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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Governor of Chi-Foo and Other Detective Stories," Edgar Wallace weaves a captivating tapestry of intrigue and suspense, showcasing his mastery of the detective genre. The collection features a series of short stories that explore themes of crime, corruption, and moral ambiguity, all set against the backdrop of early 20th-century society. Wallace's distinctive literary style combines vivid characterization with fast-paced narratives, enabling readers to experience the tension of unraveling mysteries alongside his protagonists. His adept use of dialogue and descriptive imagery offers insights into both the psychological complexities of his characters and the societal norms of his time, making this collection a notable contribution to detective fiction and early crime literature. Edgar Wallace, a prolific British writer, became renowned for his contributions to the detective genre in the early 1900s. With a background in journalism and a flair for storytelling, Wallace tapped into contemporary British anxieties surrounding crime and justice, often reflecting his experiences from various adventures in settings as diverse as London and Africa. His works were influential during a period when the public was increasingly fascinated by the intricacies of criminal justice, embodying the zeitgeist of his era through his engaging narratives. This collection is highly recommended for both enthusiasts of classic detective fiction and newcomers alike. Wallace's stories offer a blend of thrilling plot twists and richly drawn characters, making it a compelling read that will thrill those interested in the evolution of crime literature. Dive into the world of Edgar Wallace and explore the complexities of morality and justice in this expertly crafted anthology. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The Governor of Chi-Foo and other Detective Stories
Table of Contents
Introduction
This single-author volume, The Governor of Chi-Foo and other Detective Stories, gathers a focused selection of Edgar Wallace’s crime and detection short fiction. Its purpose is to present, in one place, a representative cross-section of Wallace’s handling of mystery, pursuit, and criminal intrigue across thirteen self-contained pieces. Rather than aspiring to a complete works or a genre-spanning omnibus, the collection concentrates on detective storytelling as Wallace practiced it: brisk, resourceful, and oriented toward the interplay between cunning offenders and equally resourceful investigators. Readers will find the breadth of his imagination showcased within compact forms that still carry the scale and urgency of larger narratives.
The contents are short fiction—independent narratives of detection, crime, and counter-crime—rather than novels, plays, essays, or letters. They belong to the overlapping spheres of detective story, crime tale, and thriller, sometimes tilting toward a puzzle of inference, at other moments toward a chase or sting. The pieces emphasize investigation, strategy, and revelation, with the drama arising from decisions made under pressure and the consequences of risk. While the stories share a commitment to mystery, they differ in emphasis: some are close-knit urban cases, others are adventurous episodes that carry the detective method into unfamiliar terrain.
Across the collection, unifying concerns emerge: the tension between law and justice; the uses and costs of deception; and the performance of identity in a world where appearances conceal motive. Wallace repeatedly stages contests of wits in which observation, nerve, and timing matter as much as formal authority. The stories probe how greed, loyalty, fear, and pride shape action, and how chance intersects with design. Even when outcomes turn on a single clue or a bold stratagem, the moral landscape remains textured, attentive to the ambiguities of guilt, complicity, and responsibility that give detective fiction its enduring pull.
Stylistically, these stories exhibit the hallmarks that made Wallace widely read: swift pacing, economical exposition, and dialogue that carries momentum while sketching character in a few deft strokes. Scenes are arranged for maximum clarity and effect, with clean transitions that keep the line of inquiry sharp. Plotting privileges lucid setup, well-seeded implications, and turns that feel both surprising and earned, reflecting a balanced regard for clue-laying and misdirection. The prose favors precision over ornament, so that atmosphere, procedure, and action reinforce one another. The result is an experience that is energetic without being diffuse, and clever without forfeiting plausibility.
Range is a defining virtue. The thirteen stories—among them The Governor of Chi-Foo, The Compleat Criminal, On the Witney Road, The Pick-Up, Mother o’ Mine, The King’s Brahm, The Greek Poropulos, Kid Glove Harry, The Treasure of the Kalahari, The Weakling, Bulfox Asleep, The Perfect Gentleman, and The Prison-Breakers—move from crowded streets to remote landscapes, from drawing rooms to borderlands. Wallace’s detectives and adversaries operate across social strata and geographies, testing methods against unfamiliar customs and local pressures. That breadth enriches the collection: each setting reframes the same essential questions—what happened, who gains, who deceives—while varying the textures of risk and opportunity.
