Kwen Lung 'ad gone west on a bloody
rope's end."

II

AT KWEN LUNG'S

For fully ten minutes after the fireman had departed Paul Harley sat
staring abstractedly in front of him, his cold pipe between his teeth,
and knowing his moods I intruded no words upon this reverie, until:

"Come on, Knox," he said, standing up suddenly, "I think this matter
calls for speedy action."

"What! Do you think the man's story was true?"

"I think nothing. I am going to look at Kwen Lung's joss."

Without another word he led the way downstairs and out into the deserted
street. The first gray halftones of dawn were creeping into the sky,
so that the outlines of Limehouse loomed like dim silhouettes about
us. There was abundant evidence in the form of noises, strange and
discordant, that many workers were busy on dock and riverside, but the
streets through which our course lay were almost empty. Sometimes a
furtive shadow would move out of some black gully and fade into a dimly
seen doorway in a manner peculiarly unpleasant and Asiatic. But we met
no palpable pedestrian throughout the journey.

Before the door of a house in Pennyfields which closely resembled that
which we had left in Wade Street, in that it was flatly uninteresting,
dirty and commonplace, we paused. There was no sign of life about the
place and no lights showed at any of the windows, which appeared as
dim cavities--eyeless sockets in the gray face of the building, as dawn
proclaimed the birth of a new day.

Harley seized the knocker and knocked sharply. There was no response,
and he repeated the summons, but again without effect. Thereupon, with a
muttered exclamation, he grasped the knocker a third time and executed a
veritable tattoo upon the door. When this had proceeded for about half a
minute or more:

"All right, all right!" came a shaky voice from within. "I'm coming."

Harley released the knocker, and, turning to me:

"Ma Lorenzo," he whispered. "Don't make any mistakes."

Indeed, even as he warned me, heralded by a creaking of bolts and the
rattling of a chain, the door was opened by a fat, shapeless, half-caste
woman of indefinite age; in whose dark eyes, now sunken in bloated
cheeks, in whose full though drooping lips, and even in the whole
overlaid contour of whose face and figure it was possible to recognize
the traces of former beauty. This was Ma Lorenzo, who for many years had
lived at that address with old Kwen Lung, of whom strang