Part 23 (2/2)

Here they ran into a bunch of c.h.i.n.ks just coming out of the main club room.

There were friends of Ah Lung's among them, and a tremendous pow-wow and excitement followed, all in Chinese.

Alice explained that it was partly sympathy, partly indignation against Dr. Garshaski, who was a club member, and partly about the presence of detectives in the House of the Seven Delights.

Ah Lung quieted them, however.

”Leave me now,” he said. ”I am in the hands of my friends. They will do all for me that can be done. They are not willing that you should enter the club room.”

So the detectives were escorted back to earth by the way Old King Brady and Leggett had come down into these lower regions and glad enough they were to find themselves safe on China alley.

Parting from Leggett, they started, reaching it shortly before midnight.

Alice was so exhausted that Old King Brady insisted that she should postpone her story till morning.

”I don't know that it will do any good to tell it now,” she said. ”But I must give you a hint. There is buried or hidden money at the bottom of all this business.”

”Yes, yes, I know,” said Old King Brady. ”I heard Garshaski call out about it. Do you know where the hiding place is?”

”In an old house down by the North Beach.”

”Does he know?”

”He does. He has had plenty of time to get there and get the treasure if it still exists.”

”If that is the case,” said the old detective, ”then I think the best thing that all of us can do is to go to bed.”

They did so and it was not until the next morning at breakfast in the private parlor of the detective's suite that Alice's story was told.

We need only take it up at the scene in the torture room when the princess fainted and Alice thought her dead.

”They ran me out then,” she said, ”so I don't know exactly what the yellow fiends did to her after that.

”They tied me to the chair and I think Garshaski meant mischief.

”After a little he brought the princess into the room and laid her on the bed. She was in a dreadful condition, but she was game still. She had not given the secret away. I begged Garshaski to untie me and allow me to attend to her, but he wouldn't hear to it.

”'She'll come around all right,'” he declared; adding:

”'And for your interference you have to suffer, Alice. I will make you feel sorry you ever insulted me in the way you did.' He then left us, and I tried to question the princess, but she would not talk about herself.

”'Listen, Alice,' she said. 'That fiend has killed my cousin w.a.n.g Foo.

He told me so. He means to kill me, I know it, but I will never tell him where my grandfather hid his money. I will tell you, though, for you may live to get out of this and I want you, if you do, to go and get that money and give it to Ah Lung. Promise me that.'

”I gave her the promise and asked how much the money amounted to.

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