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THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
The Modern Section
Continued

San Francisco is the meeting ground of the East and the West. Its wharves are redolent of the Orient, its Foreign Quarters crowded with the confusion of races. The exotic ripens, deadly and beautiful.

We see "big graft" in operation some three years later when slick Dan McTavish, availing himself of all the city's chances, has become a rising young contractor, allied with a smart politician of the Abe Ruef type, named Redding. This Redding is the city's chief building inspector. For part of the "divvy" he winks at scamped jobs and puts favored contractors in the way of getting rich. The two men plan a clean-up on a large Church contract by putting up the structure with skimped concrete: one part of cement to twelve parts of sand. As a blind to their schemes Honest John is engaged as the carpentry fore- man.

Dan no longer cares for Mary, his wife. He is mad for riches and pleasure. Here Sally Lung, half French, half Chinese, with a hidden sinister trail from Calcutta past Molokai to the Golden Gate, plays her peculiar role in the life of the Caucasian. Sally Lung, who has been smuggled into America, in one of his great jute bales from the East, takes his fancy. A small fortune out of his crooked gains goes into a rope of pearls around Sally's comely neck and a gorgeous apartment to house her exotic loveliness.

Mary flees to John atop the Church tower. High up there she loses her footing, is saved from headlong death by his quick arms. Examining the crumbled footing, he realizes in a flash the nature of the concrete and tells her to fetch her husband.

Dan is obliged, by the wife's urgent interruption, to leave the love-potioning Sally and go to the scene. Even so, while Dan and John are arguing, a terrible crash is heard. The whole apse wall has tumbled down, and buried in its ruins the little Mother who had strayed into the Church to touch with reverent hands her son's Tablets of the Law.

Mary is still Dan's, though every fibre of her inmost being calls out for John. Dan faces bankruptcy and perhaps State prison. To avert exposure by The Stingaree, a blackmailing weekly, he must get funds and asks Sally to disgorge.

The Chinese empties her pretty money bag. Dollar bills - one... three... five -- flutter to the floor. Nothing! Dan is after the $30,000 rope of pearls, and despite her struggles tears it from her neck. Then Sally points to a sensational article in the day's paper stating that U. S. agents are on the trail of a beautiful Eurasian who got into the country from Molokai Island. She is that outcast. Like a flash Dan realizes that she has branded him forever! In a fury he whips out his revolver and breaks the awful commandment, THOU SHALT NOT KILL.

In his wife's bedchamber Dan tells Mary of his evil case. Recoiling with horror she snatches up a weapon and cries desperately: "If you touch me, I'll kill you!" The officers come to arrest him. Then Mary, downing her fear, makes the supreme sacrifice. She pulls the distracted Dan under the clothes and hides him with her body. The officers put off by a ruse, he is enabled to attempt escape to Mexico.

A wild sea beats against a rock-bound coast. Dan's motorboat, no longer answering the helm, is driven upon the cliffs. Man and craft are dashed against its beetling twin face, the outlines of which are Nature's rude sculpture of the Tablets of the Commandments. Only Dan's dead form lying at the foot of the great cliff, one arm flung over a splintered piece of the boat bearing its name DEFIANCE - only this remains of the once insouciant spirit that defied the decrees of God and man.

And what of Mary? She tried to kill herself but was saved, by John. . . .

He drew her into his carpenter shop and she showed him her hands which she believed already whitened with leprosy. John took down the Good Book. He began to read to her of Christ healing the lepers though with averted face and eyes she cried "Unclean! unclean!"

But she could see (as John read) the Sick Girl coming to Jesus and saying: "Master, if Thou wilt, Thou canst make me clean!" and the Saviour's glad healing effected in the words, "I will, be thou made clean!" At the end of the narrative Mary looked at her hands. She could not find a blemish. Showing them against the rising sun, she said: "Look, John! In the light, it's gone!" And John answered, smiling with strange radiance: "Yes, Mary -- in the LIGHT -- it's gone!" . . . And for the first time their eyes met in perfect understanding.

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The Ten Commandments

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