer at last. "Go back! I won't have you! I'm through with this damned place."
Painfully he climbed up a few rungs.
Then the voice of Romola, no longer a whisper, but loud, broken, despairing, came to him for the last time:
"You are leaving me--leaving me--for her--for Eileen!"
Peter made no reply. He continued his laborious climb; first one foot, then a groping few inches upward along the hard rope with his right hand, and then the other foot. Nor did he once again look down.
He finally gained the deck. It was blazing with incandescent and arc-lights. Under-officers and deckhands were pacing about, giving attention to the loading. Donkey engines hissed, coughed, and rattled, as the yellow booms creaked out, up and in with their snares of bales and crates which vanished like swooping birds of prey into the noisy hatchways.
Peter took in the bustling scene with a long sigh of relief. He still heard that lonely, anguished voice; the black sampan still rested on his eyes, heaving on the flood tide upon which the great ship strained, as if eager to be gone. And out there--out there--beyond the black heart of mystery and the night, was the clean dawn--the rain-washed spaces of the shimmering sea.
But he could not look down again. He would not. For a while--or forever--he had had his fill of China. Before him now lay the freedom of the open sea, the sunshine of life--and his homeland!
Peter the Brazen had drunk all too indulgently at the bitter fountain.
