Forward on the promenade deck of the Poonah, in the shadow of the bridge, Amber stood with both elbows on the rail, dividing his somewhat perturbed attention between a noisy lot of lascar stewards, deckhands, and native third-class passengers in the bows below, and the long lines of Saugor Island, just then slipping past on the starboard beam.

On either hand, ahead, the low, livid green banks of the Hooghly were closing in, imperceptibly constricting the narrow channel through which the tawny tide swirled down to the sea at the full force of its ebb. Struggling under this handicap, the Poonah trembled from stem to stern with the heavy labouring of the screw, straining forward like a thoroughbred, its strength almost spent, with the end of the race in sight. Across the white gleaming decks, as the bows swung from port to starboard and back again, following the channel, purple-black shadows slipped like oil. A languid land-wind blew fitfully down the estuary, in warm puffs dense with sickly-sweet jungle reek. The day was hot and sticky with humidity; a haze like a wall of dust coloured the skies almost to the zenith.

It was ten o'clock in the morning; Calcutta lay a hundred miles up the river, approximately. By evenfall Amber expected to be in the city, whether he stuck by the steamer until she docked in the port, or left her at Diamond Harbour, sixty miles upstream, and finished his journey by rail. At the present moment he hardly knew which to do; in the ordinary course of events he would have gone ashore at Diamond Harbour, thereby gaining an hour or two in the city. But within the last eighteen hours events had been diverted from their normal course; and Amber was deeply troubled with misgivings.

Up to the day that the Poonah had sailed from Tilbury Dock, London, from the time he had left Quain among the sand-dunes of Long Island, he had not been conscious of any sort of espionage upon his movements. That gaunt and threatening figure which he had seen silhouetted against the angry dawn had not again appeared to disturb or trouble him. His journey across the Atlantic had been uneventful; he had personally investigated the saloon passenger lists, the second and third cabins and the steerage of the Lusitania, not forgetting the crew, only to be reassured by the absence of anybody aboard who even remotely suggested an Indian spy. But from the hour that the Poonah with its miscellaneous ship's company, white, yellow, brown, and black, had warped out into the Thames, he had felt he was being watched—had realised it instinctively, having nothing definite whereon to base his feeling. He was neither timorous nor given to conjuring up shapes of terror from the depths of a nervous imagination; the sensation of being under the surveillance of unseen, prying eyes is unmistakable. Yet he had tried to reason himself out of the belief—after taking all sensible precautions, such as never letting the photograph of Sophia Farrell out of his possession and keeping the Token next his skin, in a chamois bag that nestled beneath his arm, swinging from a leather cord round his neck. And as day blended into eventless day, he had lulled himself into an uneasy indifference. What if he were watched? What could it profit any one to know what he did or how he did it, day by day? And with increasing infrequency he had come to question himself as to the reason for the spying on his movements.

Possibly the fruitlessness of any such speculation had much to do with his gradual cessation of interest in the enigma. He was not credulous of the power of divination popularly ascribed to the Oriental; he was little inclined to believe that the nature of his errand to India had been guessed, or that any native intelligence in India knew or suspected the secret of Sophia Farrell's parentage—Rutton's solicitude to the contrary notwithstanding. The theory that he most favoured in explanation of the interest in him was that it had somehow become known that he bore with him the emerald. It was quite conceivable that that jewel, intrinsically invaluable, was badly wanted by its former possessors, whether for the simple worth of it or because it played an important part in the intrigue, or whatever it was, that had resulted in Rutton's suicide. For his own part, Amber cared nothing for it; he had christened it, mentally, the Evil Eye—with a smile to himself; nonetheless he half-seriously suspected it of malign properties. He was imaginative enough for that—or superstitious, if you prefer.

He would, however, gladly have surrendered the jewel to those who coveted it, in exchange for a promise of immunity from assassination, had he known whom to approach with the offer and been free to make it. But he must first show it to Dhola Baksh of the Machua Bazaar. After that, when its usefulness had been discharged, he would be glad of the chance to strike such a bargain….

Such, in short, had been his frame of mind up to eight o'clock of the previous evening. At that hour he had made a discovery which had diverted the entire trend of his thoughts.

