Wolves! A
hell-pack! A tinge of red dyed the grey-white, hollowed cheeks, as a
surge of fury swept upon him. No, it was not futility; no, it was not
wasted effort--this haunting of the dens of the underworld! In his soul
he knew that some day he would pick up the trail of that hell-pack and
those human wolves--and when that some day came it would be a day of
reckoning, and the price that he would exact would not be small!
He lay back on the bunk that Foo Sen had ingratiatingly allotted him.
The air was close, heavy with the sweet, sickish smell of opium, and
full of low, strange sounds and noises. And these sounds, in their
composite sense, emanating from unseen sources, were as the ominous and
sinister evidence of some foul and grotesque presence; analysed, they
resolved themselves into the swish of hangings, the swish of slippered,
shuffling feet, the stertorous breathing of a sleeper, the clink of coin
as of men at play, the tinkle of glass, the murmur of voices, the
restive stir of reclining bodies, whisperings.
And now he looked about him through half closed eyes. He was in a little
compartment, whose doorway was a faded and stained hanging of flowered
cretonne, and whose walls were but flimsy-boarded affairs that
partitioned him off from like compartments on either side.
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