and may do anything you please. You
know Brady, the Company agent? He's up the Mackenzie on a trip, and
here's the key to his shack. I know you'll appreciate getting under a
real roof again, and Brady won't object as long as I collect his thirty
dollars a month rent. Of course Barracks is open to you, but it just
occurred to me you might prefer this place while on furlough.
Everything is there from a bathtub to nutcrackers, and I know a little
Jap in town who is hunting a job as a cook. What do you say?"

"Splendid!" cried Keith. "I'll go up at once, and if you'll hustle the
Jap along, I'll appreciate it. You might tell him to bring up stuff for
dinner," he added.

McDowell gave him a key. Ten minutes later he was out of sight of
barracks and climbing a green slope that led to Brady's bungalow.

In spite of the fact that he had not played his part brilliantly, he
believed that he had scored a triumph. Andy Duggan had not recognized
him, and the riverman had been one of his most intimate friends.
McDowell had accepted him apparently without a suspicion. And Shan
Tung--

It was Shan Tung who weighed heavily upon his mind, even as his nerves
tingled with the thrill of success. He could not get away from the
vision of the Chinaman as he had backed through the Inspector's door,
the flaming needle-points of his eyes piercing him as he went. It was
not hatred he had seen in Shan Tung's face. He was sure of that. It was
no emotion that he could describe. It was as if a pair of mechanical
eyes fixed in the head of an amazingly efficient mechanical monster had
focused themselves on him in those few instants. It made him think of
an X-ray machine. But Shan Tung was human. And he was clever. Given
another skin, one would not have taken him for what he was. The
immaculateness of his speech and manners was more than unusual; it was
positively irritating, something which no Chinaman should rightfully
possess. So argued Keith as he went up to Brady's bungalow.

He tried to throw off the oppression of the thing that was creeping
over him, the growing suspicion that he had not passed safely under the
battery of Shan Tung's eyes. With physical things he endeavored to
thrust his mental uneasiness into the background. He lighted one of the
half-dozen cigars McDowell had dropped into his pocket. It was good to
feel a cigar between his teeth again and taste its flavor. At the crest
of the slope on which Brady's bungalow stood, he stoppe