Major Brane nodded. “Remove your hand from the gun,” he said. “There is a plain clothes man coming this way. I will go with you.”
He reached out, clamped a friendly hand about the arm of the youth, taking hold of the muscles just above the elbow. If the plain clothes officer should accost them, Major Brane wanted to prevent the youth from doing anything rash. And as his fingers clamped about the arm, Major Brane felt the quivering of the flesh, that tremor which comes from taut nerves.
“Steady!” he warned.
There is a popular belief that the Chinese is unemotional. The fallacy of that belief is on a par with the hundreds of fallacies which bar an understanding of the Orient by the Occident. Major Brane realized just how deadly dangerous the present situation was. If the officer should insist upon searching the youth for a weapon... But the officer was reassured by Major Brane’s words.
“If it’s real jade,” said Major Brane in a loud tone of voice, regarding the bulge in the pocket of the youth’s coat, “I’ll look at it, but I want a bargain.”
The officer veered off. The Chinese glittered his beady eyes at Major Brane and said nothing. A casual observer would have gathered that he was totally oblivious of the danger he had just escaped as well as the ruse by which he had been saved. But the reddish tinge left the surface of the eyes, and the boy took a deep breath.
“M’goy!” he muttered mechanically, which is a Cantonese expression of thanks, and means, “I am not worthy.”
Major Brane made the prompt reply which etiquette demanded.
“Hoh wah!” he said, which in turn means, “good talk!”
And the fact that most Westerners would have found the words amusing as well as entirely unrelated to expressions of thanks and welcome is but illustrative of the gulf between the races.
The young Chinese led the way down a side street. Major Brane fell in slightly behind, walked unhesitatingly, his hands swinging free, making no covert effort to reach toward the shoulder holster which was slung beneath his left arm. He had given his word, and his word had been accepted.
They paused before a dark door, which was the center one of a row of dark doors. Apparently these entrances were to separate buildings, huddled closely together in the congestion of poverty; but when the door swung open, Major Brane found himself in a courtyard enclosed by a brick wall. The enclosure was spacious and airy. The other doors had been but dummies set in the brick wall, and were kept locked. Had one opened any one of those other doors, he would have encountered nothing but brick.
Major Brane gave no evidences of surprise. He had been in such places before. The Chinese of wealth always builds his house with a cunning simulation of external poverty. In the Orient one may look in vain for mansions, unless one has the entree to private homes. The street entrances always give the impression of congestion and poverty, and the lines of architecture are carefully carried out so that no glimpse of the mansion itself is visible over the forbidding false front of what appears to be a squalid hovel.
“Quickly!” breathed the Chinese.
His feet pattered over flags, paused at an entrance, to the side of which was an altar and the Chinese characters which signify the presence of Toe Day, the god whose duty it is to frighten away the “homeless ghosts” who would attach themselves to the family, yet will permit free access to the spirits of departed ancestors.
A bell jangled. The door swung open. A huge Chinese servant stood in the doorway.
“The master awaits,” he said. The boy pushed his way into the house, through a reception room furnished in conventional dark wood furnishings, into an inner room, the doorway to which was a circle with a high ledge at the entrance, to keep away evil spirits.
Major Brane knew at once that he was dealing with an old family who had retained all the conventions of ten thousand years; knew also that he would be kept with his back to the door if he were received as a prisoner, and given a seat across the room facing the doorway, if he were an honored guest.
His eyes, suddenly grown as hard as polished steel, surveyed the interior of the room. An old man sat on a low stool. A wisp of white beard straggled down from either side of his chin. His face was withered and wrinkled. Most of the hair was gone from the head. The nails of the little fingers were almost three inches long. The left hand waved toward a stool which was at the end of the room facing the door.
“Cheng nay choh,” he said to Major Brane, and the boy interpreted. “Please sit down,” he said.
Major Brane heaved a sigh of relief as he sat down upon the rigidly uncomfortable chair which faced the doorway — the seat of honor.
The servant brought him a cup of tea and a plate of dried melon seeds, which he set down upon a stand of teakwood inlaid with ivory and jade. Major Brane knew that regardless of the urgency of the matter in hand, it would not be broached until he had partaken of the food and drink, so he sipped the scalding tea, took a melon seed between his teeth, cracked it and extracted the meat with a celerity which branded him at once as one who knew his way about. Chopsticks can be mastered with a few lessons, but not so with the technique of melon seeds.
The old man sucked up a bamboo pipe, the bowl of which was of soft metal. It was packed with sook yen, the Chinese tobacco which will eat the membranes from an uneducated throat. He gurgled into speech.
There was no doubt in Major Brane’s mind but that the young boy would act as interpreter; and he guessed that the lad was quite familiar with the situation, and eager to express himself up on it. Yet such is the veneration for age that the boy kept his eyes upon the old man’s face, listening intently, ready to interpret, not what he himself wanted to say, but what the head of the family should utter.
For some three minutes the old man spoke. Major Brane caught a word here and there, and, as his ears conveyed those words to his consciousness, Major Brane sat very rigidly attentive.
The boy interpreted, when the grandfather had finished speaking; and his voice held that absence of tone which comes to one who is repeating but the words of another.
“Jee Kit King has been taken by our enemies. She will be tortured. Even now, they are preparing to start the torture. She will be tortured until she speaks or until she dies, and she will not speak. You are to save her. You must work with speed. And your own life will be in danger.”
Major Brane snapped questions. “Who are your enemies?”
“Enemies of China.”
“Who are they?”
“We do not know.”
“How long has the girl been missing?”
“Less than one hour.”
“Why do they torture her?”
“To find out what she did with the evidence.”
“What evidence?”
That question brought a period of silence. Then the boy turned to the old man and rattled forth a swift sentence of Cantonese. Major Brane understood enough of that question to know that the youth was asking the old man for permission to give Major Brane the real facts; but even as the old man pursed his puckered lips about the stained mouthpiece of the pipe, Major Brane sensed that the reply would be adverse.
In fact there was no reply at all. The old man smoked placidly, puffing out the oily tobacco smoke, his eyes glittering fixed upon the distance.
The young man whirled back to Mayor Brane, lowered his voice.
“There is, in this city, Mah Bak Heng, who comes from Canton.”
Major Brane let his eyes show merely polite interest. He already knew much of Mah Bak Heng, and of his mission, but he kept that knowledge from showing in his eyes.