Doggott, ever a poor sailor, had been feeling ill and Amber had excused him early in the afternoon. About six o'clock he had gone to his stateroom and dressed for dinner, unattended. Absorbed in anticipations of the morrow, when first he should set foot in Calcutta and take the first step in pursuit of Sophia Farrell, he had absent-mindedly neglected to empty the pockets of his discarded clothing. At seven he had gone to dinner, leaving his stateroom door open, as was his habit—a not unusual one with first-cabin passengers on long voyages—and his flannels swinging from hooks in the wall. About eight, discovering his oversight through the absence of his cigarette-case, he had hurried back to the stateroom to discover that he had been curiously robbed.

His watch, his keys, his small change and his sovereign purse, his silver cigarette-case—all the articles, in fact, that he was accustomed to stuff into his pockets—with one exception, were where he had left them. But the leather envelope containing the portrait of Sophia Farrell was missing from the breast-pocket of his coat.

From the hour in which he had obtained it he had never but this once let it out of his personal possession. The envelope he had caused to be constructed for its safe-keeping during his enforced inaction in London. He had never once looked at it save in strict privacy, secure even from the eyes of Doggott; and the latter did not know what the leather case contained.

Thus his preconceived and self-constructed theory as to the extent of The Enemy's knowledge, was in an instant overthrown. "They" had seized the very first relaxation of his vigilance to rob him of that which he valued most. And in his heart he feared and believed that the incident indicated "their" intimacy not alone with his secret but with that which he shared with Colonel Farrell.

Since then his every move toward regaining the photograph had been fruitless. His stateroom steward, a sleek, soft Bengali boy who had attended him all through the voyage with every indication of eagerness to oblige him, professed entire ignorance of the theft. That was only to be expected. But when Amber went to the purser and the latter cross-examined the steward in his presence, the Bengali stuck to his protestations of innocence without the tremor of an eyelash. In fact, he established an alibi by the testimony of his fellow-stewards. Further, when Amber publicly offered a reward of five guineas "and no questions asked" and in private tempted the Bengali with much larger amounts, he accomplished nothing.

In the end, and in despair, Amber posted a notice on the ship's bulletin-board, offering fifty guineas reward for the return of the photograph to him either before landing or at the Great Eastern Hotel, Calcutta, and having thereby established his reputation as a mild lunatic, sat down to twirl his thumbs and await the outcome, confidently anticipating there would be none. "They" had outwitted him and not five hundred guineas would tempt "them," he believed. It remained only to contrive a triumph in despite of this setback.

But how to set about it? How might he plan against forces of whose very nature he was ignorant—save that he guessed them to be evil? How could he look ahead and scheme to circumvent the unguessable machinations of the unknown?… His wits, like wild things in a cage, battered themselves to exhaustion against the implacable bars of his understanding.

For the thousand-and-first time he reviewed the maddeningly scanty store of facts at his command, turning them over and over in his mind, vainly hopeful of inferring a clue. But, as always, he found his thoughts circling a beaten track of conjecture…. What dread power had hounded Rutton, forth from the haunts of his kind, from pillar to post of the world (as he had said) to his death among the desolate dunes of Long Island? What "staggering blow against the peace and security of the world" could that or any power possibly strike, with Rutton for its tool, once it had caught and bent him to its will? What fear had set upon his lips a seal so awful that even in the shadow of death he had not dared speak, though to speak were to save the one being to whom his heart turned in the end? To save his daughter from what, had he voluntarily renounced her, giving her into another's care, forswearing his paternal title to her love, refusing himself even the cold comfort of seeing her attain to the flower of her womanly beauty as another's child? What—finally—was the ordeal of the Gateway of Swords, and what could it be that made the Gateway of Death seem preferable to it?

For the thousand-and-first time Amber abandoned his efforts to divine the inscrutable, to overcome the insurmountable, to attain to the inaccessible, but abandoned them grudgingly, grimly denying the possibility of ultimate failure. Though he were never to know the dark heart of the mystery, yet would he snatch from its pythonic coils the woman he had sworn to save, the woman he loved!

