Sing Sing Nights Read online

  “You were telling me, Princess,” Barton resumed, now that he had the most essential thing of the interview, “that you hoped to find in China someone who will understand you. But will you meet enough people in royal circles to give any degree of choice in marriage?”

  “Well, there was once man,” she explained, her face clouding up, “oh, much older as I, who say he love me. Then was I eleven years in age — and my honourable grandfather was on China’s throne, just before China try being republic and fail. This man make serious mistake of going to my honourable grandfather with request for to marry me — we can marry so young we please in China, you know — and my honourable grandfather have him flogged. That make me very unhappy. And both my honourable father and honourable grandfather suffer for that, for this man Chu Li Yuan fled China with the Twelve Golden Coins of Confucius — and the work of centuries, of thousands of men and millions of taels of silver was lost. And poor O Lyra Seng the innocent cause of it all.”

  “The Twelve Golden Coins of Confucius!” murmured Barton, interested. “I’m afraid I don’t quite understand.”

  “I forgot,” she said simply, “that you are not of China. You see,” she explained, “when, in What in your calendar was year 478 B.C., the all-wise Confucius — in my land we call him Kong-Fu-Tse — die, he call to his bedside thirteen of his lifelong friends. To each of them did he give a golden coin hammered out by himself on his own gold-worker’s anvil. He tell them, as he lay dying, that the owners of those coins shall enjoy good luck, health and prosperity to the thousandth generation — and that when those thirteen coins shall come again together in one ownership, shall China reach the highest state of which she is capable — in ethics, military prowess, civilisation and wealth. These golden coins were handed down secretly from generation to generation; but two hundred years later an Emperor of the Wun dynasty constructed great spy system to ferret them out and bring them together into the coffers of the Emperor.”

  “And why was that?” Barton asked.

  “Oh, they were so blind,” the girl declared earnestly. “The rulers could not see — they cannot to-day — even my honourable father to-day does not see it any differently than his honourable fathers before him — nor do his present prime ministers nor his aids have even the proper interpretation yet — that Confucius meant it all figuratively; that if the owner of a coin believe it were able to bring luck and happiness, then the mental believe would bring that luck and happiness; that when individual superstition and individual greed had so far disappeared from mankind that the coins would be voluntarily given up to communistic ownership, then had mankind reached its highest state.” She paused. “And so, during last twenty-one hundred years have thousands of spies been going through China trying to find who owns the coins of Confucius’s original thirteen; millions of taels of silver have been spent in finding them. And one by one they have been located — their owners have been dragged into Emperor’s court and forced under penalty of beheadment to give them up so that original thirteen might be brought together. After twenty-one hundred years twelve had been recovered. These were kept in great room in royal palace. And Chu Li Yuan was the keeper. It was one of highest honours in the Empire. But when my honourable grandfather have him flogged, he flee in the night; and next day most valuable thing in China’s history was missing. Somewhere perhaps between Peking and the sea, perhaps in the mountains — did he bury them in his flight; but neither he nor they were ever seen since.”

  “Great Scott, Princess,” commented Barton, “but that was some terrible revenge for a flogging — to undo the work of thousands of years.” He paused and added jocularly: “Wouldn’t it have been better if you had added your entreaties to the request of this royal Chinaman, and married him, young as you were, and helped to keep these coins which were priceless to the Emperor and the Empire?”

  “But I not exactly like him,” she said, with a little uneasy laugh. “I feel queer little shivers when I talk to him and look at the funny little patch of albino hair in his queue and the funny little scar on his nose. He make — ’

  She stopped, her eyes opening in surprise. Barton had stiffened up in his chair; there was a roaring in his ears and he felt a sudden dizziness of astonishment. He was thinking of the odd patch of white hair in the queue of Sam Toy, the dead laundryman — and the equally odd little scar across the latter’s’nose.

  CHAPTER XXXI

  A JOKE ON LI HWEI TSUNG

  THE Princess O Lyra Seng continued to gaze bewildered toward Barton. “You are ill, Mr. Jason H. Barton?” she cried apprehensively.

