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estate, Clad had roared straight through a bandit ambush doing seventy miles per hour and taking a curve at just under fifty while the Sten-gun slugs slammed against his car.
    There was a somewhat blurred photograph of Clad standing next to his bullet-marked Riley sedan. The incident was newsworthy because Barney Clad only two years before had been a member of the Jaguar racing team. It was noted that Clad had finished second in the famous Le Mans 24-hour sports car race in 1953.
    In June Tam Lee’s gang slashed 540 rubber trees in the Ladang area. He led a night raid on the newly established resettlement camp at Seremban, blowing up over a hundred feet of barbed wire and injuring two constables. Twice that month he destroyed the water pipe and telephone lines leading into Ladang.
    Barney Clad, it was noted during this same period, had organized an interpolice post badminton tournament for the entire sate of Selangor. Finals to be played the first week of July in K.L.
    This last item was unusual enough to rate a close-up photograph of the tournament organizer. Ah Min studied the youthful face of Barney Clad. His age was given as twenty-nine, but he looked much younger. He was smiling—apparently proud of himself, Ah Min decided—and showing very white teeth against his deeply tanned complexion.
    Ah Min clipped the photo and studied it for days, comparing it to the picture of Tam Lee in her mind. Comparing this man who organized badminton tournaments with the man who attacked well-guarded resettlement camps. The smiling one who drove fast motor cars and used his life only to amuse himself. The unsmiling one who had been in the jungle eleven years now, fighting first the running-dog Japanese and now the red-haired devil English.
    Soon perhaps everyone would see who was the better man. It would require only ordinary luck.
    Ah Min was released from Taiping near the end of June. The Malayan Chinese Association, after interviewing her, requested she be given a civil service position to make use of her newly acquired skills of typing and shorthand. “Since she must live in Ladang to support her widowed aunt,” the M.C.A. report stated, “perhaps she could be given a position in the office of the police post—”
    B ARNEY CLAD WAS DELIGHTED to have a girl who could take shorthand. At least that was the word he used. Ah Min saw little evidence of his delight. Clad smiled the white smile of the photograph and seemed friendly, though far from enthusiastic, sitting low in a canvas chair with his feet crossed on the corner of the desk.
    She was more surprised than disappointed that he didn’t study her more closely. She knew very well that few girls, even in Kuala Lumpur, could wear a white, tight-fitting cheongsam dress as she could. Few had her softly lighted eyes, or knew enough to comb their hair straight and shoulder length so that it would gleam and move subtly as you looked over your shoulder. Yet Clad hadn’t even got up.
    He asked only a few questions about Taiping before saying, “We can begin right now if you’re ready.”
    Ah Min nodded. “Certainly. If I may get my book?”
    Clad returned her nod. “I’ll be right here.”
    In the outer office, Clad’s Malay police clerk watched Ah Min closely. What was his name? she thought. Yeop. Yes, that was it. She could feel his eyes on her, but she picked up her notebook and returned to Clad’s office without looking at him.
    The police lieutenant still sat with his feet on the desk; but now he was intently writing something on a small notepad. Ah Min’s eyes rose to the wall map of Malaya behind him. But within the moment her eyes lowered to Clad again, seeing his short-cut brown hair and deeply tanned face and arms. That was a curious thing. The white man was darker than the Chinese and Malays, darker than anyone in the village except the few Tamil Indian people. This smiling, slow-talking, unexcitable