Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 1 (1925-01).djvu/68



ONG LO was a reptile with an artist's soul. He did not sting with a fang, but belonged to the family of boas and coiled about his victims till the last drop of life was drained from them.

To him blood was not red. It was yellow and silver and green. Golden disks, soft, heavy and velvety to the touch, were chunks of rich blood, transmuted by the alchemy of Yong's spiked roulette wheel from the purses of his guests to his gambling tables.

Silver coins were so much blood squeezed from gullible victims. Crisp, crackling greenbacks, or those wrinkled and fouled, were certificates of blood, left by those who could not carry gold.

This relentless coiling about his victims till their last chip of cash went across his tables under his rakes was the reptilian streak in Yong Lo. His artistic soul verified itself in the grandeur of his gambling room.

First you entered a low, wobbly store that helped to demoralize Hop Alley. In this filthy cube stale tobacco fought moldy spices for stinking ascendancy. Here two Chinese clerks kept store for Yong Lo, but if you were popular, these would rap on a door in the rear of the shop, wait for the panel to slide back and a lean yellow face to appear at the slot.

"Man want see Yong Lo. Pass."

The door would open, the chosen would enter.

But instead of leaving hope behind. they would pass buoyantly into the second room, that red and black alcove, Yong Lo's gambling parlor.

Its walls were red, pigeon-blood red, black stripes running alternately from ceiling to floor, where a red and black mottled rug silenced the tread of feet.

From the center swung a monster lamp wrought of black iron, rose-colored incandescence glowing from the glass lights about which the chimera coiled its hideously scrolled malformation.

The gaming tables were covered with pigeon-blood simonis cloth, Their edges were of jet, hard and gleaming, on which the players drummed money-hungry fingers.

And the wheel—that revolving, striped and figured bowl, the ball bobbing over the flutings—the roulette wheel was a marvel.

The numbers on its black rim were rose color, coral set in ebony. The alternate stripings of the red and black bowl were ebony and lacquer, 67