The clock was striking eight as I walked out of the doors of the
Discoverers' Club and stood for a moment looking down lower Fifth
Avenue. As I paused, I felt with full force that uncomfortable
sensation of being watched that had both puzzled and harassed me for
the past two weeks. A curiously prickly, cold feeling somewhere deep
under the skin on the side that the watchers are located; an odd sort
of tingling pressure. It is a queer sort of a sensitivity that I have
in common with most men who spend much of their lives in the jungle or
desert. It is a throwback to some primitive sixth sense, since all
savages have it until they get introduced to the white man's liquor.

Trouble was I couldn't localize the sensation. It seemed to trickle in
on me from all sides. I scanned the street. Three taxis were drawn up
along the curb in front of the Club. They were empty and their drivers
busy talking. There were no loiterers that I could see. The two swift
side-rubbing streams of traffic swept up and down the Avenue. I
studied the windows of the opposite houses. There was no sign in them
of any watchers.

Yet eyes were upon me, intently. I knew it.

The warning had come to me in many places this last fortnight. I had
felt the unseen watchers time and again in the Museum where I had gone
to look at the Yunnan jades I had made it possible for rich old
Rockbilt to put there with distinct increase to his reputation as a
philanthropist; it had come to me in the theater and while riding in
the Park; in the brokers' offices where I myself had watched the money
the jades had brought me melt swiftly away in a game which I now
ruefully admitted I knew less than nothing about. I had felt it in the
streets, and that was to be expected. But I had also felt it at the
Club, and that was not to be expected and it bothered me more than
anything else.

Yes, I was under strictest surveillance. But why?

That was what this night I had determined to find out.

At a touch upon my shoulder, I jumped, and swept my hand halfway up to
the little automatic under my left armpit. By that, suddenly I
realized how badly the mystery had gotten on my nerves. I turned, and
grinned a bit sheepishly into the face of big Lars Thorwaldsen, back
in New York only a few days from his two years in the Antarctic.

"Bit jerky, aren't you, Jim?" he asked. "What's the matter? Been on a
bender?"

"Nothing like it, Lars," I answered. "Too much city, I guess. Too much
continual noise and motion. And too many people," I added with a real
candor he could not suspect.

"God!" he exclaimed. "It all looks good to me. I'm eating it up--after
those two years. But I suppose in a month or two I'll be feeling the
same way about it. I hear you're going away again soon. Where this
time? Back to China?"

I shook my head. I did not feel like telling Lars that my destination
was entirely controlled by whatever might turn up before I had spent
the sixty-five dollars in my wallet and the seven quarters and two
dimes in my pocket.

"Not in trouble, are you, Jim?" he looked at me more keenly. "If you
are, I'd be glad to--help you."

I shook my head. Everybody knew that old Rockbilt had been unusually
generous about those infernal jades. I had my pride, and staggered
though I was by that amazingly rapid melting away of a golden deposit
I had confidently expected to grow into a barrier against care for the
rest of my life, make me, as a matter of fact, independent of all
chance, I did not feel like telling even Lars of my folly. Besides, I
was not yet that hopeless of all things, a beachcomber in New York.
Something would turn up.

"Wait," he said, as some one called him back into the Club.

But I did not wait. Even less than baring my unfortunate gamble did I
feel like telling about my watchers. I stepped down into the street.

Who was it that was watching me? And why? Some one from China who had
followed after the treasure I had taken from the ancient tomb? I could
not believe it. Kin-Wang, bandit though he might be, and accomplished
graduate of American poker as well as of Cornell, would have sent no
spies after me. Our, well--call it transaction, irregular as it had
been, was finished in his mind when he had lost. Crooked as he might
be with the cards, he was not the man to go back on his word. Of that
I was sure. Besides, there had been no need of letting me get this far
before striking. No, they were no emissaries of Kin-Wang.

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