And while the black steamer with the buff super-structure toiled on, cleaving its arduous way through the turbulent yellow flood between the contracting shores of the Sunderbunds, while the offshore wind buffeted Amber's cheeks with the hot panting breath of Bengal, his eyes, dimmed with dreaming, saw only Her face.

So often of late had he in solitude pondered her photograph, striving to solve the puzzle of her heart that was to him a mystery as unfathomable as that which threatened her, that he had merely to think of her to bring her picture vividly before him. He could close his eyes (he closed them now, shutting out the moving panorama of the river) and see the girl that he had known in those few dear hours: the girl with eyes as brown as sepia but illumined by traces of gold in the irides—eyes that could smile and frown and be sweetly grave, all in the time that a man needs to catch his breath; the girl with the immaculate, silken skin, milk-white, with the rose-blush of young blood beneath; with lips softly crimson as satin petals of a flower, that could smile a man into slavery; the girl to contemplate whose adorably modelled chin and firm, round, young neck would soften the austerity of an anchorite; in whose hair was blended every deep shade of bronze and gold….

Something clutched at his heart as with a hand of ice. He could never forget, dared not remember what he could not believe yet dared not deny. To him, reared as he had been, the barrier of mixed blood rose between them, a thing surmountable only at the cost of caste; the shadow of that horror lay upon his soul like ink—as black as the silhouetted rails and masts and rigging of the Poonah on her dead white decks. He could win her heart only to lose his world. And still he loved, still pursued his steadfast way toward her, knowing that, were he to find her and his passion to be returned, death alone could avert their union in marriage. He might not forget but … he loved. With him the high wind of Romance was a living gale, levelling every obstacle between him and the desire of his heart.

This is to be borne in mind: it was the man's first love. Theretofore the habits of a thinker had set his feet in paths apart from those of other men. Pretty women he had always admired—from a discreet distance; that distance abridged, he had always found himself a little afraid of and dismayed by them. They were the world's disturbing element; they took men's lives in the rosy hollows of their palms and moulded them as they would. While Amber had desired to mould his own life. The theme of love that runs a golden thread through the drab fabric of existence had to him been an illusion—a hallucination to which others were subject, from which he was happily, if unaccountably, exempt. But that had been yesterday; to-day….

In the afternoon the Poonah touched at Diamond Harbour, landing the majority of her passengers. Amber was among those few who remained aboard.

When the steamer swung off from the jetty and, now aided by a favourable tide, resumed her progress up the river, he replaced his notice on the bulletin-board with one offering a hundred guineas for the return of the photograph before they docked in the port of Calcutta; the offer of fifty guineas for its return to the Great Eastern Hotel remained unaltered.

His anticipations were not disappointed; positively nothing came of it. All afternoon the Poonah plodded steadily on toward the pall of smoke that hemmed the northern horizon. The reedy river banks narrowed and receded, gorgeous with colour, unvaryingly monotonous, revealing nothing. Behind walls of rank foliage, dense green curtains almost impenetrable even to light, the flat and spongy delta of the Ganges lay decorously screened. If now and again the hangings parted they disclosed nothing more than a brief vista of half-stagnant water or a little clearing, half-overgrown, with the crumbling red brick walls of some roofless and abandoned dwelling.

In the lavender and gold and scarlet of a windless sunset, Calcutta lifted suddenly up before them, a fairy city, mystic and unreal with its spires and domes and minarets a-glare with hot colour behind a hedge of etched black masts and funnels—all dimmed and made indefinite by a heavy dun haze of smoke: lifted up in glory against the evening sky and was blotted out as if by magic by the swooping night; then lived again in a myriad lights pin-pricked upon the dense bluish-blackness.

The Poonah slipped in to her dock under cover of darkness. Amber, disembarking with Doggott, climbed into an open ghari on the landing stage and was driven swiftly to his hotel.

As he alighted and, leaving Doggott to settle with the ghariwallah, crossed the sidewalk to the hotel entrance, a beggar slipped through the throng of wayfarers, whining at his elbow:

"Give, O give, Protector of the Poor!"

Preoccupied, Amber hardly heard, and passed on; but the native stuck leech-like to his side.

