Page:The Black Camel (IA blackcamel0000earl).djvu/272

“That is true. I am only stupid old Oriental——”

“Who says you are? I never did. But Dad, if you love me, please hurry.”

“I will speed,” he answered. “If I do not, I perceive I can not come home to-night.”

He hung up the receiver and went to a near-by restaurant, where he ate a generous dinner.

Refreshed and fortified, he was presently strolling down King Street toward Aala Park. Dusk was falling over that littered stretch of ground, the campus of the undergraduates in the hard school of experience. They lolled about on the benches, some of them glancing up at Charlie with hostile eyes under discreetly lowered lids. There was muttering as he passed, an occasional curse from the lips of some one who had met the detective under circumstances none too pleasant. He paid no attention to any of them—he was seeking a man in a velvet coat and duck trousers that had once been white.

The Park yielded nothing. He crossed to a street of mean shops and shabby business. Above his head, on a fragile balcony, an enormous Filipino woman in a faded kimono puffed on an after-dinner cigar. Charlie moved along into a section of Honolulu quite unknown to tourists who breathed the pure air of the beach and raved about the beauty of these islands.

There was no beauty in the River District, only squalor and poverty; seven races jumbled together in an international slum. He heard voices raised in bitter argument, the weeping of children, the clatter of sandals, and, even here, the soft whine of Hawaiian music. The Song of the Islands floated lazily on the fetid air. Over a doorway that led to a dark and dirty stair, he saw the sign: “Oriental Cabaret.”