THE road—narrow, worn to a deep-rutted little canyon—circled a brown hill, rose into a mud-gray village, where a few listless children played among the dogs, and a few apathetic beggars, and vendors of cakes, and wrinkled old women stared at the thin white girl who walked rapidly and alone; wound on below the surface of the cultivated fields; came, at length, to a wall of gray-brick crowned with tiles of bright yellow glaze and a ridge-piece of green, and at last to a gate house with a heavily ornamented roof of timbers and tiles. Other roofs appeared just beyond, and interlacing foliage that was tinged, here and there, with the red and yellow and bronze of autumn.

The great gates, of heavy plank studded with iron spikes, stood open, apparently unattended. Dixie Carmichael paused; pursed her lips. Her coolly searching eyes noted an incandescent light bulb set in the massive lintel. This, perhaps, would be the place. Almost absently, peering through into tiled courtyards, she took two of the green tablets from her pocket; then, holding them in her hand, stepped within, and stood listening. The rustling of the leaves, she heard, as they swayed in a pleasant breeze, and a softly musical tinkling sound; then a murmur that might be voices at a distance and in some confusion; and then, sharply, with an unearthly thrill, the silver scream of a girl.... Yes, this would be the place.

The buildings on either hand were silent. Doors stood open. Paper windows were torn here and there, and the woodwork broken in. But the flowers and the dwarf trees from Japan that stood in jars of Ming pottery were undisturbed.

She passed through an inner gate and around a screen of brick and found herself in a park. There was a waterfall in a rockery, and a stream, and a tiny lake. A path led over a series of little arching bridges of marble into the grove beyond; and through the trees there she caught glimpses of elaborate yellow roofs. On either hand stood pai-lows—decorative arches in the pretentious Chinese manner—and beyond each a roofed pavilion built over a bridge.... She considered these; after a moment sauntered under the pai-low at her right, mounted the steps and dropped on the ornamented seat behind a leafy vine. Here she was sheltered from view, yet her eyes commanded both the main gate and the way over the marble bridges to the buildings in the grove.

She looked about with a sense of quiet pleasure at the gilded fretwork beneath the curving eaves of the pavilion, the painted scrolls above them, and the smooth found columns of aged nanmu wood that was in color like dead oak leaves and that still exhaled a vague perfume. The tinkling sound set up again as another breeze wandered by; and looking up she saw four small bells of bronze suspended from the eaves.... She sat very still, listening, looking, thinking, drawing in with a deep inhalation the exquisite fragrance of the nanmu wood. It might be pleasant, one day, to lease or even buy a home like this. So ran her alert thoughts.

The murmuring from the buildings in the grove continued, now swelling a little, now subsiding. It was not, of itself, an alarming sound, except for an occasional muffled shot. Her quick imagination, however, pictured the scene—they would be running about, calling to one another, beating in doors, rummaging everywhere. The drunkenness would doubtless be already under way. There would be much casual but ingenious cruelty, an orgiastic indulgence in every uttermost thrill of sense. It would be interesting to see; she even considered, her nerves tightening slightly at the thought, strolling back there over the bridges; but held finally to her first impulse and continued waiting here.

A considerable time passed; half an hour or more. Then she glimpsed figures approaching slowly through the grove. They emerged on the farthest of the little marble bridges. One was Tex Connor; the second perhaps—certainly—Tom Sung. They carried armfuls of small boxes, at the sight of which Dixie's pulse again quickened slightly; for these would be the jewels. Tom appeared to be talking freely; as they crossed the middle bridge he broke into song; and he reeled jovially.... Connor walked firmly on ahead.

They stopped by the gate screen. Connor glanced cautiously about; then moved aside into a tiled area that was hidden from the gate and the path by quince bushes. He called to Tom who followed.

Miss Carmichael could look almost directly down at them through the leaves. She watched closely as they hurriedly opened the boxes and filled their pockets with the gems. Tom used a stone to break the golden settings of the larger diamonds, pearls and rubies.

A low-voiced argument followed. She heard Tom say, “I come back, all light. But I got have a girl!” And he lurched away.

Connor, looking angrily after him, reached back to his hip pocket; but reconsidered. He needed Tom, if only as interpreter; and Tom, singing unmusically as he reeled away over the marble bridges, knew it.

