Author: Hugh Wiley

About:

Twelve stories of the Chinese underworld by author Wiley. Though listed in catalogs as a "yellow peril"-type work, in fact Manchu Blood displays a sensitivity and awareness of the culture more in line with the writings of Erle Stanley Gardner and Walter Gibson than Sax Rohmer.

Excerpt:

At eight o'clock that night a tired old Chinese lady, guarding two daughters who craved American music, sat in the front row at the Lily Bell concert and saw upon the violinist's finger a flat jade band. When the musician had responded to his third encore the watchful mamma in the front row blinked her keen old eyes in amazement. “The empress' ring! The Circle of Heaven—on the finger of this fiddling mongrel!”

When she had taken her daughters home she made haste to spread the news. “The upstart boy who sells fish and bad eggs at Sang's grocery store is wearing the Circle of Heaven.”

At eleven o'clock old Sang, enjoying a five-cent cigar and good luck at dominoes with half a dozen of his cronies in the apothecary shop run by the Benevolent Horned Toad Association, heard the news. He waited until he had confirmed the item of gossip from two or three additional sources and then in the night he made his way along the shadows of Ross Alley until he came to an open door lighted by a single gas jet. On the light's globe was painted the symbol signifying Sai-Moon, the West Door—the exit from life.

Against the dark wall to his right were three steel mail boxes. His groping hand found the third one of these, and then his fingers touched a nail head which protruded from the wood paneling directly beneath it. He pressed this nail head four times, and without further ceremony shuffled silently up a long black stairway. When he had reached the third floor of the silent house a doorway to the left of the landing lay open before him. He entered it and closed the door, and then into the dimly lighted room he spoke his own name.

Immediately thereafter a shadowed corner of the room was suddenly peopled by two men.

The old man approached them. “It is Sang,” he said, half aloud. “I have work for you that must be accomplished this night.”

Thereafter for five minutes the trio, heads together, indulged in a sharp whispered conversation.

From a purse in his pocket Sang counted out ten gold pieces.

“You are paid in advance,” he whispered. “See that your work is as good as the gold that I give you.”

He groped his way from the room and down the long stairway.

At midnight in the opium room back of his shop he lighted the single gas jet. He saved the match and applied it to the wick of the little cooking lamp beside which lay his opium equipment. His fingers were trembling when with the little steel hook he retrieved a shred of the black gum from its container. With the third deep draft from the ivory-tipped pipe his nerves quieted.

For more than two hours he lay on the couch quietly waiting for an expected guest. Somewhere in the front of the store the sound of a clock striking the third hour of morning was followed by the tinkle of the alarm bell which announced the opening of the street door.

Sang sat up on the edge of the couch and called softly into the darkness, “Back here! I am waiting for you.”

The shuffle of padded shoes, and then the doorway of the opium room framed the sinister form of the night's visitor. The man was a Chinaman and his face was marked with the scars of evil. His eyes glittered as he looked at Sang.

“The gods of luck attended my work,” he said. He handed a tin tobacco can to the old Chinaman. “Here is—what you demanded.”

Sang took the tobacco can and glanced inside of it. He snapped the cover back in place and reached again for his purse. This time he counted out twenty gold coins.

“You have done well. Here is the balance of payment. Divide equally with your companion.”

He closed the heavy door of the little room behind the departing visitor, and now in this dark sanctuary his old body surrendered to a paroxysm of trembling which delayed the tranquillity that finally came with the curling smoke of opium.

Prone on the couch, with his eyelids quivering in their last resistance to the narcotic, he glanced again into the tin tobacco box. His lips hardened and the kindly lines about his mouth were suddenly gone. With the next deep inhalation from the warm pipe came relief from the anguish which had possessed him.

For three hours the little room was free from the black devils that the gods of evil send to torture the souls of men.