sat smoking, with the countenance of a
stoic; but when the laughter in the box was silent, he started abruptly.

"We're off, old chap," he announced. "Bedtime. Just came to see you were
all up-standing. Tough as ever? Good! Don't let--er--anything carry
you off."

At the gate, Wutzler held aloft his glow-worm lantern.

"Dose fellows catch me?" he mumbled, "Der plagues--dey will forget me.
All zo many shoots, _kugel_, der bullet,--'_gilt's mir, oder gilt es
dir?_' Men are dead in der Silk-Weafer Street. Dey haf hong up nets, and
dorns, to keep out der plague's-goblins off deir house. Listen, now, dey
beat gongs!--But we are white men. You--you tell me zo, to-night!" He
blubbered something incoherent, but as the gate slammed they heard the
name of God, in a broken benediction.

They had groped out of the cleft, and into a main corridor, before
Heywood paused.

"That devil in the box!" He shook himself like a spaniel. "Queer it
should get into me so. But I hate being laughed at by--anybody."

A confused thunder of gongs, the clash of cymbals smothered in the
distance, maintained a throbbing uproar, pierced now and then by savage
yells, prolonged and melancholy. As the two wanderers listened,--

"Where's the comfort," said Heywood, gloomily, "of knowing somebody's
worse off?--No, I wasn't thinking of Wutzler, then. Talk of germs! why,
over there, it's goblins they're scaring away. Think, behind their nets
and thorns, what wretches--women, too, and kids--may be crouched down,
quaking, sick with terror. Humph!--I don't mind saying"--for a moment
his hand lay on Rudolph's shoulder--"that I loathe giving this muck-hole
the satisfaction--I'd hate to go Out here, that's all."

CHAPTER VI

THE PAGODA

He was spared that inconvenience. The untimely rain and cold, some
persons said, the few days of untimely heat following, had drowned or
dried, frozen or burnt out, the seeds of peril. But accounts varied,
reasons were plentiful. Soldiers had come down from the chow city,
two-score _li_ inland, and charging through the streets, hacking and
slashing the infested air, had driven the goblins over the walls, with a
great shout of victory. A priest had freighted a kite with all the evil,
then cut it adrift in the sky. A mob had dethroned the God of Sickness,
and banished his effigy in a paper junk, launched on the river at night,
in flame. A geomancer proclaimed that a bamboo grove behind the town
formed an angle most co