To impress this upon Keith he had, first of all, acquainted him with the fact that he had seen through his deception and that he knew he was John Keith and not Derwent Conniston.  He had also let him know that he believed he had killed the Englishman, a logical supposition under the circumstances.  This information he had left for Keith was not in the form of an intimidation.  There was, indeed, something very near apologetic courtesy in the presence of the card bearing Shan Tung’s compliments.  The penciling of the hour on the panel of the door, without other notation, was a polite and suggestive hint.  He wanted Keith to know that he understood his peculiar situation up until that particular time, that he had heard and possibly seen much that had passed between him and Mary Josephine.  The partly opened window, the mud and wet on curtains and floor, and the cigarette stubs were all to call Keith’s attention to the box on the table.

Keith could not but feel a certain sort of admiration for the Chinaman.  The two questions he must answer now were, What was Shan Tung’s game? and What did Shan Tung expect him to do?

Instantly Miriam Kirkstone flashed upon him as the possible motive for Shan Tung’s visit.  He recalled her unexpected and embarrassing question of that evening, in which she had expressed a suspicion and a doubt as to John Keith’s death.  He had gone to Miriam’s at eight.  It must have been very soon after that, and after she had caught a glimpse of the face at the window, that Shan Tung had hurried to the Shack.

Slowly but surely the tangled threads of the night’s adventure were unraveling themselves for Keith.  The main facts pressed upon him, no longer smothered in a chaos of theory and supposition.  If there had been no Miriam Kirkstone in the big house on the hill, Shan Tung would have gone to McDowell, and he would have been in irons at the present moment.  McDowell had been right after all.  Miriam Kirkstone was fighting for something that was more than her existence.  The thought of that “something” made Keith writhe and his hands clench.  Shan Tung had triumphed but not utterly.  A part of the fruit of his triumph was still just out of his reach, and the two—­beautiful Miss Kirkstone and the deadly Shan Tung—­were locked in a final struggle for its possession.  In some mysterious way he, John Keith, was to play the winning hand.  How or when he could not understand.  But of one thing he was convinced; in exchange for whatever winning card he held Shan Tung had offered him his life.  Tomorrow he would expect an answer.

That tomorrow had already dawned.  It was one o’clock when Keith again looked at his watch.  Twenty hours ago he had cooked his last camp-fire breakfast.  It was only eighteen hours ago that he had filled himself with the smell of Andy Duggan’s bacon, and still more recently that he had sat in the little barber shop on the corner wondering what his fate would be when he faced McDowell.  It