“Not necessarily.  There is a railroad.”

“He won’t be taking that.  The only safe place for him is at sea; and if he had kept to the sea, I shouldn’t have found him so easily.  Well, what about it?”

“I accept.”

“As an honest Chinaman?”—­taking out the offensiveness of the query by smiling.

“As an honest Chinaman.”

O’Higgins produced his wallet.  “Fifty now and fifty when I return.”

“Agreed.  Here are the jade carvers.  Would you like to see them at work?”

“Lead on, Macduff!”

Ah Cum raised the skirt of his fluttering blue silk robe and stored the bill away in a trouser wallet.  It was the beginning and the end of the transaction.  When he finally telegraphed his startling information to Hong-Kong, it was too late for O’Higgins to act.  The quarry had passed out into the open sea.

* * * * *

From the comatose state, Spurlock passed into that of the babbling fever; but that guarding instinct which is called subconsciousness held a stout leash on his secret.  He uttered one word over and over, monotonously: 

“Fool! ...  Fool!”

But invariably the touch of Ruth’s hand quieted him, and his head would cease to roll from side to side.  He hung precariously on the ragged edge, but he hung there.  Three times he uttered a phrase: 

“A djinn in a blue-serge coat!”

And each time he would follow it with a chuckle—­the chuckle of a soul in damnation.

Neither the American Express nor Cook’s had received mail for Howard Taber; he was not on either list.  This was irregular.  A man might be without relatives, but certainly he would not be without friends, that is to say, without letters.  The affair was thick with sinister suggestions.  And yet, the doctor recalled an expression of the girl’s:  that it was not a dissipated face, only troubled.

The whole affair interested him deeply.  That was one of the compensations for having consigned himself to this part of the world.  Over here, there was generally some unusual twist to a case.  He would pull this young fellow back; but later he knew that he would have to fight the boy’s lack of will to live.  When he recovered his mental faculties, he would lie there, neutral; they could save him or let him die, as they pleased; and the doctor knew that he would wear himself out forcing his own will to live into this neutrality.  And probably the girl would wear herself out, too.

To fight inertia on the one hand and to study this queer girl on the other.  Any financial return was inconsiderable against the promise of this psychological treat.  The girl was like some north-country woodland pool, penetrated by a single shaft of sunlight—­beautifully clear in one spot and mysteriously obscured elsewhere.  She would be elemental; there would be in her somewhere the sleeping tigress.  The elemental woman was always close to the cat:  as the elemental man was always but a point removed from the wolf.