They were passing out of the shop now, bowed out through a side door by the obsequious and oily Chang Foo.  And now they massed again in a sort of little hallway—­and Chang Foo, closing the door upon Jimmie Dale, who was the last in the line, shuffled back behind the counter in his shop to resume his guard duty over customers of quite another ilk.  With the door closed, it was dark, pitch dark.  And this, too, like everything else connected with Chang Foo’s establishment, for more reasons than one—­for effect—­and for security.  Nervous little twitters began to emanate from the women—­the guide’s voice rose reassuringly: 

“Keep close together, ladies and gentlemen.  We are going upstairs now to—­”

Jimmie Dale hugged back against the wall, sidled along it, and like a shadow slipped down to the end of the hall.  The scuffling of two dozen pairs of feet mounting the creaky staircase drowned the slight sound as he cautiously opened a door; the darkness lay black, impenetrable, along the hall.  And then, as cautiously as he had opened it, he closed the door behind him, and stood for an instant listening at the head of a ladder-like stairway, his automatic in his hand now.  It was familiar ground to Larry the Bat.  The steps led down to a cellar; and diagonally across from the foot of the steps was an opening, ingeniously hidden by a heterogeneous collection of odds and ends, boxes, cases, and rubbish from the pseudo tea shop above; a low opening in the wall to a passage that led on through the cellars of perhaps half a dozen adjoining houses, each of which latter was leased, in one name or another—­by Chang Foo.

Jimmie Dale crept down the steps, and in another moment had gained the farther side of the cellar; then, skirting around the ruck of cases, he stooped suddenly and passed in through the opening in the wall.  And now he halted once more.  He was straining his eyes down a long, narrow passage, whose blackness was accentuated rather than relieved by curious wavering, gossamer threads of yellow light that showed here and there from under makeshift thresholds, from doors slightly ajar.  Faint noises came to him, a muffled, intermittent clink of coin, a low, continuous, droning hum of voices; the sickly sweet smell of opium pricked at his nostrils.

Jimmie Dale’s face set rigidly.  It was the resort, not only of the most depraved Chinese element, but of the worst “white” thugs that made New York their headquarters—­here, in the succession of cellars, roughly partitioned off to make a dozen rooms on either side of the passage, dope fiends sucked at the drug, and Chinese gamblers spent the greater part of their lives; here, murder was hatched and played too often to its hellish end; here, the scum of the underworld sought refuge from the police to the profit of Chang Foo; and here, somewhere, in one of these rooms, was—­the Wowzer.