"Are you ready for us, Sin?" asked Sir Lucien.
"All ready. Lola hate gotchee topside loom ready," replied the
Chinaman in a soft, crooning voice.
"Go ahead, Kilfane," directed Sir Lucien.
He glanced at Rita, who was standing very near him, surveying the evil
little room and its owner with ill-concealed disgust.
"This is merely the foyer, Rita," he said, smiling slightly. "The
state apartments are upstairs and in the adjoining house."
"Oh," she murmured--and no more.
Kilfane and Mollie Gretna were passing through the inner doorway, and
Mollie turned.
"Isn't it loathsomely delightful?" she cried.
"Smartest leg in Buenos Ayres!" shrieked the raven. "Sin Sin, Sin
Sin!"
Uttering a frightened exclamation, Mollie disappeared along the
passage. Sir Lucien indicated to Rita that she was to follow; and he,
passing through last of the party, closed the door behind him.
Sin Sin Wa never moved, and the raven, settling down upon the
Chinaman's shoulder, closed his serviceable eye.
CHAPTER XVII
THE BLACK SMOKE
Up an uncarpeted stair Cyrus Kilfane led the party, and into a kind of
lumber-room lighted by a tin oil lamp and filled to overflowing with
heterogeneous and unsavory rubbish. Here were garments, male and
female, no less than five dilapidated bowler hats, more tea-chests,
broken lamps, tattered fragments of cocoanut-matting, steel bed-laths
and straw mattresses, ruins of chairs--the whole diffusing an
indescribably unpleasant odor.
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