In Red and Gold. Merwin Samuel

when his fingers found hers under the steamer rug. Twilight was thickening into night now on the river. And they were in a dim corner. He was, she saw, at the point of almost utter disorganization. He was sensitive, emotional, quite spoiled. It was almost too easy to do what she might choose with him. It would be amusing to tantalize him, if there were time; watch him struggle in the net of his own nervously unripe emotions, perhaps shake him down (we are yet again dropping into her phraseology) without the surrender of a quid pro quo. That would please her sense of cool sharp power. But he might in that event, like the young naval officer down at Hong Kong, shoot himself; which wouldn’t do. No, nothing in that!

      This other larger matter, now, was a problem indeed; really, as yet, only a haze in her sensitive, strangely gifted mind. It put to the test at once her imagination, her instinct for dangerous enterprise, her skill at organizing the sluggish minds of others. It would mean dangerous and intense activity.

      She asked, in a careless manner, where the viceroy kept his treasures; and fixed in her mind the place he named – Huang Chau.

      The fool was squeezing her fingers now; unquestionably building in his ungoverned brain an extravagant image of herself; an image wrapped in veils of somewhat tarnished but certainly boyish innocence, sentimentalized, curiously less interesting than the complicated wickedness and intrigue of actual human life as it presented itself to her.

      When he tried to kiss her she left him. But lingered to listen to his proposal that she should follow him to his own cabin; smiled enigmatically in the dusk beneath the deck light; humming lightly, pleasingly, she moved away; turned to watch him bolting for his room.

      She strolled around the deck then. Apparently none other was sitting out. The teachers and the young men were spending the evening, she knew, with Dawley Kane at the consulate. Rocky had got out of that. Tex Connor was in his cabin; reading, doubtless, with his one good eye. For rough as he might be, this gambler and promoter of boxing and wrestling reveled secretly in love stories. He read them by the hundred, the old-fashioned paper-covered romances and tales of adventure. A pretty able man. Tex; useful in certain sorts of undertakings; certainly useful now; but with that curious romantic strain – a weakness, she felt. And a difficult man, strong, arrogant, leaning on crude power and threats where she leaned on delicately adjusted intrigue. Had Tex known better how to cover his various trails he would be in New York or London now, not out here on the coast picking up small change. Approaching him would be a bit of a problem; for a year or so their ways, hers and his, had lain far apart. It was not known, here on the boat, that they were so much as casually acquainted. They bowed at the dining table; nothing more.

      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.”

      “Why should I, Dix? Answer me that.”

      “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.”

      “Well – I’ve got eyes, you know.”

      “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.

      Tex was chewing a cigar by the rail At her step his round impassive face turned toward her.

      She said, “Hello, Tex!”

      He replied, his one eye fixed on her: “Well, what is this job?”

      “Listen, Tex – are you game for a big one?”

      “What is it?”

      “The revolution’s broken out at Hankow – or across at Wu Chang – ”

      “Yes, I know!”

      “There’s going to be another big battle near Hankow. The republicans are moving over. Sure to be a mix-up.”

      “Oh. yes!”

      “There’ll be loot – ”

      “Oh, that!”

      “Wait! I know where there’s a collection of jewels – diamonds, pearls, rubies, emeralds – all kinds.”

      “Do you know how to get it?”

      “Yes. It’s a big thing. We’d be selling stones for years in America and Europe, Will you go in with me, fifty-fifty?”

      “What’s the risk?”

      “Not much – with things so confused. Looks to me like one of those chances that just happens once in a hundred years. Take some imagination and nerve.”