Fong Hen placed thirteen tiny glasses upon the table and filled them
with rice whisky scented with aniseed and a dash of powdered ginger. At
a signal from Wong Get the thirteen Chinamen lifted the glasses and
drank.

"The meeting is adjourned," said he.

* * * * *

Eighty years before, in a Cantonese rabbit warren two yellow men had
fought over a white woman, and one had killed the other. They had
belonged to different societies, or tongs. The associates of the
murdered man had avenged his death by slitting the throat of one of the
members of the other organization, and these in turn had retaliated thus
establishing a vendetta which became part and parcel of the lives of
certain families, as naturally and unavoidably as birth, love and death.
As regularly as the solstice they alternated in picking each other off.
Branches of the Hip Leong and On Gee tongs sprang up in San Francisco
and New York--and the feud was transferred with them to Chatham Square,
a feud imposing a sacred obligation rooted in blood, honor and religion
upon every member, who rather than fail to carry it out would have
knotted a yellow silken cord under his left ear and swung himself gently
off a table into eternal sleep.

Young Mock Hen, one of the four avengers, had created a distinct place
for himself in Chinatown by making a careful study of New York
psychology. He was a good-looking Chink, smooth-faced, tall and supple;
he knew very well how to capitalize his attractiveness. By day he
attended Columbia University as a special student in applied