The Society of Ancestral Loss cleaves with relentless ferocity to its law. And that law demands the life of the man or woman on the ninth day after the branding of the ancestral tomb that marks upon the voluntary victim’s breast its livid record of the sale of the soul within. Twice had I come into knowledge of the working of this law. Lieutenant Buckley, of the little gunboat Wilena, had told me of how he had first heard of the society. And after his warning, with my own eyes I had seen Tuck Cheong, on the ninth day, throw himself into the Sea of Ancestral Fire to atone for the barter of his soul, and to drown in the oblivion of the waters of the Yangtze the remorse that gnawed at his heart.
Thus was the law carried out—even if not by the society’s relentless knife, at least by the operation in the victim’s own mind of its inexorable demand.
This classic pulp story of hidden crime in China was originally published in the pulp magazine Argosy All-Story in 1920.
