Explore "Spider Tong" by Perley Poore Sheehan on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
IT WAS while he was still far back in the Gorge of the Grasping Fist passes leading from China into Tibet--that Captain Trouble first heard of the Spider Tong. The man who told him about it was a Chinese gentleman named Mr. Wang. An elderly gentleman dressed in a long coat of gray silk, with purple-black silk trousers neatly tied at the ankles over spotless white socks. Then the long hair, one of the old queue, and a mandarin cap. "A tsung-ping," the captain remarked to himself-- meaning a "red button." It took nerve on the part of a Chinaman nowadays to wear the regalia of the old empire, no matter where he was.
And Mr. Wang not only wore the mandarin cap with the red button on it; there was a ceremonial fan sticking from the back of his neck.