Taken together, these works remain significant because they crystallize the appeal of early twentieth-century detective storytelling in a form that still reads with immediacy. Their craft is evident in the compression of incident, the clarity of stakes, and the steady escalation toward an intelligible outcome. They also offer a valuable view of genre conventions—surveillance and shadowing, feints and reveals, the careful weighting of evidence—deployed with professional assurance. Readers encounter not only engaging enigmas but a sustained demonstration of how suspense and reasoning can be yoked without strain, illuminating why Wallace’s name became closely associated with popular crime fiction.
This anthology invites both deliberate reading and casual sampling. Each story is self-contained, so one can proceed in order or explore by mood and theme, noticing how certain motifs recur in new guises: the risky bargain, the deceptive calm, the overlooked detail that reconfigures a case. Read with an eye for method as much as outcome: how suspicion is framed, what evidence is privileged, when boldness supplants patience. The aim is twofold—to entertain with variety and to illuminate a single writer’s sustained engagement with detection. Within these compact forms, Wallace’s sense of pace, situation, and surprise is consistently on display.
Historical Context
Edgar Wallace (1875–1932), born in Greenwich and deceased in Beverly Hills while working on early drafts for King Kong, wrote across a world remade by empire, mass media, and new policing. His apprenticeship on Fleet Street, notably with the Daily Mail under Alfred Harmsworth (Lord Northcliffe), and his service as a war correspondent in South Africa during the Second Boer War (1899–1902), seeded a global range of settings and institutions. The detective tales gathered here draw on that experience: ports, deserts, and metropolis alike become stages where imperial jurisdictions overlap, news travels fast, and crime is narrated with the brisk certainties of modern reportage.
The late Victorian and Edwardian infrastructure of empire furnished Wallace’s plots and horizons. The Suez Canal (opened 1869) shortened routes to India and China, enabling fugitive movement and rapid pursuit; telegraph cables stitched London to colonial capitals. Treaty ports such as Chefoo (Yantai), opened after the Treaty of Tientsin (1858) and operational from 1861, existed under extraterritorial consular jurisdiction, complicating policing and extradition (framed in Britain by the Extradition Act of 1870). Greek merchant networks threaded the Mediterranean and London’s docks, while India remained a nodal point of personnel, intelligence, and law. Such circuits of shipping, debt, and law underpin many of Wallace’s cosmopolitan intrigues.
Wallace’s fiction tracks the rise of scientific detection. The Metropolitan Police Criminal Investigation Department (established 1878) professionalized inquiry just as anthropometric identification yielded to fingerprints. The Henry Classification System, developed in colonial Bengal by Sir Edward Henry with Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose (1897), reached Scotland Yard in 1901, transforming recidivist detection. Wireless telegraphy, famously used in the 1910 capture of Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen aboard the Montrose, dramatized long‑distance policing. Forensic medicine gained stature under figures like Sir Bernard Spilsbury from 1910 onward. These innovations inform the methods, timetables, and confidence with which Wallace’s investigators close nets around modern criminals.
Modern London—motorized, electrified, and stratified—provides a crucial milieu. The Motor Car Act (1903) and the arrival of taximeter cabs (widely adopted by 1907) reconfigured flight and pursuit along arterial roads, while the Flying Squad (1919) made mobile policing visible in the press. West End hotels and clubs (the Savoy, Piccadilly) mirrored a moneyed world of jewel heists and suave impostors; East End docklands and Limehouse, filtered through period stereotypes, signaled transnational contraband. Wallace, attentive to theatre, music halls, and night life, used these interwar spaces of leisure and anonymity to stage chance encounters, risky “pick-ups,” and the brittle courtesy of the self-styled perfect gentleman.
Two wars framed the mood of suspicion, mobility, and opportunity in Wallace’s career. The Second Boer War (1899–1902) gave him South African experience and contacts; the First World War (1914–1918) left demobilized men, tightened borders, and a taste for espionage narrative. The Official Secrets Act (1911), Defence of the Realm regulations (1914–1918), and the Aliens Restriction Act (1914) with the 1919 Aliens Order normalized passports and surveillance, shaping cross‑border chases. Economic shocks—the 1920–1921 slump and the 1929 crash—threw fortunes and morals into flux. In Wallace’s world, such pressures sharpen appetites for quick gain, and make both criminals and detectives skilled readers of a strained society.
