"So-long," murmured the Chinaman.
"Good night, old bird," cried Jim, following his colleague.
"So-long."
The door closed, and Sin Sin Wa, shuffling across, rebolted it. As Sir
Lucien came out from his hiding-place Sin Sin Wa returned to his seat
on the tea-chest, first putting the glass, unwashed, and the rum
bottle back in the cupboard.
To the ordinary observer the Chinaman presents an inscrutable mystery.
His seemingly unemotional character and his racial inability to
express his thoughts intelligibly in any European tongue stamp him as
a creature apart, and one whom many are prone erroneously to classify
very low in the human scale and not far above the ape. Sir Lucien
usually spoke to Sin Sin Wa in English, and the other replied in that
weird jargon known as "pidgin." But the silly Sin Wa who murmured
gibberish and the Sin Sin Wa who could converse upon many and curious
subjects in his own language were two different beings--as Sir Lucien
was aware. Now, as the one-eyed Chinaman resumed his seat and the one-
eyed raven sank into slumber, Pyne suddenly spoke in Chinese, a tongue
which he understood as it is understood by few Englishmen; that
strange, sibilant speech which is alien from all Western conceptions
of oral intercourse as the Chinese institutions and ideals are alien
from those of the rest of the civilized world.
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