Short Stories
Li Faa. To-day you stopped on the street with her. Not an
hour ago. Half an hour by the clock you talked.—What is
that?"
"It was the thrice-accursed telephone," Ah Kim muttered,
while she suspended the stick to catch what he said. "Mrs.
Chang Lucy told you. I know she did. I saw her see me. I shall
have the telephone taken out. It is of the devil."
"It is a device of all the devils," Mrs. Tai Fu agreed, taking a
fresh grip on the stick. "Yet shall the telephone remain. I like to
talk with Mrs. Chang Lucy over the telephone."
"She has the eyes of ten thousand cats," quoth Ah Kim,
ducking and receiving the stick stinging on his knuckles. "And
the tongues of ten thousand toads," he supplemented ere his
next duck.
"She is an impudent-faced and evil-mannered hussy," Mrs.
Tai Fu accented.
"Mrs. Chang Lucy was ever that," Ah Kim murmured like
the dutiful son he was.
"I speak of Li Faa," his mother corrected with stick empha-
sis. "She is only half Chinese, as you know. Her mother was a
shameless kanaka. She wears skirts like the degraded haole
women—also corsets, as I have seen for myself. Where are her
children? Yet has she buried two husbands."
"The one was drowned, the other kicked by a horse," Ah Kim
qualified.
"A year of her, unworthy son of a noble father, and you
would gladly be going out to get drowned or be kicked by a
horse."
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