Argosy All-Story Weekly, October 7, 1922 — page 157: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

‘By FRED T was midnight—Far Eastern time—in the opium joint of Won Lung, Shanghai, China, and throughout the den all was quiet. Not as quiet, perhaps, as a nursery, but unusually calm for an opium den. Business had been good that evening. Every bunk in the long sleeping room had an occupant, now tucked safely in for the night with a pipe in his hand and a small pile of pills on a stand beside his pillow. In that quarter naught could be heard but the soft pad-pad of some attendant as he stepped in to see how his pretty charges were faring or the gentle “‘ sno-sno-sno ” of the sleepers as each gave audible expression to the pleasure he was experiencing in Dreamland. In the private domicile of Won Lung, a series of rooms at the rear of the poppy- palace which were separated from the smokers’ retreat by a long hall as crooked as a pretzel, that worthy sat in a quietude even more so than that of the customers’ room. B. MANN Won Lung was constructed exactly to the specifications as laid down by all the architects who ever drew the plans for a Chinese story. Small slanting eyes—cruel, hard eyes—thin lips, high cheek-bones be- hind a yellow parchment skin, a mustache hanging down each side of the mouth to form an anzemic horseshoe, a cue down the back, and finger-nails three inches long. It was the finger-nails that now caused the only noise in this certain room, for as the Chinaman sat at the table preparing opium pills for the next night’s trade, ever and anon he would stretch forth a taloned hand to scratch what to a white person would have been an inaccessible part of the body—that No Man’s Land between the shoulder blades. And then would follow the soothing rasp of the nails as they struck his vertebra. These lengthy nails served another won- derful purpose. As is well known, an opium pill must be as near to perfect roundness as possible in order to insure its smoker 303 comicboooks C©