smiled his bland Chinese smile. He had frequent dealings
with ship masters engaged in the dangerous though lucrative trade
of smuggling Chinese into the United States, and while he had not
received advice of this particular shipment, he decided to go
with Captain Scraggs to Jackson Street bulkhead and see if he
could not be of some use to his countrymen.

As Captain Scraggs and his Chinese companion approached the wharf
the skipper glanced warily about. He had small fear that either
Gibney or McGuffey would show up for an hour, for he knew that
Mr. Gibney had money in his possession. However, he decided to
take no chances, and scouted the vicinity thoroughly before
venturing aboard the _Maggie_. These actions served but to
increase the respect of Gin Seng for the master of the _Maggie_
and confirmed him in his belief that the _Maggie_ was a smuggler.

Captain Scraggs took his visitor inside the little cabin,
carefully locked and bolted the door, lifted the zinc flap back
from the top of the crate of "Oriental goods," and displayed the
face of the dead Chinaman. Also he pointed to the Chinese
characters on the wooden lid of the crate.

"What does these hen scratches mean?" demanded Scraggs.

"This man is named Ah Ghow and he belongs to the Hop Sing tong."

"How about his pal here?"

"That man is evidently Ng Chong Yip. He is also a Hop Sing man."

Captain Scraggs wrote it down. "All right," he said cheerily;
"much obliged. Now, what I want to know is what the Hop Sing tong
means by shipping the departed brethren by freight? They go to
work an' fix 'em up nice so's they'll keep, packs 'em away in a
zinc coffin, inside a nice plain wood box, labels 'em 'Oriental
goods,' and consigns 'em to the Gin Seng Company, 714 Dupont
Street, San Francisco. Now why are these two countrymen o' yours
shipped by freight--where, by the way, they goes astray, for some
reason that I don't know nothin' about, an' I buys 'em up at a
old horse sale?"

Gin Seng shrugged his shoulders and replied that he didn't
understand.

"You lie," snarled Captain Scraggs. "You savey all right, you fat
old idol, you! It's because if the railroad company knew these
two boxes contained dead corpses they'd a-soaked the relatives,
which is you, one full fare each from wherever these two dead
ones comes from, just the same as though they was alive an' well.
But you has 'em shipped by freight, an' aims to spend a dollar
an' thirty cents each on 'em, by