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.
For a moment Li Choo stood and looked at the motionless figure, with the head fallen on the breast; then he put the reins carefully in the hands of the dead man, placed the fallen hat on his head, climbed down from the wagon, patted a horse as he slip-slopped by, and disappeared towards Tralee into the night, leaving what was left of Joel Mazarine in his wagon at the crossing of the trails.
As Li Choo stole swiftly away, he met two other figures, silent and shadowy, and somehow strangely unreal, like his own.