  But for several seconds he found himself unable to make a reply. He was forcibly conjuring up again the mental picture he had of the dead Sam Toy back in the little darkened shop on Huron Street, wondering desperately if his imagination were playing tricks. But no; he seemed to recall most distinctly a short scar across the tip of the laundryman’s lean yellow nose, and a wisp of white hair in the latter’s queue. On top of this there occurred to him for the first time the complete isolation of the Huron Street shop, far away from Chinatown and the other Celestials in Chicago; hardly even in a good neighbourhood for a laundry, since the district was poor and full of cheap lodging-houses in which the inmates did light housekeeping. Finally he collected himself and spoke hurriedly:

  “Princess O Lyra Seng, will you do me a favour? Will you translate a few Chinese characters for me? I’ll be greatly oblig — ”

  He stopped short. Outside of the stuffy hotel room he heard approaching footsteps. Then the door of the room opened slowly, and glancing over his shoulder Barton glimpsed the short, squat Asiatic whom he had last seen in the foyer of the Hotel Rydenour; and directly behind the latter was the heavily-veiled Chinese woman.

  “Li Hwei Tsung!” Barton ejaculated to himself. He rose and bowed politely. “Wonder how he’ll take it?”

  The Chinese official stood in utter amazement in the doorway for a brief second; then he strode forward into the room, his face darkening. He looked Barton over from head to toe, then his eyes shot toward the Princess’s maid, and finally toward the Princess herself. He spoke a few quick words in Chinese. The Princess replied immediately in the same tongue; and, as it seemed to Barton, rather spiritedly. At once Tsung turned to the newspaper man.

  “You — you have been interviewing the Princess, sir?” he said, his voice dangerously near a snarl.

  “I think,” Barton reflected, to himself, “it’s my move.” Then aloud: “Why, yes, honourable Tsung, the Princess saw fit to talk to me of her life and her ideas. What she told me will be highly interesting to the American people.” He tucked his notebook snugly into his back pocket.

  “My man,” stated Tsung slowly, “do you not know that you cannot publish any interview with her Highness? Those are the especial instruction from her honourable father, the sole ruler over the great Empire of China.”

  “But this is America, honourable Tsung,” declared the younger man, nettled, “and America is a free country. So long as the Princess is of age and wished to talk to me, then I have a perfect right to take her words. It is my intention to publish it, signature and all, on the first page of my paper to-night. And when a paper gives its first page, you may be sure it highly appreciates the value of the news that covers that page.”

  The Chinaman moved toward him as if to strike him. He seemed to control himself by a mighty effort.

  “How did you enter here?” he asked meaningly.

  Barton smiled for the first time during the catechism. He knew that every hotel boasted a house detective — and he read the plan in the mind of the wily Oriental in an instant.

  “I walked in, honourable Tsung, through the door. I suggest that when locking a door behind you, you try it carefully to see that the lock has not slipped back.”

  Tsung scratched his chin with his forefinger. A shade of annoyance flashed over his stolid features — a look that told plainer than words of self-recrimination for his own apparent carelessness. Finally
he looked up.

  “I do not wish to make threats,” he announced, “but if you attempt to publish that interview, it will go bad with you in Chicago. The Chinese Empire has much power.” He waved his hand in an impressive sweep. “It extends even to newspapers.”

  At this juncture Barton turned toward the Princess, who had stood motionless all the while, evidently cowed by the presence of her official guardian. “Princess O Lyra Seng, I have stenographic notes of all you have said. I prize those notes most highly. Yet if you say give them up, I shall do so. If not — may I use them?”

  The Princess smiled reassuringly, and opened her mouth to speak. But even before her words came, Tsung snapped his fingers furiously toward the maid and spoke rapidly in Chinese, turning his head toward his wife and addressing a few words to her in the same tongue. A second later, both women had taken the Princess by the shoulders and were leading her almost forcibly into the next room. In the excitement Barton took up his hat and edged over until he was between the door of the stuffy plush parlour and the angry Tsung himself. And with the closing of the door of the adjacent room, he found himself quite alone with the Chinese official. Tsung came quickly to business.

