Suddenly, among the hovels, they groped along a checkered surface of brick-work.  The flare of Heywood’s match revealed a heavy wooden door, which he hammered with his fist.  After a time, a disgruntled voice within snarled something in the vernacular.  Heywood laughed.

“Ai-yah!  Who’s afraid?  Wutzler, you old pirate, open up!”

A bar clattered down, the door swung back, and there, raising a glow-worm lantern of oiled paper, stood such a timorous little figure as might have ventured out from a masquerade of gnomes.  The wrinkled face was Wutzler’s, but his weazened body was lost in the glossy black folds of a native jacket, and below the patched trousers, his bare ankles and coolie-sandals of straw moved uneasily, as though trying to hide behind each other.

“Kom in,” said this hybrid, with a nervous cackle.  “I thought you are thiefs.  Kom in.”

Following through a toy courtyard, among shadow hints of pigmy shrubs and rockery, they found themselves cramped in a bare, clean cell, lighted by a European lamp, but smelling of soy and Asiatics.  Stiff black-wood chairs lined the walls.  A distorted landscape on rice-paper, narrow scarlet panels inscribed with black cursive characters, pith flowers from Amoy, made blots of brightness.

“It iss not moch, gentlemen,” sighed Wutzler, cringing.  “But I am ver’ glad.”

Heywood flung himself into a chair.

“Not dead yet, you rascal?” he cried.  “And we came all the way to see you.  No chow, either.”

“Oh, allow me,” mumbled their host, in a flutter.  “My—­she—­I will speak, I go bring you.”  He shuffled away, into some further chamber.

Heywood leaned forward quickly.

“Eat it,” he whispered, “whether you can or not!  Pleases the old one, no bounds.  We’re his only visitors—­”

“Here iss not moch whiskey.”  Wutzler came shambling in, held a bottle against the light, and squinted ruefully at the yellow dregs.  “I will gif you a kong full, but I haf not.”

He dodged out again.  They heard his angry whispers, and a small commotion of the household,—­brazen dishes clinking, squeals, titters, and tiny bare feet skipping about,—­all the flurry of a rabbit-hutch in Wonderland.  Once, near the threshold, a chubby face, very pale, with round eyes of shining jet, peered cautious as a mouse, and popped out of sight with a squeak.  Wutzler, red with excitement, came and went like an anxious waiter, bringing in the feast.

“Here iss not moch,” he repeated sadly.  But there were bits of pig-skin stewed in oil; bean-cakes; steaming buns of wheat-flour, stuffed with dice of fat pork and lumps of sugar; three-cornered rice puddings, no-me boiled in plantain-leaf wrappers; with the last of the whiskey, in green cups.  While the two men ate, the shriveled outcast beamed timidly, hovering about them, fidgeting.

“Herr Hackh,” he suddenly exclaimed, in a queer, strained voice, “you do not know how dis yong man iss goot!  No!  He hass to me—­immer—­” He choked, turned away, and began fussing with the pith flowers; but not before Rudolph had seen a line glistening down the sun-dried cheeks.