Page:The Californian volume 1 issue 1.djvu/10

 “You can find him. You must hunt for him,” I persisted.

It was like talking to a blank wall. unmoved except to ask,

“The lady—?”

“Ts dead. I must fimd Si-ki.”

Quite shocked that I should be so straight- forward, he said, “She has ascended to the skies?”

I nodded impatiently.

“To what sublime religion did she belong?” he asked.

I told him. I piled a small heap of gold and silver on the table under his eyes.

He spoke in high praise of her faith, but added,

“Religions are many. Reason is one. are all brothers.”

While speaking, he put the money out of sight, hung up the bird-cage, and opened his door.

We searched parts of Chinatown which would have been barred to me without a Chinese com- rade; underground depths like the abysses aft- er death, upper stories and roofs of buildings that towered in air as if striving for space to breathe, narrow, crooked alleys where loungers talked across from windows about the American

He was

We

straying there, and seemed to think I was led by Tong-ko-lin-sing because in some way his

prisoner. He offered odd trifles from the depths of his sleeves, in small pawn-shops, which held queer gatherings—pistols of all styles, daggers, even the fan-stiletto, clothes, beds and bedding, tea, sugar, clocks, china, and ornaments. He ealled on large warehouses where the heads of great firms met us; and behind huge jars the size of men, wrought silk screens, giant kites, odd baskets, and gay china, but not beyond the queer foreign scent of such stores, we were given rare tea in tiny cups holding no more than our dessert-spoons. He drew me through wood-yards and vegetable gardens, and over fish-dryer’s sheds. All knew and looked up to Tong-ko-lin-sing as one who knew the written language, but could not help him. He went to the Six Companies, but neither the Ning Yang, which owns the most men in San Francisco, nor the Sam Yup, which sends the most men to ‘other States; neither the Hop Wo, nor the Kong Chow, nor the other two, nor the great wash- house company could or would tell us anything. One after another he asked the throng of small, curb-stone dealers, the pipe-cleaners, cigarette- rollers, vegetable or sweetmeat venders, and cobblers, even the gutter-snipes.

At last, the cobbler who always sits on the south side of Clay Street, just below Dupont, told him something which I did not catch, but he

heard with a start. He wavered and urged me to giveupthe search. I would not. He set off a new way, and soon darted into an alley full of the grimy, blackened buildings which can never be used after the Chinese have lived in them, whose dark horrors recalled some scene else- where known—in what past age? I saw round me only the signs of a civilization older than the Pharaohs. I heard the twang and squeak of rude instruments, which, two thousand years before the three-stringed rebec (sire of our violin) was heard in Italy, played in balmy tea- gardens these same old songs of love, difficulty, and despair. Here crowded the strange build- ings, here crouched the quaint shadows of an Oriental city, known to me—when? where? in some dark-hued picture?

As Tong-ko-lin-sing started down some break-neck steps, I stopped a moment for breath, and looked around me. A street-lamp lighted a Chinese poster close by me, a signed and sealed notice from the Chin Mook Sow so- ciety, offering a thousand dollars, not for the taking of two offenders, but for their assassina- tion! I shuddered and crawled down the nar- row, shaky stairs. On the last landing from which I could see the narrow strip of sky, I looked up. Two great golden planets watched me. I groaned and went on. I felt the crooks of this under-world soon shut all out like a coffin-lid. My love was dead. My friend was murdered. I cursed aloud. I followed Tong- ko-lin-sing only by the strained tension of my nerves, through which I saw him in the dark as plain as if by light, and heard him muttering in Chinese, monotonous as the shrilling of the wind far overhead. He went in at a door— through a long passage that had a strange smell that made me feel faint, a smell of death —till, after a moment’s pause as if to make sure he was right, and giving me a warning touch, he opened a door into a dimly lighted den, while the sickening scent grew worse.

“Si-ki!” he called.

What was this ghostly form, white as a skel- eton, which slowly glimmered through the gloom before my amazed eyes? Dizzy from the fetid scent, yet held by my horror as by transfixing spear, with failing heart and quaking limbs, I saw the ghastly figure cross the rotten, slimy floor toward us.

“My dream! My dream!” I murmured as I clung to Tong-ko-lin-sing for support.

An awful voice, discordant as a Chinese gong, the hollow voice of a leper, a voice unearthly as if we had been shades met in another world, cried,

“Between us two! Between us two!”

EMMA FRANCES DAWSON.