“Oh,” she cried, turning to James Clancy, “You are a hundred man good!”

The young man felt somewhat embarrassed; his eyes shifted a little under the intense gaze of the Chinese mother.

“Well, we must get your boy for you,” he responded. “Of course”—turning to Hom Hing—“it will cost a little money. You can’t get fellows to hurry the Government for you without gold in your pocket.”

Hom Hing stared blankly for a moment. Then: “How much do you want, Mr. Clancy?” he asked quietly.

“Well, I will need at least five hundred to start with.”

Hom Hing cleared his throat.

“I think I told to you the time I last paid you for writing letters for me and seeing the Custom boss here that nearly all I had was gone!”

“Oh, well then we won’t talk about it, old fellow. It won’t harm the boy to stay where he is, and your wife may get over it all right.”

“What that you say?” quavered Lae Choo.

James Clancy looked out of the window.

“He says,” explained Hom Hing in English, “that to get our boy we have to have much money.”

“Money! Oh, yes.”

Lae Choo nodded her head.

“I have not got the money to give him.”

For a moment Lae Choo gazed wonderingly from one face to the other; then, comprehension dawning upon her, with swift anger, pointing to the lawyer, she cried: “You not one hundred man good; you just common white man.”

“Yes, ma’am,” returned James Clancy, bowing and smiling ironically.

Hom Hing pushed his wife behind him and addressed the lawyer again: “I might try,” said he, “to raise something; but five hundred—it is not possible.”

“What about four?”

“I tell you I have next to nothing left and my friends are not rich.”

“Very well!”

The lawyer moved leisurely toward the door, pausing on its threshold to light a cigarette.

“Stop, white man; white man, stop!”

Lae Choo, panting and terrified, had started forward and now stood beside him, clutching his sleeve excitedly.

“You say you can go to get paper to bring my Little One to me if Hom Hing give you five hundred dollars?”

The lawyer nodded carelessly; his eyes were intent upon the cigarette which would not take the fire from the match.

“Then you go get paper. If Hom Hing not can give you five hundred dollars—I give you perhaps what more that much.”

She slipped a heavy gold bracelet from her wrist and held it out to the man. Mechanically he took it.

“I go get more!”

She scurried away, disappearing behind the door through which she had come.

“Oh, look here, I can’t accept this,” said James Clancy, walking back to Hom Hing and laying down the bracelet before him.

“It’s all right,” said Hom Hing, seriously, “pure China gold. My wife’s parent give it to her when we married.”

“But I can’t take it anyway,” protested the young man.

“It is all same as money. And you want money to go to Washington,” replied Hom Hing in a matter of fact manner.