Africa—press camps, mining syndicates, and desert frontiers—haunts Wallace’s imagination. De Beers consolidated the diamond pipeline in 1888; prospecting and rumor traveled from the Kalahari across Cape Town to London brokers. Bechuanaland became a British Protectorate in 1885, while German South‑West Africa (1884–1915) later passed into a South African mandate (1919), reshaping borders and authority. Such terrains, sparsely policed and rich in legend, attracted opportunists, surveyors, and con‑men whose schemes moved with the mails and steamers. Wallace’s treasure narratives inhabit this zone where cartography, camp gossip, and commodity markets meet—an imperial economy of risk in which desert stories and city finance remain tightly linked.
Victorian penal ideas yielded, in Wallace’s lifetime, to modern incarceration and surveillance. The Prison Act of 1898 softened the separate system; Wormwood Scrubs (1891) and Dartmoor (1850) embodied the carceral landscape, while Borstal institutions were formalized by the Prevention of Crime Act (1908). Fingerprint registers and centralized records curtailed aliases, yet escapes and prison breaks continued to fascinate a public raised on the legend of Jack Sheppard. Wallace exploits this tension: professionalized custody versus the persistent ingenuity of offenders and their confederates outside the walls. The drama of recapture—procedural, technological, and psychological—belongs to an era convinced that no identity can remain untraced for long.
Wallace flourished amid a media ecosystem that minted detectives as household gods. The Strand Magazine (from 1891) and other periodicals serialized crime fiction; publishers such as Hutchinson circulated inexpensive editions to circulating libraries and kiosks. He wrote plays eagerly adapted by British studios like Stoll Picture Productions in the 1920s, and his career overlapped the detective fiction “Golden Age,” alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Freeman Wills Crofts. Transnational adaptations later carried his name to German Krimi films. This industrial context—tight deadlines, episodic publication, and rapid adaptation—encouraged compact, scene‑driven storytelling that suits tales ranging from treaty ports and English roads to prisons, salons, and deserts.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Governor of Chi-Foo
In a Far Eastern treaty port ruled off the books by an enigmatic strongman, a visiting investigator probes a web of graft and intimidation. His quiet inquiry pits official law against unofficial power without tipping into open conflict.
The Compleat Criminal
A self-styled master thief outlines the principles of the perfect crime. His bravado becomes the very thread a patient detective pulls to unravel his operations.
On the Witney Road
A nocturnal journey on an English country road ends in a baffling incident that looks like chance. Timings, tire marks, and a missing passenger point to a calculated scheme rather than bad luck.
The Pick-Up
A seemingly casual encounter in the city is engineered as a police ‘pick-up’ to net a slippery offender. Identities blur as bait and trap close around a larger racket.
Mother o’ Mine
A case of petty crime exposes the fierce loyalties between a criminal son and his mother. An investigator leverages compassion as much as evidence to reach the truth.
The King’s Brahm
When a revered royal relic known as the Brahm vanishes, the inquiry must navigate ceremony, superstition, and jealous custodians. The solution strips away legend to reveal a very human theft.
The Greek Poropulos
A Greek trader’s name surfaces in a spate of smuggling and fraud along the docks. Patient surveillance and shipment checks lay bare a cleverly masked pipeline of contraband.
Kid Glove Harry
A dapper, meticulous thief with a taste for fine manners targets high society. A Yard man studies his habits to spring a trap that hinges on etiquette as much as evidence.
The Treasure of the Kalahari
Rumors of a lost hoard in the Kalahari draw fortune-seekers into a harsh landscape of mirages and double-crosses. The detective work separates genuine clues from lures designed to swindle backers.
The Weakling
Dismissed as timid, a key figure’s apparent frailty masks unexpected resolve and insight. The case turns when the ‘weakling’ upends assumptions and exposes the real aggressor.
Bulfox Asleep
With the notorious Bulfox lying low, rivals misread inactivity as safety. A watchful officer uses the lull to bait a misstep that reveals Bulfox’s next move.
