t his father had killed
himself in a moment of despair over financial difficulties. So he
had killed his father with his excessive demands for money to
squander on 'Tonite. To be sure, he did not know--had had no hint
from home--had never guessed that his father was in trouble.
Nevertheless he had killed him--rather, she had killed him. What a
fool he had been! Never such another fool since God placed man and
woman together in one world. Cursing himself and her, and in her
cursing all her sex, he fled--he knew not where. So stunned and
dazed he was that he never really came to himself, found himself,
until one day he awoke in Hong Kong.

That was the beginning of the new life, if such it might be called. He
became a wanderer, an adventurer, seeking always new faces, new
places, new experiences, trying always to forget, hoping always for a
blessed knock on the head in some mad undertaking, for a thin knife in
the back in some wild adventure. But in all his wanderings the one
kind of adventure that he refused, the one excitement that he
steadfastly shunned, was the one that, because of his very aloofness,
and of something that women ever saw in his eyes, was offered to him
the most freely, in every land beneath the sun.

Slim Jim entered, bringing whisky and hot water. Haig turned his head
to look at him. Jim never changed, whatever his environment; he was
always the Orient, the inscrutable East. And now, slipping in so
stealthily, he seemed to bring with him an atmosphere, an odor, a
call, and Haig, still looking at Jim, but scarcely seeing him, began
to murmur lines that intoxicated him:

"I know not where the white road runs, nor what the blue hills are,
But man can have the sun for friend, and for his guide a star;
And there's no end of voyaging when once the voice is heard,
For the river calls and the road calls, and--"

He stopped and sat suddenly erect.

"Jim!" he cried. "Do you remember the night we took old Kwang's girl
away from the river rats in Tien-Tsin?"

"Vellee well," answered the Chinaman.

His face was expressionless; he concealed the joy that this mood of
his master aroused in his thin breast. Jim did not like the Park, and
only the recollection of one day when he had stood tied to a capstan
on a pirate junk, with a dozen fiends around him trying to make him
tell something he did not know, and Haig had suddenly descended upon
them like the foreign devil he was,--well, Jim took his gods