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Coryndon waited for the sound of a scuffle and a fall, but none came, and he was in the dark, surrounded by silence once more. Without waiting to consider, he followed across the room and saw the swinging light go down the passage and disappear suddenly. It seemed to Coryndon that Mhtoon Pah had disappeared, as though he had gone through the wall at the end of the passage, and he followed slowly.
The Thakin can understand that Absalom still lives, his blood is fresh and red, it is not dead blood that runs like treacle, it is living blood that spouts out hot, and that steams and smokes. Thakin, Thakin, I cry for vengeance." "I'm doing all I can, Mhtoon Pah," said Hartley, desperately.
He had spoken to him of murder, and told him that the Chinamen in the Quarter, headed by Leh Shin, were looking for him to kill him, and that, for his safety, he must remain hidden away. Mhtoon Pah told him that he would protect him, and that he would produce evidence to have Leh Shin hanged, and that once he was dead he would then emerge again, but not until then.
A breath, a shadow, or a flame, but not a man." He lay on the ground and dug his nails into the floor. "I know the shop from within and without, and I know that the lock opens with difficulty but to one key, the key that hangs on a chain around the neck of Mhtoon Pah." Silence fell again as Leh Shin wrestled with the problem that confronted him.
It was inside his bullet-head that the idea of a plot that could not be discovered came into its first nebulous being. Absalom found out that Mhtoon Pah was looking for a gold lacquer bowl, and through the agency of Leh Shin the bowl was eventually marked down as the property of a seaman who was lodging temporarily near the opium den by the river, one of Leh Shin's clients.
"I have seen the face of the slayer of Absalom," he shrieked, when the crowd had carried him in, and recovered him to his senses. "Is he a devil?" asked a young Burman, in tones of joyful excitement. "A devil with iron claws has been seen several nights lately." "A Chinese devil," groaned Mhtoon Pah, speaking through his clenched teeth. "One who shall yet be hanged for his crime."
Slowly, and without calling too evident attention to himself, Mhtoon Pah began to prosper. He opened a booth first, where he sat and cursed Leh Shin whenever he passed, saying loudly that he had ruined him and swindled him out of all his little store, that by hard work and attention to business he had collected.
Some half-way down the colonnade, and deep in the odorous gloom, Leh Shin worked at nothing in particular, and sold devils as Mhtoon Pah sold them, but without the same success. The door of his shop was closed, and Hartley rapped upon it several times before he received an answer; then a bolt was shot back, and Leh Shin's long neck stretched itself out towards the officer.
The boy reappeared after a pause, bearing a message to the effect that Mhtoon Pah begged an immediate interview upon a subject so pressing that it could not wait. Hartley listened to the message, swore under his breath, and looked sharply at Mhtoon Pah when he came into the room.
In the zenith of his affluence he married the daughter of a Burman into whose house Mhtoon Pah had introduced him, and it was only after the wedding festivities that he became aware that he had supplanted the friend of his bosom in the affections of the smiling Burmese girl.
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