message with mixed feelings. He proceeded to send out
three Secret Service code-despatches to Shanghai, Amoy and Hong Kong,
which, being picked up by a German cruiser, were worried over and
argued over and finally referred back to an intelligence bureau for
explanation.

But at Yokohama, Blake hurried ashore in a sampan, met an agent who
seemed to be awaiting him, and caught a train for Kobe. He hurried on,
indifferent to the beauties of the country through which he wound,
unimpressed by the oddities of the civilization with which he found
himself confronted. His mind, intent on one thing, seemed unable to
react to the stimuli of side-issues. From Kobe he caught a _Toyo Kisen
Kaisha_ steamer for Nagasaki and Shanghai. This steamer, he found, lay
over at the former port for thirteen hours, so he shifted again to an
outbound boat headed for Woosung.

It was not until he was on the tender, making the hour-long run from
Woosung up the Whangpoo to Shanghai itself, that he seemed to emerge
from his half-cataleptic indifference to his environment. He began to
realize that he was at last in the Orient.

As they wound up the river past sharp-nosed and round-hooded sampans,
and archaic Chinese battle-ships and sea-going junks and gunboats
flying their unknown foreign flags, Blake at last began to realize that
he was in a new world. The very air smelt exotic; the very colors, the
tints of the sails, the hues of clothing, the forms of things, land and
sky itself--all were different. This depressed him only vaguely. He
was too intent on the future, on the task before him, to give his
surroundings much thought.

Blake had entirely shaken off this vague uneasiness, in fact, when
twenty minutes after landing he found himself in a red-brick hotel
known as The Astor, and guardedly shaking hands with an incredulously
thin and sallow-faced man of about forty. Although this man spoke with
an English accent and exile seemed to have foreigneered him in both
appearance and outlook, his knowledge of America was active and
intimate. He passed over to the detective two despatches in cipher,
handed him a confidential list of Hong Kong addresses, gave him certain
information as to Macao, and an hour later conducted him down the river
to the steamer which started that night for Hong Kong.

As Blake trod that steamer's deck and plowed on through strange seas,
surrounded by strange faces, intent on his strange chase, no sense of
vast