Have your revolver in readiness. My men may not make a clean job. The
mine guards carry clubs. Each of my coolies has a rifle." Kahn Meng's
eyes in the light of a torch were glittering excitedly. He grasped
Peter's nearest hand in his enthusiasm.

"We are so near! Only a step!" He laughed wildly, lifted his voice
ecstatically to a sing-song and chanted from Ouan-Oui: "Then----

"'Let us rejoice together.
and fill our porcelain goblets
with cool wine!'"

CHAPTER XIV

Now Peter was an emotional young man. And wrathful notions were
kindled in him before he encountered the only guard Kahn Meng's men had
overlooked--may the bones of that one rest gently!

He saw little children clawing in red muck; he saw young girls with
sunken breasts, their former beauty a wretched caricature, carrying
dying babes upon their backs. He saw tired old men, and women,
crippled, blind, with red fingers and wrists, as if they had been
dipped in blood. He saw plenty to enrage him.

Kahn Meng's guards bowed gravely as he passed them at tunnel passages.
He had walked perhaps three-quarters of an hour generally in a single
direction, bearing a torch, when he collided with a smooth, flat
obstruction.

Somewhere in the earth distantly behind him occurred a metallic rumble,
followed by a gust of soft wind, fragrant with the outdoors.

He was staring at blackness, the varnished blackness of a great wooden
door. He was at the threshold! somewhere on the other side of that
enormous wooden barrier was the man of Len Yang! Chalked boldly upon
the surface was the legend:

P. M.--straight on--K. M.

Pulling with his fingers and bracing his feet in the rough floor, the
mass moved monumentally toward him. It swung wide, on great, concealed
hinges.

Peter's adventurous heart was beating an excited battle call. His
burning eyes strained beyond the ruddy luminance of the torch, and
examined--white marble! He was at his journey's end--somewhere in the
palace of the Gray Dragon!

Peter dragged the great door softly shut behind him, and found himself
in a chamber of vast proportions, built of what had at one time been
purest white marble, discolored entirely now by the red taint of the
bloody ore. The floor was perspiring redly.

Going on tiptoe to the center of the space, he searched the blank
walls, listening breathlessly.

He heard nothing but the faint patter of the dripping slime, and he
went swiftly to the end of