d Miss Vost you made a trip on the
Yangtze-Kiang in a little river steamer, the _Hankow_, which foundered
in the rapids just below Ching-Fu. This occurred after you had stabbed
and killed one of their most trusted spies.

"When the _Hankow_ sank, you followed what now appears to be your
professional habit of a trustworthy gallant, by taking a lady in
distress into your arms, and swam the whirlpools to the little village
across the river from Ching-Fu. Then Miss Vost was met by her father,
an incurable missionary from Wenchow, and by devious routes, well known
to _them_, you joined a caravan, owned by a garrulous old thief who
calls himself a mandarin, the Mandarin Chang, who told you many lies,
to amuse himself--

"Of course they were lies, Mr. Moore. Chang is one of _his_ most
trusted henchmen. He even permitted you to kill one of his coolies.
The coolie would have died anyway; he was beginning to learn too much.
But it tickled Chang, and _him_, to let you have this chance, to see
how far you would go. And Chang had orders to help you reach Len Yang.
It gave you confidence in yourself, did it not?"

"I don't believe a word," declared Peter in a daze. He refused to
believe that Chang, kindly old Chang, was in league with that man, too.

"Then you entered Len Yang, the City of Stolen Lives, and _he_ watched
you, and when you heard a difficult wireless message on the instruments
at the mine, _he_ gave you a present of money--five hundred taels,
wasn't it?--hoping, perhaps, that you would 'give up your foolishness,'
as he expressed it, and settle down to take the place of the
opium-befuddled wireless man you fooled so cleverly. _He_ valued you,
Mr. Moore, you see, and he was not in the least afraid of you!

"A dozen times, yes, a hundred times, he could have killed you. But he
preferred to sit back and stroke those long, yellow, mandarin mustaches
of his, and watch you, as a cat watches a foolish mouse. I can see him
laughing now. Yes! I have seen him, and I have heard him laugh. It
is a hideous, cackling laugh. Quite unearthly! How he did laugh at
you when you rescued Miss Vost, dear little clinging Miss Vost, from
the jaws of his white palace!

"But he let you go; and he and his thousand sharpshooters who lined the
great, green walls, when you and Captain MacLaurin and Miss Vost
galloped bravely out, with one poor little mule! A thousand rifles, I
say, were leveled upon you in that bright moonlight,