They clenched there with a power like that of
three men; for this was the kind of grip which, far away in the country
of the Yang-tse-kiang, Li Choo had learned in the days when he had made
youth a thing to be remembered.
No convulsive effort on the part of the victim could loosen that terrible
grip; but the horses, responding to the first jerk of the reins following
the attack, stood still, while a human soul was being wrenched out of the
world behind them.
No word was spoken. From the moment the fingers clutched his throat Joel
Mazarine could not speak, and Li Choo did his swift work in grim and
ghastly silence.
It did not take long. When the vain struggles had ceased and the fingers
were loosened, Li Choo's tongue clucked in his mouth, once, twice,
thrice; and that was all. It was a ghastly sort of mirth, and it had in
it a multitude of things. Among them was vengeance and wild justice, and
the thing that comes down through innumerable years in the Oriental mind
--that the East is greater than the West; that now and then the East must
prove itself against the West with all the cruelty of the world's prime.
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