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The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu

by Sax Rohmer · English · Gutenberg #1183 · 433,928 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu

Author: Sax Rohmer


        
Release date: January 1, 1998 [eBook #1183]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1183

Credits: Produced by Alan Johns, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RETURN OF DR. FU-MANCHU ***

THE RETURN OF DR. FU-MANCHU

By Sax Rohmer




CHAPTER I. A MIDNIGHT SUMMONS


“When did you last hear from Nayland Smith?” asked my visitor.

I paused, my hand on the syphon, reflecting for a moment.

“Two months ago,” I said; “he’s a poor correspondent and rather soured,
I fancy.”

“What--a woman or something?”

“Some affair of that sort. He’s such a reticent beggar, I really know
very little about it.”

I placed a whisky and soda before the Rev. J. D. Eltham, also sliding
the tobacco jar nearer to his hand. The refined and sensitive face of
the clergy-man offered no indication of the truculent character of the
man. His scanty fair hair, already gray over the temples, was silken and
soft-looking; in appearance he was indeed a typical English churchman;
but in China he had been known as “the fighting missionary,” and had
fully deserved the title. In fact, this peaceful-looking gentleman had
directly brought about the Boxer Risings!

“You know,” he said, in his clerical voice, but meanwhile stuffing
tobacco into an old pipe with fierce energy, “I have often wondered,
Petrie--I have never left off wondering--”

“What?”

“That accursed Chinaman! Since the cellar place beneath the site of the
burnt-out cottage in Dulwich Village--I have wondered more than ever.”

He lighted his pipe and walked to the hearth to throw the match in the
grate.

“You see,” he continued, peering across at me in his oddly nervous way,
“one never knows, does one? If I thought that Dr. Fu-Manchu lived; if
I seriously suspected that that stupendous intellect, that wonderful
genius, Petrie, er--” he hesitated characteristically--“survived, I
should feel it my duty--”

“Well?” I said, leaning my elbows on the table and smiling slightly.

“If that Satanic genius were not indeed destroyed, then the peace of the
world, may be threatened anew at any moment!”

He was becoming excited, shooting out his jaw in the truculent manner I
knew, and snapping his fingers to emphasize his words; a man composed of
the oddest complexities that ever dwelt beneath a clerical frock.

“He may have got back to China, Doctor!” he cried, and his eyes had the
fighting glint in them. “Could you rest in peace if you thought that he
lived? Should you not fear for your life every time that a night-call
took you out alone? Why, man alive, it is only two years since he was
here among us, since we were searching every shadow for those awful
green eyes! What became of his band of assassins--his stranglers, his
dacoits, his damnable poisons and insects and what-not--the army of
creatures--”

He paused, taking a drink.

“You--” he hesitated diffidently--“searched in Egypt with Nayland Smith,
did you not?”

I nodded.

“Contradict me if I am wrong,” he continued; “but my impression is that
you were searching for the girl--the girl--Karamaneh, I think she was
called?”

“Yes,” I replied shortly; “but we could find no trace--no trace.”

“You--er--were interested?”

“More than I knew,” I replied, “until I realized that I had--lost her.”

“I never met Karamaneh, but from your account, and from others, she was
quite unusually--”

“She was very beautiful,” I said, and stood up, for I was anxious to
terminate that phase of the conversation.

Eltham regarded me sympathetically; he knew something of my search with
Nayland Smith for the dark-eyed, Eastern girl who had brought romance
into my drab life; he knew that I treasured my memories of her as I
loathed and abhorred those of the fiendish, brilliant Chinese doctor who
had been her master.

Eltham began to pace up and down the rug, his pipe bubbling furiously;
and something in the way he carried his head reminded me momentarily of
Nayland Smith. Certainly, between this pink-faced clergyman, with his
deceptively mild appearance, and the gaunt, bronzed, and steely-eyed
Burmese commissioner, there was externally little in common; but it was
some little nervous trick in his carriage that conjured up through the
smoky haze one distant summer evening when Smith had paced that very
room as Eltham paced it now, when before my startled eyes he had rung up
the curtain upon the savage drama in which, though I little suspected it
then, Fate had cast me for a leading role.