  “Fortunately,” he said sneeringly, “I am long enough in your America to know how to talk in concrete American terms. Evidently, my dear sir, you realise that you hold the upper hand. Let us speak then, in terms of the American dollar. Exactly how many of them, Mr. Reporter, do you ask for your notes and your forgetfulness of the Princess’s words?” He fumbled in his back pocket and withdrew a fat tan leather wallet, burned over with intricate Chinese dragons.

  Barton laughed contentedly. He waved a hand away from him. “Please — please don’t attempt to talk money to me, honourable Tsung. You have evidently made a mistake in sizing me up. If a million dollars were flung on that table over there it wouldn’t move me. I have a right to that interview and I intend to keep it. Unfortunately you are from another land, and therefore don’t know American newspapers and newspaper men. News ranks just a little higher, you see, the world over, than mere money.”

  The Chinaman stood with his wallet in his hand and gazed at the newspaper man, most carefully, evidently taking in the splendid physique and the clear eye of his opponent in the duel of words. Perhaps, as an official of a great empire, he had a due appreciation both of physical strength and psychology — of the strength of the human body and the strength of character — for he suddenly changed his tack entirely.

  “What is the name of your paper?” he asked, not unfriendly.

  “The Chicago Evening Dispatch,” returned Barton coolly.

  “And your editor?”

  Barton surveyed him through half-closed eyes. “I imagine I see what he’s driving at now,” he thought. “Lord, if he only knew Frangenac as I know him! He could put a ten-thousand-dollar bill on Frangenac’s desk, and old Frog-Eater would fling it back in his face.” Then he answered the other’s query: “Leon Raoul Frangenac.”

  “Very well,” replied Tsung quietly. “You may go. I thank you.” He stepped over to the door and held it open.

  It was plain that the interview was at an end; so Barton backed rather ungracefully out of the room and into the narrow corridor. The stout oak door that barred the way to the elevator was now partly ajar on account of Tsung’s entrance into the suite; the silver shingle of the key hung loosely from it on the outside. He stepped from the corridor into the outside hall and pressed the button of the elevator. A moment later he was travelling downward with the elevator boy staring rather suspiciously at him.

  Instead of making his way back to the Dispatch office, he boarded a State Street car in the Loop, and shortly afterwards was back on the north side again, walking rapidly westward toward the Huron Street Laundry of the dead Sam Toy. As he turned in the door of the shop, he glimpsed a sign in the window which showed him pointedly that there was nothing in the universe swifter than the American business instinct. The sign read simply:

  TO RENT. — Apply to PATRICK SHANAHAN, 740, N. State Street.

  The same officer was still stationed grumpily in the doorway, and he looked up with evident surprise as Barton stepped in and closed the door behind him.

  “Back again?” he grunted. “Few of your brothers have been here, took a look, and blew out again. Body’s going to be taken to the police department morgue in half an hour — then I lock up and send the key over to the landlord.”

  “Guess I’m just in time, then,” said Barton easily. “Want to have a second look at the Chink.”

  He strode into the back room and went over to the cot. The space at the back of the partition wasn’t particularly light, so he struck a match in order to view the features of the dead Chinaman more accurately. A tiny scar was across the nose; and in the queue, lost at times among the bristling black hairs, was an undoubted strand of white albino hair weaving back and forth. Barton blew out the match and tossed it in the corner. The words of the Princess O Lyra came back to him with startling clarity: “Somewhere — perhaps between Peking and the sea, perhaps in the mountains, did he bury them in his flight. But neither he nor they were ever seen since.”

  “It’s Yuan all right,” he said incredulously. “Chu Li Yuan himself! I can hardly believe it, either,” He turned from the body. “And now comes the big scoop when I get that half a translation from Professor Chan Fu at Chicago U. Will it say anything about the Twelve Golden Coins of Confucius, I’m wondering?”

  CHAPTER XXXII

  TSUNG MAKES A CALL

  AFTER the newspaper man had left, Tsung paced angrily up and down the stuffy parlour of the suite. In the next room feminine voices, punctuated here and there by girlish voices, chattered excitedly: and an expert psychologist might have detected in the chattering the traces of sex sympathy rather than recrimination or discipline.

