Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 1 (1925-01).djvu/69

68 polished strips accurately joined, tapering to points where they crowded to the hub. Agog on its race, the wheel was a diabolical kaleidoscope.

Yong Lo. presided nightly at the gambling classics. Clad in a mandarin robe of pigeon-blood red, trimmed confusedly with black, he sat high up on a sooty throne of fumed wood. With a red lacquer fan he drummed occasionally on the lion's-head arm of his chair.

Immobile, Yonge Lo's drum-skin face was a mask for the greed eating his heart. He presided over the games, contributed to the law in his neighborhood, and hoarded the proceeds of his wheel in a secret cache of the chandelier in the sleeping room behind the gambling parlor.

There were three rooms in Yong Lo's apartment: the mock store out front, the red and black gambling chamber, and this third room in back, a hutch filled with junk, bunks, opium stands, rags for carpets, an oil lamp for illumination.

A big chandelier on heavy chains swung from the ceiling of this last room, but Yong Lo never used the fixture for lighting purposes. The gambling miser trusted more the chandelier bowl swinging near his bunk than the security of banks.

In this cubby room Yong Lo slept.

Just now Lee Gow shared the hole with Yong To.

Lee Gow had been offered the seclusion of the den for a few days while hiding from the police. Something the authorities had found in Lee Gow's rooms, something belonging to a murdered white girl, made it impossible for Lee Gow to venture abroad.

Bred in Yong Lo's tong, Tee Gow obtained fraternal cover.

In this room, adjacent to the snarling, money-sucking patrons in the gambling den, Lee Gow crouched in his loft, a rat, apprehensive of the very shadows that moved across the walls.

Occasionally he peeked through the keyhole of the door, to watch the awful faces in that red and black gambling room. Then he would crawl back to his bunk, suck on a bamboo tube and be at peace.

HUS for a week all went well until one night the roulette wheel won too much for Yong Lo. Too much to suit Butch Killian, who noticed that each time Yong Lo tapped the arm of his chair with the red fan, the wheel came to rest at a figure that won stakes for Yong Lo.

Butch Killian had the complexion of a beefsteak and the strength of a tiger.

Once, twice, four times Butch saw Yong's fan tap the chair. Four times the house won.

Butch raised his fists, was about to bellow protest at the croupier, when Yong Lo caught the eye of the infuriated giant. Out of the mongolian's black orbs a terrible warning oozed, a warning that checked the blurt on Butch's curled lips.

Then a wan smile filtered through the quartz of Yong's face.

Butch Killian threw down a hundred on the red.

Three times Yong's fan tapped the chair.

When the wheel stopped Butch Killian picked up nineteen hundred dollars and left.

Far into the night Yong Lo sat in the room behind the den; pondering over the thing Butch Killian had discovered.

While Yong Lo had lived alone here, through nine years of crooked roulette, no one had detected the fraud.

A weary, deeply drawn breath sounded from Lee Gow's bunk. Slowly, as the boa creeps, Yong Lo's brain functioned. He wondered if Lee