Page:Train - Tutt and Mr Tutt (Scribner, 1922).djvu/67

 And the four answered unemotionally: "Those to whom it is confided will not fail."

Then pivoting silently upon their heels they passed out of the cellar.

Wong Get glanced round the table.

"If there is no further business the society will disperse after the customary refreshment."

Fong Hen placed thirteen tiny glasses upon the table and filled them with rice whisky scented with aniseed and a dash of powdered ginger. At a signal from Wong Get the thirteen Chinamen lifted the glasses and drank.

"The meeting is adjourned," said he.

Eighty years before, in a Cantonese rabbit warren two yellow men had fought over a white woman, and one had killed the other. They had belonged to different societies, or tongs. The associates of the murdered man had avenged his death by slitting the throat of one of the members of the other organization, and these in turn had retaliated thus establishing a vendetta which became part and parcel of the lives of certain families, as naturally and unavoidably as birth, love and death. As regularly as the solstice they alternated in picking each other off. Branches of the Hip Leong and On Gee tongs sprang up in San Francisco and New York—and the feud was transferred with