  As for Tsung, he stopped finally and poked his head in the next room, addressing a few words to his wife. Then he jammed his hat on his head and left the room. A second later he had locked the great door that led into the suite and was in the elevator itself.

  Down in the lobby he quickly had a taxicab summoned, and climbing in, gave the driver the instructions: “Evening Dispatch office, if you please.”

  From the Rydenour on Michigan Avenue to the Dispatch office on dark, dirty Market Street was only a drive of five minutes for a taxicab. In front of Newspaper Row the Chinaman dismounted, and bidding the chauffeur wait ascended the worn steps of the Dispatch building.

  Inside he inquired from a scurrying reporter the method of reaching “the honourable Mr. Leon Raoul Frangenac, editor,” and, securing a list of hurried directions, made the climb up the wooden stairway, past long rooms in which batteries of linotype machines were clicking methodically away.

  He paused undecidedly in the doorway of the city room. gazing curiously about at the reporters working feverishly away at the scattered typewriters, the floor covered with scraps of paper, the signs of indescribable confusion that seemed to permeate even the very atmosphere. Then, catching sight of the ground-glass cage that bore the words “City Editor,” he strode down the long room and rapped politely on the door.

  Frangenac, working inside with his collar and tie off, his sleeves rolled up, his desk covered with a great tangle of clippings, takes, ‘phone numbers, books, telegrams, and miscellaneous papers, growled an unwelcome “Come in,” and went on working without even looking up. “Yeah!” he snapped, as he heard the door open and close, and he proceeded to dive into a great dictionary for the spelling of a word of which he was not sure. “Whatchwant?”

  “Honourable Frangenac — city editor of Dispatch?” he heard a polite voice inquire at his elbow.

  Surprised, Frangenac glanced up. Some feet from him was a short, squat Chinaman dressed in a most stylish suit of imported Scotch tweeds. “Li Hwei Tsung is my name,” he heard the visitor announce deferentially. “I am the prime minister of the new Chinese Empire.”

  “Glad to meet you, Mr. Tsung,”
said Frangenac, rising. He indicated a chair near his desk. “Have a seat. What may I do for you, Mr. Tsung?”

  Tsung dropped into the chair indicated. He glanced about the tiny room for a moment before he spoke. Then he drove straight to his subject.

  “Mr. Frangenac, I am a man of few words — like most of my countrymen. I regret that I do not speak French, for I perceive that you are a Frenchman, and what few words I shall use might be more explicit in your mother tongue. But English it will have to be.” He paused. “You undoubtedly know that the honourable Emperor has appointed me the official guardian of his daughter, the Princess O Lyra Seng of China, on her trip around the world?” Frangenac nodded wonderingly. “The Princess is not a diplomat, Mr. Frangenac. And for that reason her honourable father has given me the most strict instructions that no interviews from her shall get into your splendid American papers. I hope you understand.”

  Frangenac wrinkled his brows. “I’m afraid I don’t just get it,” he announced genially. “We should be glad to have an interview with the Princess — and would be willing to have you direct the channels in which that interview runs.”

  Tsung made a gesture of dissent. “It is not that of which I have come to speak. I am here to talk in concrete terms. One hour ago one of your reporters — I have not his name — forced his way into the Princess’s apartment and secured an interview with her — a complete interview — and even took notes of her words. He — ”

  “The devil you say!” broke in Frangenac delightedly. “The devil! — and I didn’t think Barton could do it.”

  Tsung’s face darkened. “But that interview must never see the light of American print,” he announced meaningly; “for if it should, I would never be able to explain matters to her honourable father in Peking. So I am here, honourable Frangenac, to talk to you of methods of suppressing that interview in its entirety. You Americans — and because you are in charge of an American paper I include you under that category — are a peculiar race — a race that measures everything in terms of what you call the dollar. I therefore frankly ask you, honourable Frangenac, exactly how many of those dollars it will require to have the Dispatch go to the print-presses to-night without the words of the Princess O Lyra Seng gracing its splendid front pages?”