Page:Ballinger Price--Fortune of the Indies.djvu/167

 to the passage. Mark, grown reckless, flashed the light green, white, and red in quick succession, and with a last squeal of terror the Chinese pushed each other pell-mell up the passage, the gray-robed temple-priest fleeing last, in abject fear of his wrathy deity.

They were really gone! Mark waited, motionless, but none returned. The moon set, and the doorway grew dark. The candles had long ago burned to the end, and the ash of the incense-ticks had toppled in gray, powdery heaps before the black feet of the idols. Mark crept stiffly from his hiding-place.

"Thanks, old boy," he whispered inaudibly to the grinning joss, and then tiptoed to the passage and slipped out. The streets were in total darkness. Cocks were crowing eerily somewhere. Mark ran silently and swiftly, with no sense of direction and no idea except to put as many miles and corners as possible between himself and the temple. Sometimes he paused a moment to listen, and once he heard, above the other night-sounds, the squeak of a yulow, or steering-oar, on a river-boat.

He blundered toward it, down an evil little