“Old fool!” she cried at Sin Sin Wa.  “What are you doing?”

But Sin Sin Wa, his sleeves rolled up above his yellow, sinewy forearms, now tossed his pigtail, serpentine, across his shoulder and touched it with his fingers, an odd, caressing movement.

“Ho!” laughed Mrs. Sin in her deep scoffing fashion, “it is for me you make all this bhobbery, eh?  It is me you are going to chastise, my dear?”

She flung back her head, snapping her fingers before the silent Chinaman.  He watched her, and slowly—­slowly—­he began to crouch, lower and lower, but always that unblinking regard remained fixed upon the face of Mrs. Sin.

The woman laughed again, more loudly.  Bending her lithe body forward in mocking mimicry, she snapped her fingers, once—­again—­and again under Sin Sin Wa’s nose.  Then: 

“Do you think, you blasted yellow ape, that you can frighten me?” she screamed, a swift flame of wrath lighting up her dark face.

In a flash she had raised the kimona and had the stiletto in her hand.  But, even swifter than she, Sin Sin Wa sprang. . .

Once, twice she struck at him, and blood streamed from his left shoulder.  But the pigtail, like an executioner’s rope, was about the woman’s throat.  She uttered one smothered shriek, dropping the knife, and then was silent. . .

Her dyed hair escaped from its fastenings and descended, a ruddy torrent, about her as she writhed, silent, horrible, in the death-coil of the pigtail.

Rigidly, at arms-length, he held her, moment after moment, immovable, implacable; and when he read death in her empurpled face, a miraculous thing happened.

The “blind” eye of Sin Sin Wa opened!

A husky rattle told of the end, and he dropped the woman’s body from his steely grip, disengaging the pigtail with a swift movement of his head.  Opening and closing his yellow fingers to restore circulation, he stood looking down at her.  He spat upon the floor at her feet.

Then, turning, he held out his arms and confronted Sam Tuk.

“Was it well done, bald father of wisdom?” he demanded hoarsely.

But old Sam Tuk seated lumpish in his chair like some grotesque idol before whom a human sacrifice has been offered up, stirred not.  The length of loaded tubing with which he had struck Kerry lay beside him where it had fallen from his nerveless hand.  And the two oblique, beady eyes of Sin Sin Wa, watching, grew dim.  Step by step he approached the old Chinaman, stooped, touched him, then knelt and laid his head upon the thin knees.

“Old father,” he murmured, “Old bald father who knew so much.  Tonight you know all.”

For Sam Tuk was no more.  At what moment he had died, whether in the excitement of striking Kerry or later, no man could have presumed to say, since, save by an occasional nod of his head, he had often simulated death in life—­he who was so old that he was known as “The Father of Chinatown.”