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Telegrams flashed messages under the great bidding of authority, men sprang armed from stations in every village, the close grip of fate was not more close than the grasp of the awakened machinery of justice, and in the centre of its power Mhtoon Pah was helpless as a fly in the web of a spider.

Mhtoon Pah became a clerk on scanty pay in the employ of a rice firm, and Leh Shin, at his father's death, became sole owner of the house in Paradise Street; no insignificant heritage, as it was stocked with a store of things that increased in value with age, and in the guise of his greatest friend Mhtoon Pah was made welcome at the shop whenever he had time to go there.

"There was a bowl, a bowl such as you describe, O servant of Kings, and I thought to procure it, for word was brought me that Mhtoon Pah had need of it, and I desired to hold it before him and withdraw it again, and to inspire his covetousness and rage and then to sell it from my own hand, but he leagues with devils and his power is great, for, behold, Honourable Haj, the bowl that was mine was lost by the man from the seas who was about to sell it to me.

Mhtoon Pah bowed low, as befitted the dignity of his guest, who was, after all, a Hypongyi, even though he wore no yellow robes. "It is unknown," he said, in a heavy voice. "The Reverend himself might know, since the Reverend saw my little Absalom that night." "You must have suspicions?" Mhtoon Pah's face worked violently. "Leh Shin," he whispered. "Look there for what is left."

It has got 'Huntley and Palmer' on the top, and pictures of children and swans all around it. Funny devils, I always say so." At length he had to drag Coryndon away, almost by main force. "I'd like to have seen Mhtoon Pah," he objected. "He ought to be on view with his chapel." "Shrine, Coryndon. You can see him in his shop," and they began the descent down the steep steps.

He had no wife, no child, and, as far as anyone knew, no kith or kin, and he had no intimate friends. He had one of those strange, shut faces; a mouth that told nothing, eyes that were nearly as expressionless as the eyes of Mhtoon Pah, and he had no restless movements.

"Well, all I can tell you is that Absalom had an order from Mhtoon Pah to get the bowl the next morning, if it was to be got, and he went away as usual the night of the twenty-ninth, and never appeared again. Heath saw him, and you saw him, and that is pretty nearly all the evidence I can collect." "Evidence?" Mrs. Wilder's voice had a piercing note in it. "Yes, evidence.

Mhtoon Pah, the wealthy curio dealer, the shrine builder, the friend of the powerful, hung from a beam across the centre of the low ceiling, and Mhtoon Pah was dead, strangled in a fine, silk scarf. Fine, strong silk made only by certain lake-dwellers in a wild place just across the Shan frontier.

Houses there, Thakin, that crawl with yellow men, who are devils, and who split a man as they would split a fowl " he broke off, and waved his hands about wildly. Hartley felt a little sick; there was something so hideous in the way Mhtoon Pah expressed himself that he recoiled a step and summoned his common sense to his aid. "Who saw Absalom last?" "Many people must have seen him.

He cooked his own food for fear of poison, and was constantly suspecting some indefinite enemy of designs upon his life. What was unusual was the fact that he had been taken at once into the small cell, and that, once there, Mhtoon Pah had behaved like a madman. Absalom could recall no coherent account of what the curio dealer had told him.