CHAPTER LVIII

McTURPIN TURNS INFORMER

Benito stared, bewildered, at the Chinaman.  “McTurpin dying?  Wants to see me?”

Po Lun nodded.  “He send-um China boy you’ house.  He wait outside.”

Benito rose.  Alice laid detaining fingers on his arm.  “Don’t go ... it’s just a ruse.  You know McTurpin.”

“The time is past when he can injure me,” he answered gravely.  “Something tells me it is right—­to go.”  He kissed her, disengaged her arms about him gently, and went out.  Adrian signaled to the Chinese.  “Follow him....”

Po Lun nodded understandingly.

A shuffling figure, face concealed beneath a broad-brimmed hat, hands tucked each within the opposite sleeve, awaited Windham just outside the door.  He set out immediately in an easterly direction, glancing over his shoulder now and again to make certain that Benito followed.  Down the steep slope of Washington street he went past moss-grown retaining walls; over slippery brick pavements, through which the grass-blades sprouted, to plunge at length into the eddying alien mass of Chinatown’s main artery, Dupont street.  Here rushing human counter-currents ebbed and flowed ceaslessly.  Burdens of all sizes and of infinite variety swept by on swaying shoulder yokes.

Benito’s guide paused momentarily on the farther side of Dupont street.  Then, with a beckoning gesture, he dived into a narrow alley.  Benito, following, found himself before the entrance of a cellarway.  As he halted, iron trapdoors opened toward him, revealing a short flight of steps.  The Chinese motioned him to descend, but the lawyer hesitated with a sudden sense of trepidation.  Beneath the pavement in this cul-de-sac of Chinatown, he would be hidden from the world, from friends or rescue, as securely as though he were at the bottom of the bay.

But he squared his shoulders and went down.  A door opened noiselessly and closed, leaving him in total darkness.  A lantern glimmered and he followed it along a narrow passage that had many unexpected turns.  An odor, pungent, acrid, semi-aromatic troubled his nostrils.  It increased until the lantern-bearing Chinese ushered him into a large square room, lined with bunks, three-deep, like the forecastle of a ship.  In each lay two Chinese, face to face.  They drew at intervals deep inhalations from a thick bamboo pipe, relaxing, thereupon into a sort of stupored dream.  The place reeked with the fumes that had assailed Benito in the passage.  Intuitively he knew that it was opium.

A voice in English, faint and dreamy, reached him.  “This way ...  Mr. Windham....  Please.”

A white almost-skeleton hand stretched toward him from a lower bunk.  A bearded face, cadaverously sunken, in which gleamed bright fevered eyes, was now discernible.

“McTurpin!” he spoke incredulously.

“What’s left of me,” the tone was hollow, grim.  “Please sit down here, close to me....  I’ve something to tell you....  Something that will—­”