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neighboring village for some visiting and street preaching. As we plodded down the

dusty road, I said, “Mr. Wang, tell me your story. I would like to know how you came
to be a Christian and to become a preacher of Christ‟s Gospel.” Without hesitation he
proceeded to do so.

Stopping in the middle of the road he swept his arm around the horizon in a wide
semi-circle. “All over this country I was formerly known as Wang-Three the Tiger
(Wang-San Lao-Hu), the chieftain over a robber band of about three hundred men. My
home was in the Wang Family Village just a few li from the Chess-Board Village

where you, pastor, where preaching just a few days ago.” With this he pointed in a
northwesterly direction. “By day I was a Confucian scholar and a respected citizen of
my village, one of the elders in fact. By night I would join my men in some
previously agreed upon rendezvous and lead them in a raid upon some village or town

that we felt sure we could overpower. We would make a surprise attack, concertedly
upon three gates if it was a walled village, and when we had effected an entrance,
would rob, kidnap, burn and kill at will. Our methods were those of terrorism, and the
vengeance we wreaked on any who dared to resist was awful. I recall one man who

attempted to withstand me one night with a farming implement. I whirled up my
broadsword to the height and split him in two from the crown of his head to his crotch,
just as if he had been a piece of kindling wood!”

No longer a young man, his eye was hardly yet dimmed or his natural force abated,
and he was still able to give a convincing dramatization of bringing his broadsword
down on the pate of his luckless victim. As the story progressed, and he projected
himself mentally back into the days of yore, his normally placid countenance

darkened and his black eyes gleamed with some of the old fury. One felt inclined to
breathe a prayer of thankfulness for having been kept from his path in those bold, bad
days. “I broke all of the ten commandments, some of them daily. I feared neither God
nor man and became utterly hardened in sin, as this career of cruelty extended over

several years.” By day one of his village gentry, and by night, the roaring Tiger, this
“elusive pimpernel” of old Cathay performed his dual role undiscovered and even
unsuspected by his nearest neighbors.

And it came to pass on a certain day, strolling with his accustomed dignity down
the main street of the Village of Wang, he approached the end of the street which
terminated at the unimposing gate in the mud wall. On his left was a two leaved door
standing ajar and opening into a court-yard, on the far side of which was the usual

mud structure with thatched roof, perhaps a little longer than most.

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