I wondered if Eltham’s thoughts ran parallel with mine. My own were
centered upon the unforgettable figure of the murderous Chinaman. These
words, exactly as Smith had used them, seemed once again to sound in my
ears: “Imagine a person tall, lean, and feline, high shouldered, with a
brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and
long magnetic eyes of the true cat green. Invest him with all the cruel
cunning of an entire Eastern race accumulated in one giant intellect,
with all the resources of science, past and present, and you have a
mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the ‘Yellow Peril’ incarnate in one
man.”

This visit of Eltham’s no doubt was responsible for my mood; for this
singular clergyman had played his part in the drama of two years ago.

“I should like to see Smith again,” he said suddenly; “it seems a pity
that a man like that should be buried in Burma. Burma makes a mess of
the best of men, Doctor. You said he was not married?”

“No,” I replied shortly, “and is never likely to be, now.”

“Ah, you hinted at something of the kind.”

“I know very little of it. Nayland Smith is not the kind of man to talk
much.”

“Quite so--quite so! And, you know, Doctor, neither am I; but”--he was
growing painfully embarrassed--“it may be your due--I--er--I have a
correspondent, in the interior of China--”

“Well?” I said, watching him in sudden eagerness.

“Well, I would not desire to raise--vain hopes--nor to occasion, shall
I say, empty fears; but--er... no, Doctor!” He flushed like a girl--“It
was wrong of me to open this conversation. Perhaps, when I know
more--will you forget my words, for the time?”

The telephone bell rang.

“Hullo!” cried Eltham--“hard luck, Doctor!”--but I could see that he
welcomed the interruption. “Why!” he added, “it is one o’clock!”

I went to the telephone.

“Is that Dr. Petrie?” inquired a woman’s voice.

“Yes; who is speaking?”

“Mrs. Hewett has been taken more seriously ill. Could you come at once?”

“Certainly,” I replied, for Mrs. Hewett was not only a profitable
patient but an estimable lady--“I shall be with you in a quarter of an
hour.”

I hung up the receiver.

“Something urgent?” asked Eltham, emptying his pipe.

“Sounds like it. You had better turn in.”

“I should much prefer to walk over with you, if it would not be
intruding. Our conversation has ill prepared me for sleep.”

“Right!” I said; for I welcomed his company; and three minutes later we
were striding across the deserted common.

A sort of mist floated amongst the trees, seeming in the moonlight like
a veil draped from trunk to trunk, as in silence we passed the Mound
pond, and struck out for the north side of the common.

I suppose the presence of Eltham and the irritating recollection of his
half-confidence were the responsible factors, but my mind persistently
dwelt upon the subject of Fu-Manchu and the atrocities which he had
committed during his sojourn in England. So actively was my imagination
at work that I felt again the menace which so long had hung over me; I
felt as though that murderous yellow cloud still cast its shadow upon
England. And I found myself longing for the company of Nayland Smith.
I cannot state what was the nature of Eltham’s reflections, but I can
guess; for he was as silent as I.

It was with a conscious effort that I shook myself out of this morbidly
reflective mood, on finding that we had crossed the common and were come
to the abode of my patient.

“I shall take a little walk,” announced Eltham; “for I gather that you
don’t expect to be detained long? I shall never be out of sight of the
door, of course.”

“Very well,” I replied, and ran up the steps.

There were no lights to be seen in any of the windows, which
circumstance rather surprised me, as my patient occupied, or had
occupied when last I had visited her, a first-floor bedroom in the front
of the house. My knocking and ringing produced no response for three or
four minutes; then, as I persisted, a scantily clothed and half
awake maid servant unbarred the door and stared at me stupidly in the
moonlight.

“Mrs. Hewett requires me?” I asked abruptly.

The girl stared more stupidly than ever.

“No, sir,” she said, “she don’t, sir; she’s fast asleep!”

“But some one ‘phoned me!” I insisted, rather irritably, I fear.

“Not from here, sir,” declared the now wide-eyed girl. “We haven’t got a
telephone, sir.”

For a few moments I stood there, staring as foolishly as she; then
abruptly I turned and descended the steps. At the gate I stood looking
up and down the road. The houses were all in darkness. What could be the
meaning of the mysterious summons? I had made no mistake respecting the
name of my patient; it had been twice repeated over the telephone; yet
that the call had not emanated from Mrs. Hewett’s house was now palpably
evident. Days had been when I should have regarded the episode as
preluding some outrage, but to-night I felt more disposed to ascribe it
to a silly practical joke.

Eltham walked up briskly.

“You’re in demand to-night, Doctor,” he said. “A young person called
for you almost directly you had left your house, and, learning where you
were gone, followed you.”

