Page:Weird Tales Volume 7 Number 6 (1926-06).djvu/12

Chinese, still———. The room clerk gave him the benefit of the doubt and decided that he was white. The same room clerk was surprized that this man should always go up to his room, while apparently he never came down. He was more surprized about dawn when he received a call, asking that a porter be sent up to 714 immediately for a trunk. Then the tall, swarthy-faced man came down and paid his bill. "An early train to Seattle," the guest said suavely. Yes, he had his own expressman outside. He'd give directions about the trunk. Looking up at this moment the clerk saw four other tall, swarthy-faced men leave the elevator and walk to the door.

"Friends?" he asked, pointing to the departing men.

"Yes," the suave gentleman explained. "They called for me; we're on a sight-seeing expedition together. We're off for Seattle." He paid his bill and departed to take care of his trunk. But instead of loading it on an express wagon, he and his four "friends" packed it into a big curtained automobile, which sped away toward the wharves of the Embarcadero where the great steamship Empress was coaling for its morning departure for Shanghai.

John Powell enjoyed a restful, although somewhat dreamful night in Room 708. He had spent the hours before midnight strolling the streets of Chinatown, and he was physically tired. Early in the evening he had joined a sight-seeing party and for an hour was content to witness the "show" part of the Chinese sections, to visit the gambling houses and tea rooms which were carefully stage-set to interest tourists. Then, realizing that the whole trip was a cut-and-dried affair, he slipped away from the party and began his own investigation.

A less courageous man would have hesitated to penetrate some of the dark areaways where John Powell's curiosity led him, to tiptoe up some of the stairs whose narrow openings were set flush with the sidewalk, or to sneak into "go downs" and peer through torn curtains at the Chinese faces in the dim, smoky rooms. But John Powell was one of those rare mortals to whom fear is almost unknown. Perhaps his splendid physique, his six feet of lean muscularity, had found that it could take care of itself without aping the caution of others; certainly in his twenty-six years of existence he had learned not cowardice, but confidence.

So the dangers of Chinatown did not exist to John Powell; the exotic sights and mysterious happenings alone interested him. Thus he dreamed, not of Chinese ogres with red-handled knives, living Buddhas demanding a human foot for toll—such dreams as June Hubbard was dreaming in the next room—but of the delicate, cameo faces of the silk-clad Chinese girls he had seen in the garish second-floor room above a canyonlike alley-street; of the emotionless face of a Chinese dandy as he collected the fan-tan markers; of the fragile hand of a slender, yellow wraith who beckoned to him from a half-closed door; of these John Powell dreamed. And toward morning he dreamed a fantasy of dancers around a great copper kettle from which arose an intoxicating, numbing odor and toward which he was being led by some invisible, resistless spirit.

He awoke from this dream just as he was about to faint before the strength of that pervading perfume. For a few seconds dream and actuality were indistinguishable; each struggled for mastery. He seemed drugged, still under the power of that odor. It took effort of will to force