As Bersonin stood by the wistaria gate beside the pulsing motor, confused thoughts rushed through his mind into an eddying phantasmagoria. The fear and agitation which he had kept under only by an immense self-control returned with double weight.

All was known—thanks to the brainless fool in whom he had relied! The Government knew. The wild tale the Japanese girl had told had been believed! Had there been suspicions before? He thought of the espionage he had fancied had been kept of late on his movements, of the silent, saturnine faces he had imagined dogged his footsteps. Even his servants, even Ishida, with his blank visage and fantastic English, might be—

He looked sharply at the chauffeur. He was lighting a cigarette in the hollow of his hands; the ruddy flare of the match lit the brown placid face, the narrow, secret-keeping eyes.

He tried to force his mind to a measure of control, to look the situation in the face.

If Phil failed. If the aËroplane won against darkness and wind—if the bungalow was reached in time, and the machine made harmless. Nothing would happen. Who, then, would believe the girl's wild story? Who could show that he had made it? He had worked at night, alone in his locked laboratory. Besides, it would tell nothing. It would yield its secret only to the master mind. And if its presence on the roof damned anybody, it would not be him! He had not put it there. He had not been in Yokohama in three days!

If the aËroplane did not start—he remembered the look on Phil's face when he rushed away!—or if it failed. With its own deadly ray, the very machine would vanish. Phil had not known this—could not have told. The searchers would find nothing! The news would have flashed along the cables that must roll up for him vast sums in the panic of markets. And there would be nothing to bring the deed home to him!

Nothing? The warning had been given before the fact. The Government had taken alarm. Bureaus were buzzing already. Sooner or later the accusation would be running through the street, swiftly and stealthily, from noble to merchant, from coolie to beggar, from end to end of this seething oriental city—wherein he was a marked man! What mattered it whether there were evidence on which a court would condemn him? The story of his huge coup in the bourses would be told—would rise up against him. He remembered suddenly a tale he had heard—of a traitor to Japan cut to pieces in a tea-house. An icy sweat broke out on his limbs.

Where was there any refuge? On a foreign ship? There were many in the bay. He longed with a desperate longing for the touch of a deck beneath his feet, a bulwark of blue water between him and possible vengeance. At Kisaraz' on the Chiba Road, a dozen miles to the north in the curve of the bay, was his summer villa, his frequent resort for week-end. His naphtha launch lay there, always ready for use. He could reach it in an hour.

"Get into the tonneau," he said to the chauffeur. "I'll drive, myself."

He took the wheel the other resigned, threw on the clutch, and the clamorous monster moved off down the quiet lane. Past ranks of darkened shoji, with here and there a barred yellow square; by lanterned tea-houses, alight and tinkling, past stolid, pacing watchmen in white duck clothing, and sauntering groups of night-hawk students chanting lugubrious songs—faster and faster, till the chauffeur clutched the seat with uneasiness.

The fever of flight was on his master now. He began to imagine voices were calling after him. From a police-box ahead a man stepped into the roadway waving a hand. It was no more than a warning against over-speed, but the gesture sent a thrill of terror through the big man at the wheel. He swerved sharply around a corner, skidding on two wheels.

Bersonin muttered a curse as he peered before him, for the stretch was brilliantly illuminated. He was on the Street-of-Prayer-to-the-Gods, which to-night seemed strangely alive with hubbub.

That afternoon, with the passing of the rain, there had been held a neighborhood hanami, a "flower-viewing-excursion." A score of families, with picnic paraphernalia, had trooped to the wistaria arbors of far-distant Kameido, to return in the small hours laden with empty baskets and somnolent babies. To-morrow, like to-day, would be holiday, when school and work alike should be forgotten. The cavalcade had just returned—afoot, since the trams had ceased running at midnight—the men merry with sakÉ, the women chattering. A few children, still wakeful, scampered here and there.

The chauffeur leaned forward with an exclamation—they had all but run down a hobbling figure.

"Keep your hands off!" snarled Bersonin. "Let them get out of the way!" The automobile dashed on, the people scattering before it.

