at seven o'clock. You'll be there,
without fail?"

A coolie guarded her luggage near by impatiently. They could hear the
sobbing of the J. C. J. passenger launch as it rounded the starboard
counter.

"I forget," said Peter, with his flashing smile. "I'll be dead in an
hour. The steel trap of China, you know."

"Please don't jest."

"I'll tell you what I will do. I'll put a tag on my lapel, saying,
deliver this corpse to the Desvoeux Road balcony of the Hong Kong Hotel
restaurant at seven sharp to-night! Without fail! C. O. D.!"

These last words were addressed to the empty wireless cabin doorway.
The white skirt of Romola Borria flashed like a taunting signal as she
hastened out of his sight with the boy who carried her grips.

CHAPTER XI

Wearing a slight frown, Peter made his way through piles of
indiscriminate luggage to the port ladder, where his sampan and the
maid from Macassar were waiting.

As he descended this contrivance he scanned the other sampans warily,
and in one of these he saw a head which protruded from a low cabin.
The sampan was a little larger than the others, and it darted in and
out on the edge of the waiting ones.

The head vanished the instant Peter detected it, but it made a sharp
image in his memory, a face he would have difficulty in forgetting. It
was a long, chalk-white face, topped by a black fedora hat--a face
garnished at the thin gray lips by a mustache, black and spikelike,
resembling nothing more closely than the coal-black mustache affected
by the old-time melodrama villains.

An hour of life? Did this man have concealed under his black coat the
knife which had been directed by the beast in Len Yang to seek out his
heart, to snuff out his existence, the existence of a trifling enemy?

As Peter reached the shelving at the foot of the ladder the thought
grew and blossomed, and the picture was not a pleasant one. The man in
the sampan, as Peter could judge by his face, would probably prove to
be a tall and muscular individual.

And then Peter caught sight of another face, but the owner of it
remained above-board. This man was stout and gray, with a face more
subtly malignant. It was a red face, cut deep at the eyes, and in the
region of the large purple nose, with lines of weather or dissipation.
Blue eyes burned out of the red face, faded blue eyes, that were,
despite their lack of lustre, sharp and cunning.

The hand of its owner beckoned imperiously