I went to the floor.
Going down as if I’d been knocked, I missed the flash. But I heard the roar, smelled the powder.
My guide spun around, twisting out of one slipper. In each of his hands was an automatic as big as a coal scuttle. Even while trying to get my own gun out I wondered how so puny a man could have concealed so much machinery on him.
The big guns in the little man’s hands flamed at me. Chinese-fashion, he was emptying them—crash! crash! crash!
I thought he was missing me until I had my finger tight on my trigger. Then I woke up in time to hold my fire.
He wasn’t shooting at me. He was pouring metal into the door behind me—the door from which I had been shot at.
I rolled away from it, across the hall.
The scrawny little man stepped closer and finished his bombardment. His slugs shredded the wood as if it had been paper. His guns clicked empty.
The door swung open, pushed by the wreck of a man who was trying to hold himself up by clinging to the sliding panel in the door’s center.
Dummy Uhl—all the middle of him gone—slid down to the floor and made more of a puddle than a pile there.
The hall filled with yellow men, black guns sticking out like briars in a blackberry patch.
I got up. My guide dropped his guns to his side and sang out a guttural solo. Chinese began to disappear through various doors, except four who began gathering up what twenty bullets had left of Dummy Uhl.
The stringy old boy tucked his empty guns away and came down the hall to me, one hand held out toward my gun.
“You give ’em,” he said politely.
I gave ’em. He could have had my pants.
My gun stowed away in his shirt-bosom, he looked casually at what the four Chinese were carrying away, and then at me.
“No like ’em fella, huh?” he asked.
“Not so much,” I admitted.
“All light. I take you.”
Our two-man parade got under way again. The ring-around-the-rosy game went on for another flight of stairs and some right and left turns, and then my guide stopped before a door and scratched it with his fingernails.
V
The door was opened by another Chinese. But this one was none of your Cantonese runts. He was a big meat-eating wrestler—bull-throated, mountain-shouldered, gorilla-armed, leather-skinned. The god that made him had plenty of material, and gave it time to harden.
Holding back the curtain that covered the door, he stepped to one side. I went in, and found his twin standing on the other side of the door.
The room was large and cubical, its doors and windows—if any—hidden behind velvet hangings of green and blue and silver. In a big black chair, elaborately carved, behind an inlaid black table, sat an old Chinese man. His face was round and plump and shrewd, with a straggle of thin white whiskers on his chin. A dark, close-fitting cap was on his head; a purple robe, tight around his neck, showed its sable lining at the bottom, where it had fallen back in a fold over his blue satin trousers.
He did not get up from his chair, but smiled mildly over his whiskers and bent his head almost to the tea things on the table.
“It was only the inability to believe that one of your excellency’s heaven-born splendor would waste his costly time on so mean a clod that kept the least of your slaves from running down to prostrate himself at your noble feet as soon as he heard the Father of Detectives was at his unworthy door.”
That came out smoothly in English that was a lot clearer than my own. I kept my face straight, waiting.
“If the Terror of Evildoers will honor one of my deplorable chairs by resting his divine body on it, I can assure him the chair shall be burned afterward, so no lesser being may use it. Or will the Prince of Thief-catchers permit me to send a servant to his palace for a chair worthy of him?”
I went slowly to a chair, trying to arrange words in my mind. This old joker was spoofing me with an exaggeration—a burlesque—of the well-known Chinese politeness. I’m not hard to get along with: I’ll play anybody’s game up to a certain point.
“It’s only because I’m weak-kneed with awe of the mighty Chang Li Ching that I dare to sit down,” I explained, letting myself down on the chair, and turning my head to notice that the giants who had stood beside the door were gone.
I had a hunch they had gone no farther than the other side of the velvet hangings that hid the door.
“If it were not that the King of Finders-out”—he was at it again—“knows everything, I should marvel that he had heard my lowly name.”
“Heard it? Who hasn’t?” I kidded back. “Isn’t the word change, in English, derived from Chang? Change, meaning alter, is what happens to the wisest man’s opinions after he has heard the wisdom of Chang Li Ching!” I tried to get away from this vaudeville stuff, which was a strain on my head. “Thanks for having your man save my life back there in the passage.”
He spreads his hands out over the table.
“It was only because I feared the Emperor of Hawkshaws would find the odor of such low blood distasteful to his elegant nostrils that the foul one who disturbed your excellency was struck down quickly. If I have erred, and you would have chosen that he be cut to pieces inch by inch, I can only offer to torture one of my sons in his place.”
“Let the boy live,” I said carelessly, and turned to business. “I wouldn’t have bothered you except that I am so ignorant that only the help of your great wisdom could ever bring me up to normal.”
“Does one ask the way of a blind man?” the old duffer asked, cocking his head to one side.
