The Manila Kid was in the social hall, rummaging through the shelf of battered and scratched records above the taking machine. A quaint spirit, the Kid; weak, oddly useless, gloomily devoted to music of a simple sort, quite without enterprise. But.... by this time the delicate steel machinery of her mind was functioning clearly.... he would serve now, if only as a means of solving that first little problem of interesting Tex.
She paused in the doorway; caught his furtive eye, and with a slight beckoning movement of her head, moved back into the comparative darkness. Slowly--thick-headedly of course--he came out.
“Jim,” she said, “I'm wondering if you and Tex wouldn't like to pick up a little money.”
“What do you think we are?” he replied in a guarded sulky voice. “Tex dropped three thousand at that fight. There's no talking to him. He's rough--that's what he is.”
“Jim--” she considered the man before her deliberately; his lank spineless figure, his characterless, hatchet face: “Jim, send Tex to me.”
“Don't act up, Jim. I've never handed you anything that wasn't more than coming to you. I know all about you, Jim. Everything! I'm not talking--but I know. This is a big proposition I've got in mind, and you'll get your share, if you come in and stick with me? How about half a million in jewels?”
“I don't know's Tex would care to go in for anything like that. If it's a yegg job--”
“I'm not a yegg,” she replied crisply. “Ask Tex to slip around here. I don't want to talk on that side of the deck.”
“I suppose you wouldn't like young Kane to know what you are--er?”
“That sort of talk won't get you anywhere, Jim.”
“Better learn how to use them. You hurry around to Tex's cabin. We may have to move quickly.” Sulkily the Kid went; and shortly returned.
“Well”--this after a silence--“what did he say? Is he coming?”
“He wants you to go around there--to his stateroom.”
“I won't do that. He's got to come here.”
This decision lightened somewhat the gloom on the Kid's saturnine countenance. He went again, more briskly.
The girl slipped into her own cabin and consulted a folding map of China she had there. Huang Chau--she measured roughly from the scale with her thumb--would be seventy or eighty miles up-stream from Kiu Kiang here, perhaps thirty-five down-stream from Hankow.