N all San Francisco's Chinatown, gilded with sunlight and richly splashed with color, there was not another eight so quaint., so bright, or so engaging as that of pretty little Sucy Ling—motherless and only five years old—sitting alone in the doorway of her father's house, holding fast to a poor old headless doll as if she felt that it too might be just about to pass from her tiny grasp forever.
She was a gayly dressed but sober little woman-child, with large, brown, half-awed eyes, a tiny mouth sensitive with eagerness for affection, and the roundest and smoothest of tinted-bronze cheeks imaginable. Her tiny feet, in their wee yellow boats of shoos, were as motionless as her two dimpled, doll-clasping hands, for she had a fear.
Whether she remembered how death had come to take away her mother, and knew certain signs of its approach, or whether she partially comprehended some vague intuition respecting her father's fatal illness now, may never be known; yet she sat in the very corner of the doorway, instinctively making room for death to pass, and for a long time nothing came there to keep her company save the sunlight, generous and comforting.
Nevertheless, as she sat there, demure and alone, a Chinese melody, teased from a one-stringed violin, at last came floating down from the casement above, and gave her great pleasure, despite the fact that its cadence was overburdened with sentiments of newly budded love.
It was Luey Mow, a Chinese youth of two-and-twenty, who played with such impassioned fervor. He was joyously confiding certain transports of ecstasy to the various gods who might have been attracted to this particular neighborhood of Chinatown by sundry red lanterns and Oriental symbols in green and gold. He was very much in love indeed with an altogether delightful Chinese maiden at present secure from Mongolian intrigue in the Rescue House, that was roofed and fenced by white man's law and governed by white man's women. The maiden's name was Nikku Loy, and in memory of certain glances bestowed upon him obliquely from her eyes, Luey played and song a rapture vocally expressible only in a very high falsetto voice. He sang a continued novelette, concerning the manner of his love, for each and every day of the year, the tale enriched and supplemented by a florid recital of the. names of the gods who would esteem the mating between himself and Nikku Loy an obedience to their most celestial wishes.
It was a pleasant song—from a Chinese point of contemplation, Little Sucy Ling opened wide her tiny cars and tiny nature, as she sat in the sunlight, to receive every chirrup, accent, and squeak of the one-stringed rhapsody. And the squeaks were many. To her lonely little being, however, the notes came like invisible playmates, to nestle in the lap of her heart. She sat so still and listened so intently that she did not even observe the hard, ugly face of a large Chinese man, revealed at a window of the opposite house, as the creature glared across the narrow street at her pretty little figure. Indeed, when he came from his door at last and stood for a moment looking hungrily upon her, she continued oblivious to everything save that melody of love.
Impatiently the man surveyed the street. It was all but deserted. Again he regarded the listening little girl as he once more revolved his meditations. There she sat, in easy reach—worth at least three hundred dollars, and her father perhaps already dead! A galvanic spasm contracted the muscles of the man's tense limbs as he abruptly restrained an impulse to dart across the way and snatch little Sucy thus prematurely. But he thought of a method far more crafty, and furtively retreated to his hovel.
In half an hour the music ceased, and eager little Sucy felt that the friendly squeaks and chirrups had returned to their home. Then the sunlight also deserted her corner and left her in the cooling shadow.
Afraid to arise and enter the house, afraid to remain where the dusk was stealing in upon her so mystically, little Sucy tried her utmost to suppress a tiny shiver and to face the dreaded things of coming night, already weaving shades about the precious form of her doll. Her little arms were aching with the tension of her grasp; her tiny heart was trembling timidly at the silence. Then a stealthy sound behind her, in the house, abruptly cast a paralysing terror on her being.
In her father's door stood the Chinese ogre who had glared at her so covetously from across the street. He had come to the house by a hidden way.