The Perfect Gentleman
A polished connoisseur of crime relies on charm and immaculate conduct to disarm victims. A tiny lapse in manners proves the loose thread that unpicks his facade.
The Prison-Breakers
An audacious plan to spring a convict unfolds under the warders’ noses. Anticipating the timing and method, the authorities turn the escape into a net for the entire ring.
The Governor of Chi-Foo and other Detective Stories
The Governor of Chi-Foo
In Chi-Foo, as in the Forbidden City, the phrase Iang-knei-tsi, which means “foreign devil,” was one seldom employed, for Colin Hemel, who in the days of the Manchu dynasty had the august and godlike ear of the Daughter of Heaven, was as terribly quick to punish now that he served a democratic president. As for Chi-Foo, Augustus Verrill sat there, and, brute as he was, he had still enough of the white man in him to resent Iang-knei-tsi.
So it was Iang-ren that people said, meaning (so we persuade ourselves) “honorable foreign.”
What they call foreigners in Chi-Foo nowadays I do not know, for Augustus Verrill is not there, and for this reason.
On a bright spring morning the interested but fearful people of Chi-Foo, straining their ears for the sound, were rewarded with the word they awaited. It was the word “shul!” which means “kill!”
A Chinaman with a thick padded coat of blue, his hands concealed in his sleeves, was picking a delicate way along the untidy street which leads to the Gate of a Thousand Regrets, when he heard the guttural whisper, and saw the crazy door of a house come flying outward.
He spun round on the heel of his felt boot, his eyes blinking in the strong sunlight, his lean brown face tense, and a grin of expectancy showing the white even rim of his teeth.
“Kill!” said the dog-faced leader.
The blue-coated Chinaman squared his elbow and a straight splinter of fire leaped from his hand.
The dog-faced man, with a grimace like one who swallows a noxious draught, went lurching against the white wall of the house, leaving it smeared and disfigured when he finally collapsed to his knees.
This was against all arrangement, for the Devil in Blue had left the inn outside the city gates, and in a second’s space the Street of Going Forth was deserted save for the blue-coated Chinaman and the gurgling thing that was huddled in the mud by the wall. The blue Chinaman looked down, frowning.
“Insensate Chink,” said he. “Blind and prejudiced instrument of fate—quo vadis?”
He took a white handkerchief from the fold of his sleeve and blew his nose, never removing his eyes from the dying man.
“Better you than me, by gad,[1q]” he said earnestly, “from all over the world to die like a pig in a wallow of mud? That’s no death for a gentleman.”
All the time he spoke aloud in English, yet so cleverly was he made up, so scrupulous was the attention he had devoted to his toilette and the et ceteras of his character that none in the city of Chi-Foo knew him for any other than Li Wan, a small-piece mandarin charged by the Daughter of Heaven to inquire into certain irregularities at the Court of Mandarin Wen-Ho-Hong, Governor of the Province of Chi-Foo.
He waited until the man was dead, then looked up and down the deserted street. The Gate of a Thousand Regrets was closed, though it was long before sunrise. The Captain of the Guard would explain the unusual happening, would also swear by his domestic gods that he saw no sight of brawling and heard no sound of shot.
At the other end of the street a little knot of small boys had gathered with folded arms, frowning curiously, and relaxing their attitude from time to time to point out, with their thin little arms stretched stiffly, the tragic consequences of the attack.
These melted as the man in blue, twirling his long-barreled Browning, walked slowly back the way he had come. The bazaar was alive with people—the bazaar which ran to the right from the street end to the very gates of the Yamen.
But even this crowd, silent and watchful, stepped on one side to give him a free passage. Once he heard a half-hearted “Shul!” and his quick ears caught the rustle of movement which is so ominous a sequence to such an urgent suggestion.
Then a jagged stone whistled past his ear, and he heard the “Ugh!” of the man who threw it.
He was half-way to the Yamen, and did not turn until another stone caught him in the middle of his well-padded back.
He whipped round as the thrower was stooping for further ammunition, and covered him.
“Oh, man,” said he, in the queer dialect of the river province, “I wish you a safe journey.”
The thrower dropped his stone as if he had been shot.
“Come nearer to me,” commanded the Blue Man, and the coolie shuffled forward through the mud, staring without expression into the gray eyes of the other.
“There is a wind on the river tonight,” said the man with the pistol.
