Chapter XXXVII - Page 2

coolie hats.

It was eight o'clock, but it was Holt's "night off" and as he had told her that morning he could get a pass for the dinner, and that it was time she "changed her bill," she had risen early and met him at her door.

It was apparent that she took a lively interest in this bit of Shanghai but a step out of the Occident, for her face had lost its heavy brooding and she asked him many questions. It was an hour before Masters' name was mentioned, and then she said abruptly:

"You tell me much of his life out here and before he came, but you hardly ever say anything about the present."

"That sort of life is much of a muchness."

"How do you hear?"

"One of the Bulletin men--Tom Lacey--went East just after Masters did. He is on the Times. Several of us correspond with him."

"Has--has he ever been--literally, I mean--in the gutter?"

"Probably. He was in a hospital for a time and when he came out several of his friends tried to buck him up. But it was no use. He did work on one of the newspapers--the Tribune, I believe--about half sober until he had paid his hospital bill with something to spare. Then he went to work in the same old steady painstaking way to drink himself to death."

"Wh--why did he go to the hospital? Was he very ill?"

"Busted the crust of a policeman and got his own busted at the same time."

"How is it you spared me this before?"

He pretended not to see her tears, or her working hands.

"Didn't want to give you too heavy doses at once, but you are so much stronger that I chanced it. He's been in more than one spectacular affair. One night, in front of the City Prison, he tossed the driver off a van as if the man had been a dead leaf, and before the guard had time to jump to his seat he was on the box and had lashed the horses. He drove like mad all over New York for hours, the prisoners inside yelling and cursing at the top of their lungs. They thought it was a new and devilishly ingenious mode of punishment. When the horses dropped he left the van where it stood and went home. There was a frightful row over the affair. Masters was arrested, of course, but bailed out. He has friends still and some of them are influential. The trial was postponed a few times and then dropped. His rows are too numerous to mention. When he was here and sober he betrayed anger only in his eyes, which looked like steel blades run through fire, and with the most caustic tongue ever put in a man's head. But when he's in certain stages of insobriety his fighting instincts appear to take their own sweet way. At other times, Lacey writes, he is as interesting as ever and men sit round eagerly and listen to him talk. At others he simply disappears. Did I tell you he had come into a little money--just