"Give, hazoor—and the mercy of God shall be upon the Heaven-born for ten-thousand years!"

Now "Heaven-born" is flattery properly reserved for those who sit in high places. Amber turned and eyed the man curiously, at the same time dropping into the filthy, importunate palm a few annas.

"May the shadow of the Heaven-born be long upon the land, when he shall have passed through the Gateway of Swords!"

And like a flash the man was gone—dodging nimbly round the ghari and across Old Court House Street, losing himself almost instantly in the press of early evening traffic.

"The devil!" said Amber thoughtfully. "Why should it be assumed that I have any shadow of an intention of entering that damnable Gateway of Swords?"

An incident at the desk, while he was arranging for his room, further mystified him. He had given his name to the clerk, who looked up, smiling.

"Mr. David Amber?" he said.

"Why, yes—"

"We were expecting you, sir. You came by the Poonah?"

"Yes, but—"

"There's a note for you." The man turned to a rack, sorting out a small square envelope from others pigeon-holed under "A."

Could it be possible that Sophia Farrell had been advised of his coming? Amber's hand trembled slightly with eagerness and excitement as he took the missive.

"An Eurasian boy left it for you half an hour ago," said the clerk.

"Thank you," returned Amber, controlling himself sufficiently to wait until he should be conducted to his room before opening the note.

It was not, he observed later, superscribed in a feminine hand. Could it be from Quain's friend Labertouche? Who else?… Amber lifted his shoulders resignedly. "I wish Quain had minded his own business," he said ungratefully; "I can take care of myself. This Labertouche'll probably make life a misery for me."

There was a quality in the note, however, to make him forget his resentment of Quain's well-meant interference.

"My dear Sir," it began formally: "Quain's letter did not reach me until this afternoon; a circumstance which I regret. Otherwise I should be better prepared to assist you. I have, on the other hand, set afoot enquiries which may shortly result in some interesting information bearing upon the matters which engage you. I expect to have news of the Fs. to-night, and shall be glad to communicate it to you at once. I am presuming that you purpose losing no time in attending to the affair of the goldsmith, but I take the liberty of advising you that to attempt to find him without proper guidance or preparation would be an undertaking hazardous in the extreme. May I offer you my services? If you decide to accept them, be good enough to come before ten to-night to the sailors' lodging house known as 'Honest George's,' back of the Lal Bazaar, and ask for Honest George himself, refraining from mentioning my name. Dress yourself in your oldest and shabbiest clothing; you cannot overdo this, since the neighbourhood is questionable and a well-dressed man would immediately become an object of suspicion. Do not wear the ring; keep it about you, out of sight. Should this fail to reach you in time, try to-morrow night between eight and ten. You would serve us both well by burning this immediately. Pray believe me yours to command in all respects."

There was no signature.

Amber frowned and whistled over this. "Undoubtedly from Labertouche," he considered. "But why this flavour of intrigue? Does he know anything more than I do? I presume he must. It'd be a great comfort if…. Hold on. 'News of the Fs.' That spells the Farrells. How in blazes does he know anything about the Farrells? I told Quain nothing…. Can it be a trap? Is it possible that the chap who took that photograph recognised…?"

The problem held him in perplexity throughout the evening meal. He turned it over this way and that without being able to arrive at any comforting solution. Impulse in the end decided him—impulse and a glance at his watch which told him that the time grew short. "I'll go," he declared, "no matter what. It's nearly nine, but the Lal Bazaar's not far."

In the face of Doggott's unbending disapproval he left the hotel some twenty minutes later, having levied on Doggott's wardrobe for suitable clothing. Dressed in an old suit of soft grey serge, somewhat too large for him, and wearing a grey felt hat with the brim pulled down over his eyes, he felt that he was not easily to be identified with his every-day self—the David Amber whose exacting yet conservative "correctness" had become a by-word with his friends.

