sun still continued to shine.  No regret rose before him now.  He felt no shame.  All that he saw was the fight, the tremendous fight, ahead of him, his fight to make good as Conniston, his fight to play the game as Conniston would have him play it.  The inspiration that had come to him as he stood facing the storm from the western mountains possessed him again.  He would go to the river’s end as he had planned to go before McDowell told him of Shan Tung and Miriam Kirkstone.  And he would not go alone.  Mary Josephine would go with him.

It was midnight when he rose from the big chair and went to his room.  The door was closed.  He opened it and entered.  Even as his hand groped for the switch on the wall, his nostrils caught the scent of something which was familiar and yet which should not have been there.  It filled the room, just as it had filled the big hall at the Kirkstone house, the almost sickening fragrance of agallochum burned in a cigarette.  It hung like a heavy incense.  Keith’s eyes glared as he scanned the room under the lights, half expecting to see Shan Tung sitting there waiting for him.  It was empty.  His eyes leaped to the two windows.  The shade was drawn at one, the other was up, and the window itself was open an inch or two above the sill.  Keith’s hand gripped his pistol as he went to it and drew the curtain.  Then he turned to the table on which were the reading lamp and Brady’s pipes and tobacco and magazines.  On an ash-tray lay the stub of a freshly burned cigarette.  Shan Tung had come secretly, but he had made no effort to cover his presence.

It was then that Keith saw something on the table which had not been there before.  It was a small, rectangular, teakwood box no larger than a half of the palm of his hand.  He had noticed Miriam Kirkstone’s nervous fingers toying with just such a box earlier in the evening.  They were identical in appearance.  Both were covered with an exquisite fabric of oriental carving, and the wood was stained and polished until it shone with the dark luster of ebony.  Instantly it flashed upon him that this was the same box he had seen at Miriam’s.  She had sent it to him, and Shan Tung had been her messenger.  The absurd thought was in his head as he took up a small white square of card that lay on top of the box.  The upper side of this card was blank; on the other side, in a script as exquisite in its delicacy as the carving itself, were the words: 

“With the compliments of Shan Tung.”

In another moment Keith had opened the box.  Inside was a carefully folded slip of paper, and on this paper was written a single line.  Keith’s heart stopped beating, and his blood ran cold as he read what it held for him, a message of doom from Shan Tung in nine words: 

“What happened to Derwent Conniston?  Did you kill him?”

XI