“Drop us somewhere handy, then,” replied Smith, “and lie close in, with your ears wide open.  We may have to run for it, so don’t go far away.”

From the tone of his voice I knew that the night mystery of the Thames had claimed at least one other victim.

“Dead slow,” came Ryman’s order.  “We’ll put in to the Stone Stairs.”

CHAPTER VI

A seemingly drunken voice was droning from a neighboring alleyway as Smith lurched in hulking fashion to the door of a little shop above which, crudely painted, were the words: 

“Shen-Yan, Barber.”

I shuffled along behind him, and had time to note the box of studs, German shaving tackle and rolls of twist which lay untidily in the window ere Smith kicked the door open, clattered down three wooden steps, and pulled himself up with a jerk, seizing my arm for support.

We stood in a bare and very dirty room, which could only claim kinship with a civilized shaving-saloon by virtue of the grimy towel thrown across the back of the solitary chair.  A Yiddish theatrical bill of some kind, illustrated, adorned one of the walls, and another bill, in what may have been Chinese, completed the decorations.  From behind a curtain heavily brocaded with filth a little Chinaman appeared, dressed in a loose smock, black trousers and thick-soled slippers, and, advancing, shook his head vigorously.

“No shavee—­no shavee,” he chattered, simian fashion, squinting from one to the other of us with his twinkling eyes.  “Too late!  Shuttee shop!”

“Don’t you come none of it wi’ me!” roared Smith, in a voice of amazing gruffness, and shook an artificially dirtied fist under the Chinaman’s nose.  “Get inside and gimme an’ my mate a couple o’ pipes.  Smokee pipe, you yellow scum—­savvy?”

My friend bent forward and glared into the other’s eyes with a vindictiveness that amazed me, unfamiliar as I was with this form of gentle persuasion.

“Kop ‘old o’ that,” he said, and thrust a coin into the Chinaman’s yellow paw.  “Keep me waitin’ an’ I’ll pull the dam’ shop down, Charlie.  You can lay to it.”

“No hab got pipee—­” began the other.

Smith raised his fist, and Yan capitulated.

“Allee lightee,” he said.  “Full up—­no loom.  You come see.”

He dived behind the dirty curtain, Smith and I following, and ran up a dark stair.  The next moment I found myself in an atmosphere which was literally poisonous.  It was all but unbreathable, being loaded with opium fumes.  Never before had I experienced anything like it.  Every breath was an effort.  A tin oil-lamp on a box in the middle of the floor dimly illuminated the horrible place, about the walls of which ten or twelve bunks were ranged and all of them occupied.  Most of the occupants were lying motionless, but one or two were squatting in their bunks noisily sucking at the little metal pipes.  These had not yet attained to the opium-smoker’s Nirvana.