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With one there was the death house at Sing Sing for the Gray Seal; with the other well, there were many ways, from a shot or a knife thrust in the open street, to his murder in some hidden dive like this of Chang Foo's, for instance, where he now was the Gray Seal was responsible for the occupancy of too many penitentiary cells by those of the underworld to look for any other fate!
There was a crowd, too, but the crowd was at a respectful distance on the opposite side of the street. Jimmie Dale still hugged the corner. A man swaggered out from a doorway, quite close to Chang Foo's, and came on along the street. As the other reached the corner, Jimmie Dale sidled forward. "'Ello, Chick!" he said, out of the corner of his mouth. "Wot's de lay?"
Larry the Bat was well enough known to enter Chang Foo's unquestioned, and but again he shook his head and went on. There was not time.
Someone in the corridor banged a door violently, and as the manager's head and Ling Foo's jerked about, Dennison stuffed the note into a pocket. A trap! Dennison wasn't alarmed he was only furious. Jane had walked into a trap. She had worn those accursed beads when his father had approached her by the bookstall that afternoon. The note had attacked her curiosity from a perfectly normal angle.
Ling Foo's heart contracted, then expanded and began to beat like a bird's wing. In here somewhere on the floor! He turned away from the door without haste. His Oriental mind worked quickly and smoothly. He would tramp back and forth the length of the shop as if musing, but neither nook nor crevice should escape his eye. He was heir to these pearls.
The lady would be in her room at this hour. The devil beads would not be casting a spell on us." "Devil beads, eh?" Ling Foo shrugged and ran his hands into his sleeves. Somewhere along the banks of the Whangpoo or the Yang-tse would be the body of an unknown, but Ling Foo's lips were locked quite as securely as the dead man's. Devil beads they were.
There had been raids before, the police had begun to change their minds about Chang Foo's, but Chang Foo's was not an easy place to raid. House after house in that quarter of Chinese laundries, of tea shops, of chop-suey joints, opened one into the other through secret passages in the cellars.
Chang Foo's was just a tea merchant's shop, innocuous and innocent enough in its appearance, blandly so indeed, and that was all outwardly; but Jimmie Dale, as he reached his destination, experienced the first sensation of uplift he had known that night, and this from what, apparently, did not in the least seem like a contributing cause. "Luck!
A patrol wagon was backed up to the curb, and a half dozen officers were busy loading it with what was evidently Chang Foo's far from meagre stock of gambling appurtenances; while Chang Foo himself, together with Sam Wah and another attendant, were in the grip of two other officers, waiting possibly for another patrol wagon.
"Forget it!" observed the barkeeper cordially. "Dis is on me. Any friend of de Wowzer's gets de glad hand here any time." "T'anks!" said Jimmie Dale gratefully, as he turned away. "So long, then see youse later." Chang Foo's! Jimmie Dale's face set even a little harder than it had before, as he swung on again down the Bowery. Yes; he knew Chang Foo's too well.
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