Page:Ballinger Price--Fortune of the Indies.djvu/166

 Chinaman, a devout believer in evil spirits and magic power, to see the eyes of a bronze war-god suddenly blaze with green fire.

No amount of Western veneer can wholly cover in the low-caste Chinese his belief in evil power and his innate fear of it. Chun Lon was the only one among these men who had ever mingled much with foreigners, and his knowledge of Western ways was confined, at best, to shipboard doings and wharf-head brawling. His time ashore had been spent in strange holes of the Chinatown of New York or San Francisco. The customs of "foreign devils" he despised; of their electric flashlights he knew nothing. The temple was ancient, the joss immemorial and sacred; whatever manifestations it might choose to exhibit were supernatural and certainly not to be connected for an instant with the possible presence within the temple-room of a frightened young American.

A few brave Chinese crawled a little nearer, but as they gazed, panic-stricken, the eyes of the angry god glared at them with a baleful red beam that sent them shrieking and