The River's End by James Oliver Curwood
page 40 of 185 (21%)
page 40 of 185 (21%)
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McDowell's voice gave permission, and the door slowly opened. Cruze,
the young secretary, thrust in his head. "Shan Tung is waiting, sir," he said. An invisible hand reached up suddenly and gripped at Keith's throat. He turned aside to conceal what his face might have betrayed. Shan Tung! He knew what it was now that had pulled him back, he knew why Conniston's troubled face had traveled with him over the Barrens, and there surged over him with a sickening foreboding, a realization of what it was that Conniston had remembered and wanted to tell him--when it was too late. THEY HAD FORGOTTEN SHAN TUNG, THE CHINAMAN! VI In the hall beyond the secretary's room Shan Tung waited. As McDowell was the iron and steel embodiment of the law, so Shan Tung was the flesh and blood spirit of the mysticism and immutability of his race. His face was the face of an image made of an unemotional living tissue in place of wood or stone, dispassionate, tolerant, patient. What passed in the brain behind his yellow-tinged eyes only Shan Tung knew. It was his secret. And McDowell had ceased to analyze or attempt to understand him. The law, baffled in its curiosity, had come to accept him as a weird and wonderful mechanism--a thing more than a man--possessed of an unholy power. This power was the oriental's marvelous ability to remember faces. Once Shan Tung looked at a face, it was photographed in his memory for years. Time and change could not make him forget--and the law made use of him. |
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