Page:Ballinger Price--Fortune of the Indies.djvu/163

 out of his sleeve. He continued to smile blandly. Mark looked around at the circle of impassive faces and narrow black eyes, all fixed on him. An old man dropped two expressionless monosyllables into the silence, and Mark fancied he caught the glint of other knives behind the sickening smoke of the bubble-pipes.

Swift thoughts raced through his mind. He knew quite well by now that, even though he might sign the paper, he would never go free from the temple if Chun Lon could prevent it. For with Mark free, the document was of no more use to the Chinaman than if it were not signed at all. With the keen awareness of every detail of the moment, Mark wondered why Chun Lon could not have forged the signature and had done with it; then he realized that the man in all likelihood had never wielded anything but a wooden pen and probably could have scrawled nothing that would have resembled Western handwriting. An ignorant man, Mark thought, staring at Chun Lon's sallow face above the lamp. In his white mess-coat, on ship-board, he had at least looked clean and servile; now, happed up in untidy native dress, he seemed little better than a coolie, with the