ee emerge from his doorway in
Doyers Street just before four o'clock the following Thursday and slip
silently along under the shadow of the eaves toward Ah Fong's
grocery--and instantly sensed something peculiar in the Chink's walk.

"Hello, Quong!" he called, interposing himself. "Where you goin'?"

Quong paused with a deprecating gesture of widely spread open palms.

"'Lo yourself!" replied blandly. "Me go buy li'l' glocery."

Mooney ran his hands over the rotund body, frisking him for a possible
forty-four.

"For the love of Mike!" he exclaimed, tearing open Quong's blouse. "What
sort of an undershirt is that?" Quong grinned broadly as the detective
lifted the suit of double-chain mail which swayed heavily under his blue
blouse from his shoulders to his knees.

"So-ho!" continued the plain-clothes man. "Trouble brewin', eh?"

He knew already that something was doing in the tongs from his
lobby-gow, Wing Foo.

"Must weigh eighty pounds!" he whistled. "I'd like to see the pill that
would go through that!" It was, in fact, a medieval corselet of finest
steel mesh, capable of turning an elephant bullet.

"Go'long!" ordered Mooney finally. "I guess you're safe!"

He turned back in the direction of Chatham Square, while Quong resumed
his tortoiselike perambulation toward Ah Fong's. Pell and Doyers Streets
were deserted save for an Italian woman carrying a baby, and were
pervaded by an unnatural and suspicious silence. Most of the shutters on
the lower windows were down. Ah Fong's subsequent story of what happened
was simple, and briefly to the effect that Quong, having entered his
shop and priced various litchi nuts and pickled starfruit, had purchased
some powdered lizard and, with the package in his left hand, had opened
the door to go out. As he stood there with his right hand upon the knob
and facing the afternoon sun four shadows fell aslant the window and a
man whom he positively identified as Sui Sing emptied a bag of
powder--afterward proved to be red pepper--upon Quong's face; then
another, Long Get, made a thrust at him with a knife, the effect of
which he did not observe, as almost at the same instant Mock Hen felled
him with a blow upon the head with an iron bar, while a fourth, Mock
Ding, fired four shots at his crumpling body with a revolver one of
which glanced off and fractured a very costly Chien Lung vase and ruined
four boxes of mandarin-blossom tea. In his excitement he ducked behind
the coun