Connor waited, standing irresolute, listening, turning his eye toward the gate, then toward the trees behind him. The girl in the pavilion considered him. She had not before observed evidence of fear in the man. But then she had never before seen him in a situation that tested his brain and nerve as well as his animal courage. He was at heart a bully, of course: and she knew that bullies were cowards.... What small respect she had at moments felt for Tex left her now. She came down to despising him, as she despised nearly all other men of her acquaintance. Still peering through the leaves, she saw him move a little way toward the gate, then glance, with a start, toward the marble bridges, finally turning back to the remaining boxes.

He opened one of these—it was of yellow lacquer richly ornamented—and drew out what appeared to be a tangle of strings of pearls. He turned it over in his hands; spread it out; felt his pockets; finally unbuttoned his shirt and thrust it in there.

It was at this point that Dixie arose, replaced the green tablets in her pocket, smoothed her skirt, and went lightly down the steps. He did not hear her until she spoke.

“Do you think Tom'll come back, Tex?”

He whirled so clumsily that he nearly fell among the boxes and the broken and trampled bits of gold and silver; fixed his good eye on her, while the other, of glass, gazed vacantly over her shoulder.

She coolly studied him—the flushed face, bulging pockets, protruding shirt where he had stuffed in those astonishing ropes of pearls.

He said then, vaguely: “What are you doing here?”

“Thought I'd come along. Suppose he stays back there—drinks some more. You'd be sort of up against it, wouldn't you?”

“I'd be no worse off than you.” He was evasive, and more than a little sullen. She saw that he was foolishly trying to keep his broad person between her and the boxes.

“You couldn't handle the junk without Tom. Not very well.... Look here, Tex, it can't be very far to the concessions at Hankow. We could pick up a cart, or even walk it.”

“What good would that do?”

“There'll be steamers down to Shanghai.”

“And there'll be police to drag us off.”

“How can they? What can they pin on you?” Connor's eye wavered back toward the grove and the buildings. He was again breathing hard. “After all this..” he muttered. “That old viceroy'll be up here, you know. With his mob, too. And there's plenty of people here to tell....” He was trying now to hold an arm across his middle in a position that would conceal the treasure there.

Her glance followed the motion, and for a moment a faintly mocking smile hovered about her thin mouth. She said: “Saving those pearls for me, Tex?”

He stared at her, fixed her with that one small eye, but offered not a word. A moment later, however, nervously signaling her to be still he brushed by and peeped out around the quinces.

“What is it?” she asked quickly; then moved to his side.

Immediately beyond the farthest of the marble bridges stood a group of ten or twelve soldiers in drunkenly earnest argument. Above them towered the powerful shoulders and small round head of Tom Sung. In the one quick glance she caught an impression of rifles slung across sturdy backs, of bayonets that seemed, at that distance, oddly dark in color; an impression, too, of confused minds and a growing primitive instinct for violence. Tom and another swayed toward the bridge; others drew them back and pointed toward the buildings they had left. The argument waxed. Voices were shrilly emphatic.

“Looks bad,” said the girl at Connor's shoulder. “You've let 'em get out of hand, Tex.” Then, as she saw him nervously measuring with his eye the width of the open space between the quinces and the gate screen, she added, “Thinking of making a run for it, Tex?”

He slowly swung that eye on her now; and for no reason pushed her roughly away. “It's none of your business what I'm going to do,” he replied roughly.

But the voice was husky, and curiously light in quality. And the eye wavered away from her intent look. This creature fell far short of the Tex Connor of old. She spoke sharply.

“Come up into this summer-house, Tex!” she indicated it with an upward jerk of her head. “They won't see us there, at first. You didn't see me. You've got your pistols. You can give me one. We ought to be able to stand off a few Chinese drunks.”

She could see that he was fumbling about for courage, for a plan, in a mind that had broken down utterly. His growl of—“I'm not giving you any pistol!”—was the flimsiest of cover. And so she left him, choosing a moment when that loud argument beyond the bridges was at its height to run lightly up the steps and into the pavilion.

From this point she looked down on the thick-minded Connor as he struggled between cupidity, fear and the bluffing pride that was so deep a strain in the man. The one certain fact was that he couldn't purposelessly wait there, with Tom Sung leading these outlawed soldiers to a deed he feared to undertake alone.... They were coming over the bridges now, Tom in the lead, lurching along and brandishing his revolver, the others unslinging their rifles. The argument had ceased; they were ominously quiet.

