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For a moment there was dead silence, and then a voice full of smooth malice and cruelty made answer to Leh Shin. "Get thee to thy bed, fool." "I wait," Leh Shin's voice cracked and trembled, "and when the hour that is already written for thy destruction comes like the night-bat, it is I who shall proclaim it to thee; thus I have demanded, and thus it shall fall out."
"I am thy friend, thy good and honourable friend," he said pleasantly as he made play with the Afghan dagger. "I do but make mirth for both myself and thee, and I have no thought to harm thee." The flesh of the gross body crept and crawled under the Burman's look. Fate had put the heart of a chicken in the huge frame of Leh Shin's assistant, and it beat now like pelting hail on a frozen road.
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.
Someone was hidden in the lonely house, some man who paid heavily for the privacy of the waterside opium den, and Coryndon was determined to discover who that man was. The night was fair and clear, and the murmur of the tidal river gentle and soothing, and as he sat, well hidden by the clump of grass, he went over the events of the evening and thought of the face of Leh Shin's assistant.
Coryndon was never at the mercy of one idea only, and he began to see, very soon after he had investigated the two houses the ramshackle shop and the riverside den that if he intended to progress he could not afford to sit in the street and drink in the café opposite Leh Shin's dwelling for an interminable space of weeks.
He had compromised his master's credit to a heavy extent, and not only the gains he had made but the principal was swept away into an awful chasm where the grasping hands of creditors grabbed the whole of Leh Shin's patrimony, claiming it under papers signed by his hand. "It was then that light flowed in upon my darkness, and I saw the long prepared evil that was the work of one man's hand."
The moments were full of the tense agony of suspense, and he peered cautiously out from under the silk blind. A late passer-by went slowly up the street, and Leh Shin's heart beat a loud obbligato to the sound of his wooden pattens. By craning his neck as the man passed, he could just distinguish the Burman crouching behind the wooden man, who blandly indicated the heavy padlock.
It was a vast, lofty building inside, supported by gold pillars and black pillars, and in the centre near the door was a tank-shaped well where pots of flowering plants and palms were set with no particular eye to regularity or effect. As they shivered and rustled in the dark, they were full of a suggestion of the fear that made Leh Shin's heart as cold as a stone in a deep pool.
It was next to impossible to discover what the truth was about Leh Shin's illness on the night of July the 29th, and it really did not bear very much upon the matter, unless there was no other clue to what had become of the boy. Hartley returned to other matters and put the case on one side for the moment. On his way back for luncheon he looked in at Mhtoon Pah's shop.
With a doggedness that is often part of some forms of mania, the Burman squatted in the dust, and under no provocation could he be induced to speak. After midday he indicated by lifting his fingers to his mouth that he intended to go in search of food; having worked Leh Shin's assistant into a state of perspiring wrath by the simple process of reiterating in pantomime that he was dumb.
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