“I sail my sampan in the wind,” stammered the other; and then, “Let me die if I have offended your honorable body.”
“Walk behind me, brother,” said the blue Chinaman, and continued on his way. The trembling coolie who had followed him did not see him grin, or know that the Devil in Blue was armed. He had used the password of the Mournful Owls—not for the first time—and here was a member of the secret society humbly serving him, though Chung-Win-Ti, the local head of the Order, lay stiffening in the mud not a stone’s throw away.
The man in blue passed hastily through the gates of the Yamen, and entered the outer Court of Justice.
He swept aside an imploring secretary full of murmurs about the Mandarin’s indisposition, and came without ceremony to the presence of the Governor.
Wen-Ho-Hong looked up as the Blue Man entered, and started.
“It is an honorable happening that you condescend to come to my hovel,” he murmured. “Does your graciousness desire something?”
“My miserable carcass has come,” said the Blue Man, a snarl on his lips, “despite the fact that your honorable assassins endeavored to send me on the journey; also, my noble prince, I fear that I have villainously slain an honorable servant of yours, Chung-Win-Ti, in the Street by the Gate.”
The æsthetic face of the other did not so much as twitch.
“If you had brought your nobleness with the other honorable members of your Commission,” he said gently, “I, unworthy as I am, would have sent forth my miserable guard to bring your felicity to the Yamen.”
For a moment they sat, two Chinamen with shaven heads and plaited queues, their hands upon their knees, watching one another; then the Governor spoke:
“Will your lordship deign to enter my poverty-stricken inner room?”
The stranger hesitated a moment, then rose without a word and followed the Mandarin through the great lacquered door, which the Mandarin closed carefully behind him.
“Now, Mr. Hemel,” he said, in English, “we can talk—what is the idea?”
Colin Hemel, the President of China’s Secret Service, lit a cigarette.
“A few slight irregularities, Augustus,” he said slowly, between his puffs. “Robbery of troops’ pay——”
“That’s nothing,” said the other lightly.
“Betrayal of the Government to the rebels—membership of a secret society.”
“That’s nothing either,” snarled the Mandarin. “Isn’t there anything else?”
Colin Hemel looked up at the beautiful carved ceiling of the sanctuary.
“When we were very young men,” he said slowly, “long before you went Chinese—I suppose the fact that we were both born in the land makes our jobs natural—there was a girl at Shanghai; do you remember?”
The other licked his lips.
“I was rather fond of her, and so were you,” Colin went on, “and when Li Hang took you up, made you his English secretary, and finally gave you a province to rule, I was jolly glad—it sort of left the way open to me.”
The other smiled faintly, but Colin seemed not to see him.
“I heard all about your wonderful success at Pekin, how you had pleased the Daughter of Heaven, and your fine new appointment—the only American to hold such a job, aren’t you?”
The Mandarin nodded.
“I used to talk about it to her, and she was a little wistful. One day she disappeared.”
The man before him averted his gaze.
“She disappeared,” repeated the Secret Service man, blowing out a cloud of smoke, “and she came here.”
There was a dead silence, which the Mandarin broke.
“Well?” he asked defiantly.
“Well,” said the other, “I have added to your crimes—that.”
The man he called Augustus—he was an Augustus Verrill before his Chinese days—nodded.
“I somehow fancied you were on the track when I heard the Commission was appointed,” he said; “naturally I tried—to stop you. I am rather a big chap with the Owls, and they do, well—they do things for me.”
“Naturally,” said the blue-coated man dryly.
“As for Miss—er—Mrs. Verrill, for, of course, I married her—you are quite mistaken if you think she is unhappy. You shall see her—if you care—after this trial. I suppose it is a trial?”
Colin nodded.
“The Commission will arrive in an hour. I came on ahead for reasons of my own.”
“To secure news of her?” The Mandarin’s eyes narrowed.
“Exactly. Can’t I—can’t I see her now?”
The Mandarin shook her head.
“Be reasonable, my dear fellow,” he said suavely. “She is in the very best of health—lives like a princess and all that sort of thing—servants—and she’s awfully happy.”
Colin rose, and paced the parquetted floor of the room, his hand on his breast.
