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small hatchet out of his pocket and proceeded to shave the
hair from the back of his hand with its razor-sharp edge.
    Sam turned quite pale and began to
bluster until Lem thought it best to intervene.
    But even his lesson in manners had
no effect on the brash youth. He so persisted in his unmannerly conduct that
our hero was tempted to part company with him.
    Sam stopped in front of what was
evidently an unlicensed liquor parlor.
    “Come on in,” he said, “and have a
whisky.”
    “Thank you,” said our hero, “but I
don’t care for whisky.” “Perhaps you prefer beer?”
    “I don’t care to drink anything,
thank you.”
    “You don’t mean to say you’re a
temperance crank?” “Yes, I think I am.”
    “Oh, go to the devil, you prude,”
said Sam, ringing a signal button that was secreted in the door of the “blind
pig.”
    To Lem’s great relief, he at last found himself alone. It was still early, so he decided
to continue his stroll.
    He turned a corner not far from Pell
Street, when, suddenly, a bottle smashed at his feet, missing his skull by
inches.
    Was it intentional or accidental?
    Lem looked
around carefully. The street was deserted and all the houses that faced on it
had their blinds drawn. He noticed that the only store front on the block
carried a sign reading, “Wu Fong, Wet Wash Laundry,”
but that meant nothing to him.
    When he looked closer at the bottle,
he was surprised to see a sheet of notepaper between the bits of shattered
glass and stooped to pick it up.
    At this the door of the laundry
opened noiselessly to emit one of Wu Fong’s followers, an enormous Chinaman.
His felt slippers were silent on the pavement, and as he crept up on our hero,
something glittered in his hand.
    It was a knife.

 
18
     
    Many chapters earlier in this book,
we left our heroine, Betty Prail , in the bad house of
Wu Fong, awaiting the visit of a pockmarked Armenian from Malta.
    Since then numbers of orientals , Slays, Latins , Celts and Semites had visited her, sometimes as
many as three in one night. However, so large a number was rare because Wu Fong
held her at a price much above that of the other female inmates.
    Naturally enough, Betty was not
quite as happy in her situation as was Wu Fong. At first she struggled against
the series of “husbands” that were forced on her, but when all her efforts
proved futile she adapted herself as best she could to her onerous duties.
Nevertheless, she was continuously seeking a method of escape.
    It was Betty, of course, who had
authored the note in the bottle. She had been standing at her window, thinking
with horror of the impending visit of a heavyweight wrestler called Selim Hammid Bey ,
who claimed to be in love with her, when she suddenly saw Lem Pitkin turn the corner and pass in front of the laundry. She had hastily
written a note describing her predicament, and putting it into a bottle had
tossed it into the street.
    But, unfortunately, her action had
not gone unobserved. One of Wu Fong’s many servants had been carefully watching
her through the keyhole, and had immediately carried the intelligence to his
master, who had sent the enormous Chinaman after Lem with a knife.
    Before I take up where I left off in
my last chapter, there are several changes in Wu Fong’s establishment which I
would like to report. These changes seem significant to me, and while their
bearing on this story may not be obvious, still I believe it does exist.
    The depression hit Wu Fong as hard
as it did more respectable merchants, and like them he decided that he was
over-stocked. In order to cut down, he would have to specialize and could no
longer run a “House of All Nations.”
    Wu Fong was a very shrewd man and a
student of fashions. He saw that the trend was in the direction of home
industry and home talent, and when the Hearst papers began their “Buy American”
campaign he decided to get rid of all the foreigners in his employ and turn his
establishment into an