After a time, a disgruntled voice within snarled something in the vernacular.

Heywood laughed.
"Ai-yah! Who's afraid?
Wutzler, you old pirate, open up!" A bar clattered down, the door swung back, and there, raising a glow-worm lantern of oiled paper, stood such a timorous little figure as might have ventured out from a masquerade of gnomes.

The wrinkled face was Wutzler's, but his weazened body was lost in the glossy black folds of a native jacket, and below the patched trousers, his bare ankles and coolie-sandals of straw moved uneasily, as though trying to hide behind each other.
"Kom in," said this hybrid, with a nervous cackle.

"I thought you are thiefs.

Kom in." Following through a toy courtyard, among shadow hints of pigmy shrubs and rockery, they found themselves cramped in a bare, clean cell, lighted by a European lamp, but smelling of soy and Asiatics.