He went on to explain that Mhtoon Pah had required him to come back late by an unfrequented alley, from where his master himself had admitted him into the basement of the shop.  There was nothing altogether unusual about this, it appeared, as Mhtoon Pah was very strange in his ways at times.  He cooked his own food for fear of poison, and was constantly suspecting some indefinite enemy of designs upon his life.  What was unusual was the fact that he had been taken at once into the small cell, and that, once there, Mhtoon Pah had behaved like a madman.

Absalom could recall no coherent account of what the curio dealer had told him.  He had spoken to him of murder, and told him that the Chinamen in the Quarter, headed by Leh Shin, were looking for him to kill him, and that, for his safety, he must remain hidden away.  Mhtoon Pah told him that he would protect him, and that he would produce evidence to have Leh Shin hanged, and that once he was dead he would then emerge again, but not until then.  He told him how Chinamen killed their victims, and his fears and terrors communicated themselves to the boy, who delivered himself up to bondage without resistance.

For weeks Absalom dragged out a miserable existence, loose when Mhtoon Pah was in the shop, but chained to the wall whenever he went out, and only for an hour after midnight was the boy ever allowed to emerge into the dark, waste garden at the back of the house.  The rest of the time was spent in the cell, and Absalom broke into incoherent wailing as he called Hartley and Coryndon to witness that it had been a hard life.

As the end of his story approached, Absalom grew more dramatic and quoted the parting words of Mhtoon Pah before he went out to attend the Pwe at the Pagoda.

“I leave thee in fear,” said he, “for thou art the apple of my eye, O Absalom, and when I am gone some calamity may befall.  From whence it comes I know not, but as men look at the heaped clouds behind the hills and say, ‘Lo, it will soon fall in rain,’ so does my heart look out and observe darkness, and I am ill-satisfied to quit this house.”

His words rang in the mind of the boy, shut into the stifling darkness below the ground, and he remembered that he cried out for help, not once but over and over again, and that his cries were eventually answered by the voice of Leh Shin, who had called him a child of vipers and threatened to enter and break him against the wall as he would a plantain.  After that Absalom had refrained from crying out, and had waited silently expecting the door to open and admit Leh Shin and his last moment simultaneously.  Upon the silence came the sounds of scuffling and hoarse cries, and it seemed to Absalom that Leh Shin had called out that he had already cut the heart from his ribs, and was about to force it down Mhtoon Pah’s throat, and then nothing was very clear until voices and lights roused him from stupor to fresh terror and alarm.