focused themselves on him in those few instants. It made him think of
an X-ray machine. But Shan Tung was human. And he was clever. Given
another skin, one would not have taken him for what he was. The
immaculateness of his speech and manners was more than unusual; it was
positively irritating, something which no Chinaman should rightfully
possess. So argued Keith as he went up to Brady's bungalow.

He tried to throw off the oppression of the thing that was creeping
over him, the growing suspicion that he had not passed safely under the
battery of Shan Tung's eyes. With physical things he endeavored to
thrust his mental uneasiness into the background. He lighted one of the
half-dozen cigars McDowell had dropped into his pocket. It was good to
feel a cigar between his teeth again and taste its flavor. At the crest
of the slope on which Brady's bungalow stood, he stopped and looked
about him. Instinctively his eyes turned first to the west. In that
direction half of the town lay under him, and beyond its edge swept the
timbered slopes, the river, and the green pathways of the plains. His
heart beat a little faster as he looked. Half a mile away was a tiny,
parklike patch of timber, and sheltered there, with the river running
under it, was the old home. The building was hidden, but through a
break in the trees he could see the top of the old red brick chimney
glowing in the sun, as if beckoning a welcome to him over the tree
tops. He forgot Shan Tung; he forgot McDowell; he forgot that he was
John Keith, the murderer, in the overwhelming sea of loneliness that
swept over him. He looked out into the world that had once been his,
and all that he saw was that red brick chimney glowing in the sun, and
the chimney changed until at last it seemed to him like a tombstone
rising over the graves of the dead. He turned to the door of the
bungalow with a thickening in his throat and his eyes filmed by a mist
through which for a few moments it was difficult for him to see.