Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/225

"Today I have found you," he sang; and his voice broke; vanished in the whirling fog of the poppies.

He felt a curious, sweet pain. An immense shutter seemed to drop across his mind with a speed of lightning. There was a momentary break in his consciousness, a sense of vague, yet abrupt dislocation, of infinite, rather helpless regret, and the door opened—

"Looka here, yer darned Chink hop-head!" came a rough voice.

Bill Devoy, detective of Second Branch and on the Pell Street beat of sewer gas and opium and yellow man and white, stepped inside. He sniffed, turned up the gas jet, then crossed to the window and opened it wide.

"Gosh! Wot a smell!"

He looked about the room, dusty, grimy, bare of all furnishings except the narrow, wooden bunk where Yung Han-Rai lay stretched out, the bamboo pipe in his stiff fingers, and the small taboret with the smoker's paraphernalia which stood beside the bunk.

He touched the Chinese on the shoulder with his heavy hand.

"Looka here, Yung," he said. "I don't wanta pinch yer. Ye're a decent lad. I'm only gonna talk t' yer like a Dutch uncle, see? Yer gotta cut out the poppy, get me? Wottahell! Look at yerself! Look at this room! Doity and grimy, and not a stick o' furniture! Ain't yer ashamed o yerself? Wottya mean—soakin' yerself in th' black smoke every night, wastin' every cent yer earn on hop? Ain't yer got no sense at all, yer poor Chink? And they tells me yer useter be a gent, back home in Chinkieland—a real gent, eddycated and of a swell family! Wottya mean, yer poor, weak-spined fish?"