e in a country that
was pretty wild.

"There was gold and copper back in the hills and the company intended to
carry on extensive operations if the ground proved worth while. How
strange it seemed to us to find a bit of a foreign colony--a handful of
Americans and British and French, missionaries and representatives of
the company--set down in a region that for no one knows how many
thousand years had belonged to the yellow men. You go about in China and
you see those old, old temples and the weather-worn houses and the
ancient hills, bald and bare, and you feel as if antiquity were casting
a spell over you. A person who hasn't lived among the Chinese can't
imagine what a strange, superstitious people they are; more than any
other race on the face of the earth they are bound to the past--and I
suppose when we came up there to Tung-sha and began to dig tunnels in
their hills we were breaking the precedent of the past. Still we didn't
really expect any trouble--and for many months all went smoothly. Some
wonderful things happened up there in that out-of-the-way corner of the
world. We lived--Marion and I--in a three-room bungalow with a roof that
sloped like the roof of a temple, and here that first springtime
something very fine came into our lives--a son was born to us. He was a
husky little youngster--and maybe he couldn't yell!"

Wolcott Norris laughed.

"I remember that Ho Sen, my Chinese servant boy, used to say when the
baby howled 'Nice stlong lung; he'll glow nice, big man! And by Jingo!
How that little chap did grow! Those were days crowded with happiness
and before we knew it we'd been in Tung-sha more than a year. The mine
was beginning to require additional machinery and everything looked good
for the future. We were so contented there in our bungalow that I
suppose we never thought of anything happening to burst our bubble of
happiness--at least I don't remember that any worries troubled our
minds."

The mining engineer paused in his story and passed his hand across his
brow. A minute went by, during which the hushing sound of the fire alone
broke the stillness of the room. Teeny-bits, Neil Durant and Ted Norris
sat without moving; their eyes were on the red and yellow fireplace
flames, but what they saw was a bit of the old Chinese Empire, in-land
on a tributary of the Yangtse--and a bungalow at Tung-sha. The mining
engineer was silent so long that finally they looked up--and, seeing the
expression on