Dixie got her tablets out again; then sat waiting, that faint mocking smile again touching the corners of her mouth. But the smile now meant an excitement bordering on the thrill she had lately envied the savage folk in the grove. Such a thrill had moved those coldeyed women who sat above the combat of gladiators in the Colosseum and with thumbs down awaited the death agony of a fallen warrior. It had been respectable then; now it was the perverse pleasure of a solitary social outcast. But to this girl who could be moved by no simple pleasure it came as a gratifying substitute for happiness. Her own danger but added a sharp edge to the exquisite sensation. It was the ultimate gamble, in a life in which only gambling mattered.

Connor was fumbling first at a hip pocket where a pistol bulged, then at a side pocket that bulged with precious stones. His eye darted this way and that his cheeks had changed in color to a pasty gray. The girl thought for a moment that he had actually gone out of his head.

His action, when it finally came, was grotesquely romantic. She thought, in a flash, of the adventure novels she had so often seen him reading. It was to her absurd; even madly comic. For with those bulging pockets and that gray face, a criminal run to earth by his cruder confederates, he fell back on dignity. He strode directly out into the path, with a sort of mock firmness, and, like a policeman on a busy corner, raised his hand.

Even at that he might have impressed the soldiers; for he was white, and had been their vital and vigorous leader, and they were yellow and low-bred and drunk. As it was, they actually stopped, just over the nearest bridge; gave the odd appearance of huddling uncertainly there. But Connor could not hold the pose. He broke; looked wildly about; started, puffing like a spent runner, up the steps of the pavilion where the girl, leaning slightly forward, drawing in her breath sharply through parted lips, looked through the leaves.

Several of the rifles cracked then; she heard bullets sing by. And Connor fell forward on the steps, clawed at them for a moment, and lay still in a slowly widening pool of thick blood. He had not so much as drawn a weapon. Tex Connor was gone.

They came on, laughing, with a good deal of rough banter, and gathered up the jewels. Tom and another mounted the steps to the body and went through the pockets of his trousers for the jewels that were there and the pistols. As there was no coat they did not look further. And then, merrily, they went back over the marble bridges to the buildings in the grove where were still, perhaps, liquor and women.

When the last of their shouts had died out, when laying her head against the fragrant wood she could hear again the musical tinkling of the bronze bells and the pleasant murmuring of the tiny waterfall and the sighing of the leaves, Dixie slipped down to the body, fastidiously avoiding the blood. It was heavy; she exerted all her wiry strength in rolling it partly over. Then, drawing out the curious net of pearls she let the body roll back.

Returning to her sheltered seat she spread on her lap the amazing garment; for a garment of some sort it appeared to be. There was even a row of golden clasps set with very large diamonds. At a rough estimate she decided that there were all of three thousand to four thousand perfect pearls in the numerous strings. Turning and twisting it about, she hit on the notion of drawing it about her shoulders and found that it settled there like a cape. It was, indeed, just that—a cape of pearls. She did not know that it was the only garment of its precise sort in the world, that it had passed from one royal person to another until, after the death of the Old Buddha in 1908 it fell into the hands of his excellency, Kang Yu.

She took it off; stood erect; pulled out her loosely hanging middy blouse; and twisting the strings into a rope fastened it about her waist, rearranging the blouse over it. The concealment was perfect.

She sat again, then, to think out the next step. Returning to the junk was cut of the question. It would be better to get somehow up to the concessions and trust to her wits to explain her presence there. For Tex had been shrewd enough about that. The concessions were a small bit of earth with but one or two possible hotels, full of white folk and fuller of gossip. She had had her little difficulties with the consuls as with the rough-riding American judge who took his itinerant court from port to port announcing firmly that he purposed ridding the East of such “American girls” as she. Dawley Kane would surely be there, and other survivors of the fire.... It all meant picking up a passage down the river at the earliest possible moment; and running grave chances at that. But her great strength lay in her impregnable self-confidence. She feared herself least of all.

Another problem was the getting to the concessions. It was not the best of times for a girl to walk the highway alone. To be sure, she had come safely through from the junk; but it had not been far, and she hadn't had to approach a native army. She decided to wait an hour or so, until the plunderers there in the grove should be fully drunk; then, if at the moment it seemed the thing, to slip out and make a try for it.