“Indeed!” I said, a trifle incredulously. “There are plenty of other
doctors if the case is an urgent one.”

“She may have thought it would save time as you were actually up and
dressed,” explained Eltham; “and the house is quite near to here, I
understand.”

I looked at him a little blankly. Was this another effort of the unknown
jester?

“I have been fooled once,” I said. “That ‘phone call was a hoax--”

“But I feel certain,” declared Eltham, earnestly, “that this is genuine!
The poor girl was dreadfully agitated; her master has broken his leg and
is lying helpless: number 280, Rectory Grove.”

“Where is the girl?” I asked, sharply.

“She ran back directly she had given me her message.”

“Was she a servant?”

“I should imagine so: French, I think. But she was so wrapped up I had
little more than a glimpse of her. I am sorry to hear that some one has
played a silly joke on you, but believe me--” he was very earnest--“this
is no jest. The poor girl could scarcely speak for sobs. She mistook me
for you, of course.”

“Oh!” said I grimly, “well, I suppose I must go. Broken leg, you
said?--and my surgical bag, splints and so forth, are at home!”

“My dear Petrie!” cried Eltham, in his enthusiastic way--“you no doubt
can do something to alleviate the poor man’s suffering immediately. I
will run back to your rooms for the bag and rejoin you at 280, Rectory
Grove.”

“It’s awfully good of you, Eltham--”

He held up his hand.

“The call of suffering humanity, Petrie, is one which I may no more
refuse to hear than you.”

I made no further protest after that, for his point of view was evident
and his determination adamant, but told him where he would find the
bag and once more set out across the moonbright common, he pursuing a
westerly direction and I going east.

Some three hundred yards I had gone, I suppose, and my brain had been
very active the while, when something occurred to me which placed a new
complexion upon this second summons. I thought of the falsity of the
first, of the improbability of even the most hardened practical joker
practising his wiles at one o’clock in the morning. I thought of our
recent conversation; above all I thought of the girl who had delivered
the message to Eltham, the girl whom he had described as a French
maid--whose personal charm had so completely enlisted his sympathies.
Now, to this train of thought came a new one, and, adding it, my
suspicion became almost a certainty.

I remembered (as, knowing the district, I should have remembered before)
that there was no number 280 in Rectory Grove.

Pulling up sharply I stood looking about me. Not a living soul was
in sight; not even a policeman. Where the lamps marked the main paths
across the common nothing moved; in the shadows about me nothing
stirred. But something stirred within me--a warning voice which for long
had lain dormant.

What was afoot?

A breeze caressed the leaves overhead, breaking the silence with
mysterious whisperings. Some portentous truth was seeking for admittance
to my brain. I strove to reassure myself, but the sense of impending
evil and of mystery became heavier. At last I could combat my strange
fears no longer. I turned and began to run toward the south side of the
common--toward my rooms--and after Eltham.

I had hoped to head him off, but came upon no sign of him. An all-night
tramcar passed at the moment that I reached the high road, and as I ran
around behind it I saw that my windows were lighted and that there was a
light in the hall.

My key was yet in the lock when my housekeeper opened the door.

“There’s a gentleman just come, Doctor,” she began--

I thrust past her and raced up the stairs into my study.

Standing by the writing-table was a tall, thin man, his gaunt face brown
as a coffee-berry and his steely gray eyes fixed upon me. My heart gave
a great leap--and seemed to stand still.

It was Nayland Smith!

“Smith,” I cried. “Smith, old man, by God, I’m glad to see you!”

He wrung my hand hard, looking at me with his searching eyes; but there
was little enough of gladness in his face. He was altogether grayer than
when last I had seen him--grayer and sterner.

“Where is Eltham?” I asked.

Smith started back as though I had struck him.

“Eltham!” he whispered--“Eltham! is Eltham here?”

“I left him ten minutes ago on the common--”

Smith dashed his right fist into the palm of his left hand and his eyes
gleamed almost wildly.

“My God, Petrie!” he said, “am I fated always to come too late?”

My dreadful fears in that instant were confirmed. I seemed to feel my
legs totter beneath me.

“Smith, you don’t mean--”

“I do, Petrie!” His voice sounded very far away. “Fu-Manchu is here; and
Eltham, God help him... is his first victim!”



