Carruthers stopped so suddenly that Tado bounced off his broad back like a rubber ball. He picked the fallen youngster up none too gently.
"What fool's talk is this, little owl?" he growled. But his fingers were as gentle as his voice was rough. "Is Takagawa of the Eta?" he went on.
Tado grinned impishly to himself in the darkness.
"He was," Tado corrected. "And that one whom I killed was his brother," he continued. "It was the cow-faced one who followed us all day."
Carruthers whistled softly.
"What the" He stood motionless while his mind raced crazily. With this new knowledge he was again visioning the evening before when he had put away the sharkskin packet of jewels—Takagawa's cat-like lithe tread, his quick nervous movements, his darting glittering eyes. Takagawa, an Eta, an outcast—forced to live by his wits, yet able to worm his way into the A-I office as a porter. This new knowledge about his porter explained many things that Carruthers had noticed almost subconsciously—little things that now bulked large and important. Dimly he remembered, too, of seeing the porter's snarling visage as he had turned away from the office door in the street that morning.
"Where is it, Tado?" he whispered as he glided ahead once more.
A scant hundred feet they went forward. Tado peered intently through
the thick gloom.
"There, danna-san." His outstretched hand pointed at a hovel a little more disreputable than its neighbors, whose thatched roof sagged drunkenly. A dim fuzzy light showed through the blackness about its walls.
With noiseless tread Carruthers crept closer. His ear caught the low mutter of voices beyond the dirty oiled-paper barrier.
"It is the voice of Takagawa himself," Tado whispered sibilantly in his ear.
Carruthers' fist smashed through the fragile wall, making a jagged rift from floor to ceiling in the oiled paper. Through the opening he had made he caught a glimpse of two figures springing up from beside a rope-seed oil lamp that glared smokily on a rickety stand, saw too
His left hand was outthrust, the blued barrel of the automatic gleamed wickedly.
"Stand still, Takagawa," Carruthers ordered curdy. "I've got you—and your loot, too!"
The little Japanese porter leaped backward. The gun spat angrily. Tado's round child eyes stared past his master at the sprawled figure of the porter, at the round black hole in his forehead. His ears were deafened by the roar of the gun in that enclosed space, at the excited whining pleadings of the other shaking wretch, an unsavory dealer m jewels and antiques, who had been in trouble with the police times without number.
Slowly Carruthers stepped into the filthy room. Tado scuttled ahead, his greedy hands grasped the glittering baubles strewed on the low table before the smoking lamp and stowed them again in the soft shagreen packet. Deftly he dropped the closed pouch into the gaping pocket of the seiyo-jin's bloody coat.
"Kill this other father of pigs, danna-san," he pleaded. "He is a rat that seeks a hole and is too cowardly to bite."
The other's face turned gray, his pleading grew more vehement.
"Here! One jewel I stole when that—that crow was not looking!" With a shaking hand he dropped the largest jewel of all upon the table, from which it bounced with a rattle, to roll upon the filthy matting.