And then, a little later, evidently from the road outside the wall, came a new sort of confused sounds; music, of flageolets and strings, and falsetto voices, and with it a low-pitched babel of many tongues. Whoever these new folk might be, they appeared to be turning in at the open gate. The music stopped abruptly, in a low whine of discord, and the talk rose in pitch. Over the brick screen appeared banners moving jerkily about, dipping and rising, as if in the hands of agitated persons below; a black banner, bearing in its center the triple imperial emblems of the Sun, the other two yellow, one blazoning the familiar dragon, the other a phoenix.

A few banner men appeared peeping cautiously about the screen; Manchu soldiers of the old effete army, bearing short rifles. They came on, cautiously into the park, joined in a moment by others. An officer with a queue and an old-fashioned sword and a military cap in place of a turban followed and, forming them into a ragged column of fours, marched them over the marble bridges and into the grove, where they disappeared from view.

Then a gorgeously colored sedan chair came swaying in, carried by many bearers walking under stout bamboo cross-poles. Others, in the more elaborate dress of officials, walked beside and behind it. Then came more soldiers, who straggled informally about, some even dropping on the gravel to rest their evidently weary bodies.

The chair was opened in front and a tall fat man stepped rather pompously out, wearing a robe of rose and blue and the brightly embroidered insignia and button of a mandarin of the fourth rank. At once a servant stepped forward with a huge umbrella which he opened and held over the fat man. And then they waited, all of them, standing or lying about and talking in excited groups. Several of the officials hurried back around the screen as if to examine the deserted apartments just within the gate, and shortly returned with much to say in their musical singsong.... An officer espied the body of Connor lying on the steps of the pavilion, and came with others, excitedly, to the foot of the steps. The key of the confused talk rose at once. There was an excited conference of many ranks about the tall fat man under the umbrella.

Then came, from the grove, that same sound of muffled shots, followed by a breathless pause. More shots then, and increasing excitement here by the screen. A number of the soldiers who had crossed the bridges appeared, running. The man in the lead had lost turban and rifle; as he drew near blood could be seen on his face. And now, abruptly, the officials and the ragtag and bobtail by the screen—pole-bearers, lictors, runners, soldiers—lost their heads. Some ran this way and that, even into the bushes, only to reappear and follow their clearer-headed brethren out to the gate. The umbrella-bearer dropped his burden and vanished. The fugitives from the grove were among the panic-stricken group now, racing with them for the gate and the highway without; scurrying around the end of the screen like frightened rabbits; and in pursuit, cheering and yelling, came many of the soldiers from the junk.

They caught the tall fat mandarin, as he was waddling around the screen, wounded by a chance shot; leaped upon him, bringing him down screaming with fear; beat and kicked him; with their knives and bayonets performing subtle acts of torture which gave them evident pleasure and of which the coldly observant Dixie Carmichael lost no detail. When the fat body lay inert, not before, they took the sword of a fallen officer and cut off the head, hacking clumsily. The head they placed on a pole, marching noisily about with it; finally setting the pole upright beside the first of the little marble bridges. Then, at last, they wandered back into the grove and left the grisly object on the pole to dominate obscenely the garden they had profaned.

Dixie leaned against the smooth sweet surface of the nanmu wood and listened, again, to the pleasantly soft sounds of waterfall and moving leaves and little bronze bells. Her face was chalk white; her thin hands lay limp in her lap; she knew, with an abrupt sensation of sinking, that she was profoundly tired. But in her brain burned still a cold white flame of excitement. Life, her instinct as the veriest child had informed her, was anything, everything, but the simple copybook pattern expounded by the naive folk of America and England. Life, as she critically saw it, was a complex of primitive impulses tempered by greeds, dreams and amazing subtleties. It was blindly possessive, carelessly repellent, creative and destructive in a breath, at once warm and cold, kindly and savage, impersonally heedless of the helpless human creatures that drifted hither and yon before the winds of chance. Cunning, in the world she saw about her, won always further than virtue, and often further than force.

She could not take her eyes, during a long period, from the hideous object on the pole. Her over-stimulated thoughts were reaching quickly, sharply, far in every direction. The feeling came, grew into belief, that she was, mysteriously, out of her danger. She felt the ropes of pearls under her blouse with an ecstatic little catch of the breath; and (finally) letting her eyes drop to that other ugly object on the steps beneath her, slowly opened her bag, drew out the bracelet watch (that the Manila Kid had given her out of an absurd hope) and fastened it about her wrist. And her eyes were bright with triumph.