Once away from the Great Eastern he quietly insinuated himself into the tide of the city's night life that tirelessly ebbs and flows north of Dalhousie Square—the restless currents of native life that move ceaselessly in obedience to impulses so meaningless and strange to the Occidental understanding. Before he realised it he had left civilisation behind him and was breathing the atmosphere, heady and weird, of the Thousand-and-One Nights. The Lal Bazaar seethed round him noisily, with a roaring not unlike that of a surf in the hearing of him who had so long lived separate from such scenes. But gradually the strangeness of it passed away and he began to feel at home. And ere long he passed in a single stride from the glare of many lights and the tumult of a hundred tongues to the dark and the quiet hush of an alley that wormed a sinuous way through the hinterland of the bazaar. Here the air hung close and still and gravid with the odour of the East, half stench, half perfume, wholly individual and indescribable; here black shadows clung jealously to black and slimy walls, while lighter ones but vaguely suggestive of robed figures glided silently hither and yon; and odd noises, whispers, sobs, sounds of laughter and of rage, assailed the ear and excited the imagination….

At a corner where there was more light he came upon a policeman whose tunic, helmet, and truncheon were so closely patterned after those of the London Bobby that the simple sight of them was calculated to revive confidence in the security of one's person. He inspected Amber shrewdly while the latter was asking his way to Honest George's, and in response jerked a white-gloved thumb down the wide thoroughfare.

"You carn't miss it, sir—s'ylors' boardin'-'ouse, all lit up and likely with a row on at the bar. Mind your eye, guv'nor. It ayn't a plyce you'd ought to visit on your lone."

"Thanks; I've business there. I reckon to take care of myself."

Nevertheless it was with a mind preyed upon by forebodings that Amber stumbled down the cobbled way, reeking with filth, toward the establishment of Honest George. Why on earth should Labertouche make an appointment in so unholy a spot? Amber's doubts revived and he became more than half persuaded that this must be a snare devised by those acute intelligences which had instigated both the theft of the photograph and that snarled mock-benediction of the mendicant.

"I don't like it," he admitted ruefully; "it's so canny."

He stopped in front of a building whose squat brick facade was lettered with the reassuring sobriquet of its proprietor. A bench, running the width of the structure, was thick with sprawling loafers, who smoked and spat and spoke a jargon of the seas, the chief part of which was blasphemy. Within, visible through windows never closed, was a crowded barroom ablaze with flaring gas-jets, uproarious with voices thick with drink.

One needed courage of no common order to run the gauntlet of that rowdy room and brave the more secret dangers of the infamous den. "You've got to have your nerve with you," Amber put it. "But I suppose it's all in the game. Let's chance it." And he entered.

Compared with the atmosphere of that public-room a blast from Hell were sweet and cooling, thought Amber; the first whiff he had of it all but staggered him; and he found himself gasping, perspiration starting from every pore. Faint with disgust he elbowed his way through the mob to the bar, thankful that those about him, absorbed in the engrossing occupation of getting drunk, paid him not the least heed. Flattening himself against the rail he cast about for the proprietor. A blowsy, sweating barmaid caught his eye and without a word slapped down upon the sloppy counter before him a glass four fingers deep with unspeakable whiskey. And he realised that he would have to drink it; to refuse would be to attract attention, perhaps with unpleasant consequences. "It's more than I bargained for," he grumbled, making a pretence of swallowing the dose, and to his huge relief managing to spill two-thirds of it down the front of his coat. What he swallowed bit like an acid. Tears came to his eyes, but he choked down the cough, and as soon as he could speak paid the girl. "Where's the boss?" he asked.

"Who?" Her glance was penetrating. "Oh, he's wytin' for you." She
nodded, lifting a shrill voice. "Garge, O Garge! 'Ere's that Yankee."
With a bare red elbow she indicated the further end of the room.
"You'll find 'im down there," she said, her look not unkindly.

Amber thanked her quietly and, extricating himself from the press round the bar, made his way in the direction indicated. A couple of billiard tables with a small mob of onlookers hindered him, but by main strength and diplomacy he wormed his way past and reached the rear of the room. There were fewer loafers here and he had little hesitation about selecting from an attendant circle of sycophants the genius of the dive—Honest George himself, a fat and burly ruffian who filled to overflowing the inadequate accommodation of an armchair. Sitting thus enthroned in his shirt-sleeves, his greasy and unshaven red face irradiating a sort of low good-humour that was belied by the cold cunning of his little eyes, he fulfilled admirably the requirements of the role he played self-cast.

