The man nodded and went on. “My wife and I are responsible for your injury. She, not being native to these shores, has never fully realised how potentially treacherous the Pacific surf can be, and yesterday I neglected to renew my warnings. Had you not been there, had you not been willing to risk your life for hers, she would have drowned. I do accept that one cannot pay a man for acting a good Samaritan, but one can at least reimburse him for the losses he incurs.”

Long had no idea what a Samaritan was, good or otherwise, and a number of the other words were not in his vocabulary either, but his English was sufficient to follow his visitor's general meaning. What was crystal clear, and of far greater importance, was that this stranger referred to Long, a person whose eyes and skin made him less than human to most of the city rulers, as a man, and moreover one whose dignity was a thing to be taken into consideration.

Unwittingly, Long's chin came up and he met the pale eyes as one man to another.

“Sir,” the tall Westerner said, “I would like to offer you a job.”

It was the Sir more than anything else that clinched the deal.

Long came to work for the Russell family the following day, walking up the hills to the grand house each morning, descending home again to Chinatown in the afternoon. At first, his work was one-armed and somewhat pointless, but with the second healing of his collarbone, he took over responsibility for the grounds, and discovered in himself an unexpected quiet pleasure in working the earth and growing flowers and lettuces. Within the next year, Mah came as well, to work inside the house, helping in the kitchen and slowly absorbing this odd Western style of cooking. When the cook fled the city after the events of April 1906, Mah took over, and the Long family ran the Russell household, inside and out.

Unlike the Scots nanny, who had left the establishment soon after their arrival, the Longs never lived in the Pacific Heights house. The Russells offered, but did not press after the refusal, because both sides knew the problems the neighbours might raise. Instead, Long would clean his spade and tidy the walks, leaving the house in the afternoon so he might be home when young Tom was let out of school. Often as he walked, Long took with him some book or another that one of the Russells thought their gardener might enjoy. And during the periods when the Russells were away, in England or on the East Coast, one or the other of the Longs would go to the house every day, to be sure all was well.

When Tom went east to university in 1909, a Russell gift allowed him to take up somewhat more comfortable rooms than his parents alone could have provided. And when the deep aches that had settled into Long's bones made his work in the garden more difficult, it was Russell money that kept the family from having to approach the usurious money-lenders of Chinatown to create the bookstore.