There was a small figure in the roadway, however, of whom no one took account—a six year old. Ishikichi had not gone to the hanami that day. For many hours that long afternoon, while his mother cared for the sick father, he had beat the tiny drum that soothed a baby's fret, comforted by the promise that he should be waked in the great hour when the crowd came home. Stretched on his worn f'ton that night, he had puzzled over the situation—the hard, blank fact that because they had no money, they must give up the shop, which was the only home he knew. When they took his father away to the byo-in, the sick-house, what would he and his mother and the baby-San do? Would they stand, like the kadots'ke, playing a samisen at people's doors? It was not honorably pleasant to be a kadots'ke! Only men could earn money, and it would be so long before he became a man. So he had been pondering when he went to sleep. Now, standing in the road, he heard the hum of the rushing motor, and a quick thought,—born of that instinct of sacrifice for the parent, that is woven, a golden thread, in the woof of the Japanese soul—darted into his baby brain. One of the big fire-wagons of the seiyo-jin was coming! When the carriage killed Toru, his playmate, the foreigner had sent much money to Toru's house. He was not sorry any more, because the white-faced man whom he liked, who lived in the temple, had told him what a fine thing it had been. For Toru's honorable father had been fighting with the Gaki, the no-rice-devils—it was almost like a war—and Toru had died just as the brave soldiers did in battle. A great purpose flooded the little soul. Was he not brave, too?

So, as Bersonin, with a snarl, shook off the hand of the chauffeur and threw the throttle wide open, Ishikichi did not scamper with the rest. With his hands tightly clenched in his patched kimono, his huge clogs clattering on the roadway, he ran straight into the path of the hurtling mass of steel.

There was a sudden, sickening jolt. The car leaped forward, dragging something beneath it that made no sound. The chauffeur hurled himself across the seat on the gear, and the automobile stopped with a grinding discord of screeching pistons. A surge of people came around it—a wave without outcry, but holding a hushed murmur like the sea. Shoji were opening, doorways filling the street with light. A man bent and drew something gently from between the wheels.

With a writhing oath the expert wrenched at the clutch.

"Go on!" he said savagely. "How dare you stop without my orders?"

The Japanese made no reply, but the arms that braced the wheel were rigid as steel.

Bersonin sank back in his seat, his massive frame quivering, his eyes glittering like flakes of mica. But for this, in ten minutes he would have been clear of the city, flying along the Chiba Road! What if he were detained? He felt strange, chilly tendrils plucking at his flesh, and a hundred fiery needles seemed pricking through his brain.

Peering over his shoulder, with his horrible fear on him, he saw the crowd part to admit a woman who, quite silently, but with haste, came forward and knelt on the ground. There was no movement from the crowd.

In a hush like that of death, the mother rose with Ishikichi in her arms. The white, still face looked pitifully small. One clog swayed from its thong between the bare toes. The faded kimono was stained with red. She spoke no word. There was no tear on her face. But in the dreadful silence, she turned slowly with her burden and looked steadily at the twitching face in the car—looked and looked. The chauffeur swung himself from the seat into the crowd.

An insane desire had been creeping stealthily on Bersonin. He had felt it coming when he faced the truth in Phil's cringing admission. The horrible compulsion to laughter was on him. The damnable man-hysteria had him by the throat. He fought it desperately, as one fights a wild beast in the dark.

In vain.

His jaws opened. He laughed—a dreadful peal of merriment that echoed up and down the latticed street. And as he laughed, he knew that he raised a peril nearer, more fearful even than that from which he had been flying.

There was an instant's shocked calm, like the silence which follows the distant spurt of blue flame from the muzzle of a Krupp gun. Then, like its answering detonation—in such a menacing roar as might arise from the brink of an Inferno—the silence of the quiet street burst into awful sound.

Ten minutes later but a single lighted shoji glimmered on the darkened thoroughfare. The roadway was deserted save for a soldierly figure in policeman's uniform who stood thoughtfully looking at a huddle in the dim roadway—a mixture of wrenched and battered iron and glass, in the midst of which lay an inert, shapeless something that might have been a bundle of old clothes fallen from a scavenger's cart.