Sometimes a yellow face showed close to one of the streaming windows;
sometimes a black-eyed, pallid face, but never a face wholly sane and
healthy. This was an underworld where squalor and vice went hand in
hand through the beautiless streets, a melting-pot of the world's
outcasts; this was the shadowland which last night had swallowed up
Nayland Smith.
Ceaselessly I peered to right and left, searching amid that
rain-soaked company for any face known to me. Whom I expected to find
there, I know not, but I should have counted it no matter for surprise
had I detected amid that ungracious ugliness the beautiful face of
Karamaneh, the Eastern slave-girl, the leering yellow face of a
Burmese dacoit, the gaunt, bronze features of Nayland Smith; a hundred
times I almost believed that I had seen the ruddy countenance of
Inspector Weymouth, and once (at what instant my heart seemed to stand
still) I suffered from the singular delusion that the oblique green
eyes of Dr. Fu-Manchu peered out from the shadows between two stalls.
It was mere phantasy, of course, the sick imaginings of a mind
overwrought. I had not slept and had scarcely tasted food for more
than thirty hours; for, following up a faint clue supplied by Burke,
Slattin's man, and, like his master, an ex-officer of New York Police,
my friend, Nayland Smith, on the previous evening, had set out in
quest of some obscene den where the man called Shen-Yan--former keeper
of an opium shop--was now said to be in hiding.
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