Wong Get glanced round the table.

“If there is no further business the society will disperse after the customary refreshment.”

Fong Hen placed thirteen tiny glasses upon the table and filled them with rice whisky scented with aniseed and a dash of powdered ginger.  At a signal from Wong Get the thirteen Chinamen lifted the glasses and drank.

“The meeting is adjourned,” said he.

* * * * *

Eighty years before, in a Cantonese rabbit warren two yellow men had fought over a white woman, and one had killed the other.  They had belonged to different societies, or tongs.  The associates of the murdered man had avenged his death by slitting the throat of one of the members of the other organization, and these in turn had retaliated thus establishing a vendetta which became part and parcel of the lives of certain families, as naturally and unavoidably as birth, love and death.  As regularly as the solstice they alternated in picking each other off.  Branches of the Hip Leong and On Gee tongs sprang up in San Francisco and New York—­and the feud was transferred with them to Chatham Square, a feud imposing a sacred obligation rooted in blood, honor and religion upon every member, who rather than fail to carry it out would have knotted a yellow silken cord under his left ear and swung himself gently off a table into eternal sleep.

Young Mock Hen, one of the four avengers, had created a distinct place for himself in Chinatown by making a careful study of New York psychology.  He was a good-looking Chink, smooth-faced, tall and supple; he knew very well how to capitalize his attractiveness.  By day he attended Columbia University as a special student in applied electricity, keeping a convenient eye meanwhile on three coolies whom he employed to run The College Laundry on Morningside Heights.  By night he vicariously operated a chop-suey palace on Seventh Avenue, where congregated the worst elements of the Tenderloin.  But his heart was in the gambling den which he maintained in Doyers Street, and where anyone who knew the knock could have a shell of hop for the asking, once Mock had given him the once-over through the little sliding panel.

Mock was a Christian Chinaman.  That is to say, purely for business reasons—­for what he got out of it and the standing that it gave him—­he attended the Rising Star Mission and also frequented Hudson House, the social settlement where Miss Fanny Duryea taught him to play ping-pong and other exciting parlor games, and read to him from books adapted to an American child of ten.  He was a great favorite at both places, for he was sweet-tempered and wore an expression of heaven-born innocence.  He had even been to church with Miss Duryea, temporarily absenting himself for that purpose of a Sunday morning from the steam-heated flat where—­unknown to her, of course—­he lived with his white wife, Emma Pratt, a lady of highly miscellaneous antecedents.