But we must continue to regret that John Keith
did not live to be hanged."

"He has paid the price," said Keith dully.

"No, he has not paid the price, not in full. He merely died. It could
have been paid only at the end of a rope. His crime was atrociously
brutal, the culmination of a fiend's desire for revenge. We will wipe
off his name. But I can not wipe away the regret. I would sacrifice a
year of my life if he were in this room with you now. It would be worth
it. God, what a thing for the Service--to have brought John Keith back
to justice after four years!"

He was rubbing his hands and smiling at Keith even as he spoke. His
eyes had taken on a filmy glitter. The law! It stood there, without
heart or soul, coveting the life that had escaped it. A feeling of
revulsion swept over Keith.

A knock came at the door.

McDowell's voice gave permission, and the door slowly opened. Cruze,
the young secretary, thrust in his head.

"Shan Tung is waiting, sir," he said.

An invisible hand reached up suddenly and gripped at Keith's throat. He
turned aside to conceal what his face might have betrayed. Shan Tung!
He knew what it was now that had pulled him back, he knew why
Conniston's troubled face had traveled with him over the Barrens, and
there surged over him with a sickening foreboding, a realization of
what it was that Conniston had remembered and wanted to tell him--when
it was too late. THEY HAD FORGOTTEN SHAN TUNG, THE CHINAMAN!

VI

In the hall beyond the secretary's room Shan Tung waited. As McDowell
was the iron and steel embodiment of the law, so Shan Tung was the
flesh and blood spirit of the mysticism and immutability of his race.
His face was the face of an image made of an unemotional living tissue
in place of wood or stone, dispassionate, tolerant, patient. What
passed in the brain behind his yellow-tinged eyes only Shan Tung knew.
It was his secret. And McDowell had ceased to analyze or attempt to
understand him. The law, baffled in its curiosity, had come to accept
him as a weird and wonderful mechanism--a thing more than a
man--possessed of an unholy power. This power was the oriental's
marvelous ability to remember faces. Once Shan Tung looked at a face,
it was photographed in his memory for years. Time and change could not
make him forget--and the law made use of him.

Briefly McDowell had classified him at Headquarters. "Either an exiled
prime minister of China or the devil in a yel