his face, looked quickly down again--as those turn away
their faces who look by mistake too deeply into the intimate thoughts of
another.

"Bad water and Red Knife wrecked Tung-sha," said Wolcott Norris
abruptly. "The water was contaminated somehow--typhoid got into it. Our
little colony was hard hit and when that second summer was over the
youngster I told you about didn't have any mother--she was sleeping the
long sleep out there at the foot of the Tung-sha hills."

The mining engineer's voice had grown thick--it was as if another person
were speaking.

"I should have told you more at the start about Red Knife," he said. "He
was a Chinese robber--the chief of a gang of hill-men who for years had
levied tribute from those poor, ignorant people of Honan. His name was a
living terror--I have never seen such abject fear on the faces of human
beings as one day when a rumor passed among our mine workers that Red
Knife was in the hills near by waiting to pounce down upon them. They
reminded me of sheep huddling together to escape wolves.

"From the time when the company first started operations at Tung-sha we
realized that this bandit was working against us--for the reason, of
course, that he knew we would lessen his power. I questioned Ho Sen one
day and learned that Red Knife had sent word around that if the 'foreign
devils', as he called us, dug further into the hills man-eating dragons
would come out and destroy the villages. We had to pay extra to get
labor after that."

"Why did they call him Red Knife?" asked Neil Durant.

"Because that was his symbol--a red knife--and his followers were said
to carry red-bladed daggers.

"Red Knife chose his time well. He came down on our little settlement at
the height of the typhoid scourge. It was only a few days after Marion
had been buried and I was up at the mine attending to some last
arrangements so that I could leave. I had made up my mind to take
Winslow--that's what we'd named the little boy--out to Shanghai, for
Tung-sha was no place for a motherless youngster. In broad daylight I
heard the natives wailing and yelling, and then the mine workers began
to cry out that Red Knife had swooped down from the hills. The white men
who were with me pulled out their guns and we ran down to the bungalows.
We were too late, however; Red Knife had come and gone--and with him had
gone Ho Sen and the boy. Three or four of the natives lay in the street
with their throats cut and t