Weird Tales/Volume 37/Issue 1/Death in a Gray Mist

Death in a Gray Mist
By Frank Owen

Heading by A. R. Tilburne
Seven men had gone to the Black
Inn to kill Chung Kuo. They chose
a night when fog hung low over the
land so that their actions might not be observed.
They were all strangers to each
other, and also to the man whom they had
come to kill. Each pictured him in an entirely
different manner.
One believed that Chung Kuo was a
monk in a gray robe; a second, that he was
tall and austere, no longer young, a graduate
of Han-lin College; a third, that he
was fat and blustery, a military man who
swaggered more than any mandarin of old;
a fourth, that he was a business man,
shrewd, penetrating, a good trader, cold, ​dangerous; a fifth, that he was a shopkeeper,
a seller of ivory and jade, who
liked to spend his evenings playing fan-tan
at the inn; but the sixth, merely believed
that he was a general, an important leader
in China's fight to be free.
Unfortunately, Chung Kuo knew every
one of them and if he had any part in the
fictions that had been so deviously planted
in craven minds, he was shrewd enough to
divulge the matter to no one. However,
he had excellent lieutenants who had
proved good reporters. Chung Kuo considered
it dro

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