"'Ere, you!" he hailed Amber brusquely. "You're a 'ell of a job-'unter, ain't you? Mister Abercrombie's been wytin' for you this hour gone. 'Know the w'y upstairs?"

His tone was boisterous enough to fix upon Amber the attention of the knot of loafers round the arm-chair. Amber felt himself under the particular regard of a dozen pair of eyes, felt that his measure was taken and his identification complete. Displeased, he answered curtly: "No."

"This w'y, then." Honest George hoisted himself ponderously out of his arm-chair and lumbered heavily across the room, shouldering the crowd aside with a high-handed contempt for the pack of them. Jerking open a small door in the side wall, he beckoned Amber on with a backward nod of his heavy head. "Be a bit lively, carn't you?" he growled; and Amber, in despite of qualms of distrust, followed the fellow into a small and noisome hallway lighted by a single gas-jet. On the one hand a flight of rickety steps ran up into repellent obscurity; on the other a low door stood open to the night.

The crimp lowered his voice. "Your friend's this w'y." He waved his fat red hand toward the door. "Them fools back there 'll think you're tryin' for a berth with Abercrombie, the ship-master. I 'opes you'll not tyke offense at the w'y I 'ad to rag you back there, sir."

"No," said Amber, and Honest George led the way out into a small, flagged well between towering black walls and left him at the threshold of a second doorway. "Two flights up, the door at the top," he said; "knock twice and then twice." And without waiting for an answer he lurched heavily back to his own establishment.

Amber watched his broad back fill the dimly-lighted doorway opposite and disappear, of two minds whether or not to turn tail and run. Suspicious enough in the beginning, the affair had now an exceeding evil smell—as repulsive figuratively as was the actual effluvium of the premises. He hung hesitant in doubt, with a heart oppressed by those grim and silent walls of blackness that loomed above him. With feet slipping on slimy flags he might be pardoned for harbouring suspicions of some fouler treachery. The yawning mouth of the narrow doorway, with the blackness of Erebus within, was deterring at its best; in such a hole a man might be snared and slain and his screams, though they rang to high Heaven, would fall meaningless on mundane ears. Honest George's with its flare of lights and its crowd had been questionable enough….

With a shrug, at length, he took his courage in his hands—and his life, too, for all he knew to the contrary—and moved on into the blackness, groping his way cautiously down a short corridor, his fingers on either side brushing walls of rotten plaster. He had absolutely nothing to guide him beyond the crimp's terse instructions. Underfoot the flooring seemed to sag ominously; it creaked hideously. Abruptly he stumbled against an obstruction, halted, and lighted a match.

The insignificant flame showed him a flight of stairs, leading up to darkness. With a drumming heart he began to ascend, counting twenty-one steps ere his feet failed to find another. Then groping again, one hand encountered a baluster-rail; with this for guide he turned and followed it until it began to slant upwards. This time he counted sixteen steps before his eyes, rising above the level of the upper floor, discovered to him a thin line of light, bright along the threshold of a door. He began to breathe more freely, yet apprehension kept him strung up to a high tension of nerves.

He knuckled the door loudly—one double knock followed by another.

From within a voice called cheerfully, in English: "Come in."

He fumbled for the knob, found and turned it, and entered a small, low-ceiled chamber, very cosy with lamplight, and simply furnished with a single chair, a charpoy, a water-jug, a large mirror, and beneath the latter a dressing-table littered with a collection of toilet gear, cosmetics and bottles, which would have done credit to an actress.

There was but a single person in the room and he occupied the chair before the dressing-table. As Amber came in, he rose; a middle-aged babu in a suit of pink satin, very dirty. In one hand something caught the light, glittering.

"Oah, Mister Amber, I believe?" he gurgled, oily and affable. "Believe me most charmed to make acquaintance." And he laughed agreeably.

But Amber's face had darkened. With an oath he sprang back, threw his weight against the door, and with his left hand shot the bolt, while his right whipped from his pocket Rutton's automatic pistol.

"Drop that gun, you monkey!" he cried sharply. "I was afraid of this, but I think you and I'll have an accounting before any one else gets in here."