bscure pressure, through
what underground channels. But the miniature--the miniature of Bibi-Ri!
You recollect? Somehow. Monsieur--somehow, I say--it found its way into
the panier with the head of Bibi-Ri. Somehow the new assistant,
Bombiste's successor, discovered it when he "robbed the basket"--when he
stooped to gather the little perquisites of office for his master. And
somehow and finally it was laid straightway in the palm of M. de Nou....

He glanced at it. I saw him start. I saw him stare. I saw him stand and
stand and still stare. I saw him lose bit by bit that shell of damnable
pride, that prop of untouched and unrelenting hatred and contempt which
was and which had been through all his years, his evil support.... He
gave a movement, of horror, of growing terror. He stepped over. And he
looked into the basket at his handiwork still lying there. He looked and
he looked. But he could not know. He cannot know. He can never, never
know, Monsieur.... For the red mark about that severed neck was all one
red mark--do you see?--and the Red Mark remains a mystery forever!

EAST OF EASTWARD

Few persons ever attain any precise knowledge of the immemorial East,
its ways or its meanings; its wickedness or its mystery. But Tunstal was
a young man with a cherubic smile and a plethoric letter of credit, and
he had traveled far and wide to Honolulu, to Yokohama, to Macao, and
even to Singapore, which is very far indeed, besides being extremely
wicked. By the time he had taken passage on the _Lombock_ for a tour of
the archipelago his education seemed complete. He had just learned to
play fan-tan with much the same skill he was wont to display at poker in
more familiar climes.

Tunstal had fallen in with other traveled men on board the _Lombock_,
which covers a beat among the lesser ports of Netherlands India. These
were simple planters, merchants and traders for the most part, largely
Dutch in flavor as well as speed. He thought them pretty dull, but they
proved to be good listeners. So he had been instructing them all around,
charming their ears with tales of Sago Lane and the Jalan Sultan, of Gay
Street and Number Nine and the dances at Kapiolani, the while he banked
a bowl of chinking cash as long as any would sit up with him.

That was how he came to find himself alone in the smoking room one
breathless hot morning some days out from Singapore, amid the dead
cheroots and the empty glasses, with a pile of ill-g