elf up softly and remained for
an instant, half-kneeling, in the body of the wagon. Then suddenly,
noiselessly, it rose up, leaned over the absorbed Joel Mazarine, and
with long, hooked, steely fingers caught the throat of the Master of
Tralee under the grayish beard. They clenched there with a power like
that of three men; for this was the kind of grip which, far away in the
country of the Yang-tse-kiang, Li Choo had learned in the days when he
had made youth a thing to be remembered.

No convulsive effort on the part of the victim could loosen that
terrible grip; but the horses, responding to the first jerk of the reins
following the attack, stood still, while a human soul was being wrenched
out of the world behind them.

No word was spoken. From the moment the fingers clutched his throat Joel
Mazarine could not speak, and Li Choo did his swift work in grim and
ghastly silence.

It did not take long. When the vain struggles had ceased and the fingers
were loosened, Li Choo's tongue clucked in his mouth, once, twice,
thrice; and that was all. It was a ghastly sort of mirth, and it had in
it a multitude of things. Among them was vengeance and wild justice,
and the thing that comes down through innumerable years in the Oriental
mind--that the East is greater than the West; that now and then the East
must prove itself against the West with all the cruelty of the world's
prime.

For a moment Li Choo stood and looked at the motionless figure, with the
head fallen on the breast; then he put the reins carefully in the hands
of the dead man, placed the fallen hat on his head, climbed down from
the wagon, patted a horse as he slip-slopped by, and disappeared towards
Tralee into the night, leaving what was left of Joel Mazarine in his
wagon at the crossing of the trails.

As Li Choo stole swiftly away, he met two other figures, silent and
shadowy, and somehow strangely unreal, like his own. After a moment's
whisperings, they all three turned their faces again towards Tralee.

Once they stopped and listened. There was the sound of wagons. One was
coming from the north--that is, from the direction of Tralee; the other
was coming from the south-east-that is, Nolan Doyle's ranch.

Li Choo's tongue clucked in his mouth; then he made an exclamation in
Chinese, at which the others clucked also, and then they moved on again.

CHAPTER XVI. THE CROSS TRAILS

Like Joel Mazarine on his journey from Askatoon, Orlando, on his