“That is all I want,” he said, a little huskily. “I wronged you, Verrill—I’m sorry.” He held out his hand. “I always thought there was a beast in you. Somehow I never thought of her as being happy. That—that was conceit, I suppose. I’ll arrange the Commission for you.”
Later he was to remember the attempt on his life, and wonder why—if the man had nothing to fear. But perhaps he feared for her, that this masterful officer, who now enjoyed the confidence of the Daughter of Heaven, would carry her back to her people perhaps.
He went to the sitting of the Commission with a light heart.
* * * * * * * *
He who was called Wen-Ho-Hong swore by all his domestic gods, and by every sacred thing save his dead father—he was too much of a gentleman to so perjure himself—that he knew nothing of the world of the Owls, nor of any other secret society. He was charged also with having been the cause of a mutiny in the army by withholding his soldiers’ pay for a year, but here he saved himself without difficulty.
The Owls’ business was more difficult to explain away to the commissioners from Pekin. Though he thrust responsibility upon a small-piece mandarin named Ho-shi-lai, though he arrayed witnesses by the thousand—producing a sample hundred in the flesh before the grave Commission who sat, hands on knees, spectacled and impassive, in the court-house—to testify to his innocence, neither Li-hung-sao nor the teak-faced Mandarin with the winking eye, who sat at the end of the row of judges, were visibly impressed.
“The Daughter of Heaven” (they still preserve the faction of Royal Government in China), murmured Li-hung-sao apologetically, “is disturbed, and miserable sycophant as I am, and unworthy to discuss such high matters with Your Excellency, yet I must humbly ask for a better story to carry to the gate of the Celestial City.”
“Prince,” said the Governor lightly, and he glanced meaningly at Colin Hemel, “I have sworn by the Noble Dead, and I have brought witnesses to prove that I know nothing of the killing of the Sesu folk—I can do no more.”
Li-hung-sao had glanced from time to time at the third member of the Commission.
“What does Your Excellency say to this?” he asked timidly, for president though he was, the last word was with the blue-coated man at the least important place.
Colin Hemel twisted round.
“I am unworthy to give an opinion,” he said, and he was occupied in his mind with the important question—how little could he with decency fine this peccant Mandarin, before he delivered a mild admonition?
For he was anxious to have done with this farce of a trial—a farce which he had planned so tragically—and go to some place where he could see her over again and for the last time. How strange she would seem in the Chinese costume she would wear! She with her flaxen hair and gray eyes.
“Your Excellency knows,” he began, when there was a stir in the crowd, a howl like the howl of a beast, and a figure dived head down between the soldiers. It fell on its knees before the grave court.
A coolie flung after and lashed at the quivering figure in his fear and rage.
“Excellencies,” he stammered, “a woman from the kitchen—shameless.”
“Mercy, O judges!” the thing on the floor mumbled and blubbered in Chinese, and raised its head and caught the staring eyes of the Mandarin in blue. He saw the cropped hair, the gray eyes, the wasted face, the skinny arms stretched in supplication.
“Mr.—Mr. Hemel!” sobbed the wreck, and collapsed.
“Let this woman be taken to my chair,” said Hemel softly; “in the name of the Daughter of Heaven, let no man harm her.”
The court was very still; only the shuffling feet of the man who lifted the figure and the heavy breathing of the Governor of Chi-Foo were the sounds heard.
Then Hemel, white as death, leaned forward, consulting no man, and struck a gong with his bare knuckles.
Through the side door curtained with gold and black tapestries came a man bare to the waist, dull-eyed and brown. He ran forward and sank on his knees before the judge, sweeping his lithe body till his shaven forehead touched the ground.
“Go, Fa-ti-sing,” said Colin Hemel huskily, “taking with you His Excellency Wen-Ho-Hong, the Governor. Outside the city gate, near by the Plain of Ten Thousand Sorrows, you shall strike the head of Wen-Ho-Hong from his body. In the name of the Daughter of Heaven, tremble and obey.”
So they took Augustus Verrill to the appointed place, and snicked off his head before an incurious crowd, and the members of the Commission went back to Pekin in their chairs.
All except the teak-faced Mandarin, who, with three soldiers at his back, rode out of the Gate of Great Assistance, and took the bumpy road for the hospital at Foo-sang, riding beside a palanquin wherein lay a Chinese kitchen-wench who was all the world to him.
