e Eastern waters at
times penetrated his own preoccupied soul. A vague sense of his
remoteness from his old life at last crept in to him.

He thought of the watching green lights that were flaring up, dusk by
dusk, in the shrill New York night, the lamps of the precinct stations,
the lamps of Headquarters, where the great building was full of moving
feet and shifting faces, where telephones were ringing and detectives
were coming and going, and policemen in uniform were passing up and
down the great stone steps, clean-cut, ruddy-faced, strong-limbed
policemen, talking and laughing as they started out on their night
details. He could follow them as they went, those confident-striding
"flatties" with their ash night-sticks at their side, soldiers without
bugles or banner, going out to do the goodly tasks of the Law, soldiers
of whom he was once the leader, the pride, the man to whom they pointed
as the Vidoc of America.

And he would go back to them as great as ever. He would again compel
their admiration. The newspaper boys would again come filing into his
office and shake hands with him and smoke his cigars and ask how much
he could tell them about his last haul. And he would recount to them
how he shadowed Binhart half way round the world, and gathered him in,
and brought him back to Justice.

It was three o'clock in the afternoon when Blake's steamer drew near
Macao. Against a background of dim blue hills he could make out the
green and blue and white of the houses in the Portuguese quarters,
guarded on one side by a lighthouse and on the other by a stolid square
fort. Swinging around a sharp point, the boat entered the inner
harbor, crowded with Chinese craft and coasters and dingy tramps of the
sea.

Blake seemed in no hurry to disembark. The sampan into which he
stepped, in fact, did not creep up to the shore until evening. There,
ignoring the rickshaw coolies who awaited him as he passed an
obnoxiously officious trio of customs officers, he disappeared up one
of the narrow and slippery side streets of the Chinese quarter.

He followed this street for some distance, assailed by the smell of its
mud and rotting sewerage, twisting and turning deeper into the
darkness, past dogs and chattering coolies and oil lamps and
gaming-house doors. Into one of these gaming houses he turned, passing
through the blackwood sliding door and climbing the narrow stairway to
the floor above. There, from a small quadra