do not move! Two feet behind you stands an excellent
shot with a pistol aimed at your backbone. Men with cracked spines do
not live long!" He chuckled.

"What was I about to say? Ah, yes! If I could purchase from you that
quality--if I could, I say, anything in my kingdom would be
yours--everything! It is the one thing I have been denied. Holy
wheel! It is strange, this way I am talking! I have rarely had such
an interested audience. Most of my captives at this stage are
cringing, are kissing my feet."

The snarling grin left his lips again, and his mood became strangely
soft, like dead flesh, so Peter thought, as he waited--with that pistol
at his backbone!

"I intend telling you an amazing story, which you may or may not
credit. I am telling it--this confession--partly because I dislike the
look in your blue eyes. Like everyone else, you loathe me. But I will
erase that look. I intend to show you I am even more human than you!

"By Buddha, I will tell that story to you--you, Peter Moore, the most
fortunate man in all China this hour. Think, before I begin, of that
mandarin, that bungling Javanese merchant, who, also, are about to die.
Then forget all else--and listen.

"This took place many years ago, when I was a young man, like yourself.
I, too, loved a woman. Can you understand me? I, too, once loved a
woman, a maiden of the Punjab. I can conceive her in the veil of my
memory still. Eyes like dusty stars, skin the color of the Tibetan
dawn, the dawn that you may never again look upon.

"Her heart was gold, so I thought. Yet it was dross. On a night in
springtime, in the bazaar at Mangalore, we two first met. I have not
forgotten. That night I fell in love with the white orchid from the
Punjab. She was more beautiful to me than life or death, a feast of
beauty.

"Len Yang was mine then, and I was a rich prince, but not so rich as
now. Drunkenly I was casting my gold about the bazaar when we met.
She saw me--and she smiled! It was the first time any woman had smiled
upon me, and I was alarmed and troubled. I was no more handsome than
now. I was the man that no one loved. _Chuh-seng_--the beast--was my
name even then, among those who tolerated my friendship because of my
fluent gold.

"And when the Punjab maiden smiled upon me, I thought to myself:
'_Chuh-seng_, love has come at last to sweeten your bitter heart.'
What should a young lover have done? I--I bought the bazaar and