Page:Weird Tales Volume 37 Number 01 (1943-09).djvu/82



On a nignt when the fog hung low over the land, seven had come to the Black Inn to kill one Weird Tales v37n01 - Ornament.png

EVEN men had gone to the Black Inn to kill Chung Kuo. They chose a night when fog hung low over the land so that their actions might not be observed. They were all strangers to each other, and also to the man whom they had come to kill. Each pictured him in an entirely different manner.

One believed that Chung Kuo was a monk in a gray robe; a second, that he was tall and austere, no longer young, a graduate of Han-lin College; a third, that he was fat and blustery, a military man who swaggered more than any mandarin of old; a fourth, that he was a business man, shrewd, penetrating, a good trader, cold, 81