CHAPTER II. ELTHAM VANISHES

Smith went racing down the stairs like a man possessed. Heavy with such
a foreboding of calamity as I had not known for two years, I followed
him--along the hall and out into the road. The very peace and beauty of
the night in some way increased my mental agitation. The sky was lighted
almost tropically with such a blaze of stars as I could not recall to
have seen since, my futile search concluded, I had left Egypt. The glory
of the moonlight yellowed the lamps speckled across the expanse of
the common. The night was as still as night can ever be in London. The
dimming pulse of a cab or car alone disturbed the stillness.

With a quick glance to right and left, Smith ran across on to the
common, and, leaving the door wide open behind me, I followed. The path
which Eltham had pursued terminated almost opposite to my house. One’s
gaze might follow it, white and empty, for several hundred yards past
the pond, and further, until it became overshadowed and was lost amid a
clump of trees.

I came up with Smith, and side by side we ran on, whilst pantingly, I
told my tale.

“It was a trick to get you away from him!” cried Smith. “They meant no
doubt to make some attempt at your house, but as he came out with you,
an alternative plan--”

Abreast of the pond, my companion slowed down, and finally stopped.

“Where did you last see Eltham?” he asked rapidly.

I took his arm, turning him slightly to the right, and pointed across
the moonbathed common.

“You see that clump of bushes on the other side of the road?” I said.
“There’s a path to the left of it. I took that path and he took this. We
parted at the point where they meet--”

Smith walked right down to the edge of the water and peered about over
the surface.

What he hoped to find there I could not imagine. Whatever it had been he
was disappointed, and he turned to me again, frowning perplexedly, and
tugging at the lobe of his left ear, an old trick which reminded me of
gruesome things we had lived through in the past.

“Come on,” he jerked. “It may be amongst the trees.”

From the tone of his voice I knew that he was tensed up nervously, and
his mood but added to the apprehension of my own.

“What may be amongst the trees, Smith?” I asked.

He walked on.

“God knows, Petrie; but I fear--”

Behind us, along the highroad, a tramcar went rocking by, doubtless
bearing a few belated workers homeward. The stark incongruity of the
thing was appalling. How little those weary toilers, hemmed about
with the commonplace, suspected that almost within sight from the car
windows, in a place of prosy benches, iron railings, and unromantic,
flickering lamps, two fellow men moved upon the border of a horror-land!

Beneath the trees a shadow carpet lay, its edges tropically sharp; and
fully ten yards from the first of the group, we two, hatless both, and
sharing a common dread, paused for a moment and listened.

The car had stopped at the further extremity of the common, and now with
a moan that grew to a shriek was rolling on its way again. We stood
and listened until silence reclaimed the night. Not a footstep could be
heard. Then slowly we walked on. At the edge of the little coppice we
stopped again abruptly.

Smith turned and thrust his pistol into my hand. A white ray of light
pierced the shadows; my companion carried an electric torch. But no
trace of Eltham was discoverable.

There had been a heavy shower of rain during the evening just before
sunset, and although the open paths were dry again, under the trees
the ground was still moist. Ten yards within the coppice we came upon
tracks--the tracks of one running, as the deep imprints of the toes
indicated.

Abruptly the tracks terminated; others, softer, joined them, two sets
converging from left and right. There was a confused patch, trailing off
to the west; then this became indistinct, and was finally lost upon the
hard ground outside the group.

For perhaps a minute, or more, we ran about from tree to tree, and from
bush to bush, searching like hounds for a scent, and fearful of what we
might find. We found nothing; and fully in the moonlight we stood facing
one another. The night was profoundly still.

Nayland Smith stepped back into the shadows, and began slowly to turn
his head from left to right, taking in the entire visible expanse of the
common. Toward a point where the road bisected it he stared intently.
Then, with a bound, he set off.

“Come on, Petrie!” he cried. “There they are!”

Vaulting a railing he went away over a field like a madman. Recovering
from the shock of surprise, I followed him, but he was well ahead of me,
and making for some vaguely seen object moving against the lights of the
roadway.

Another railing was vaulted, and the corner of a second, triangular
grass patch crossed at a hot sprint. We were twenty yards from the road
when the sound of a starting motor broke the silence. We gained the
graveled footpath only to see the taillight of the car dwindling to the
north!

Smith leaned dizzily against a tree.

“Eltham is in that car!” he gasped. “Just God! are we to stand here and
see him taken away to--”

He beat his fist upon the tree, in a sort of tragic despair. The nearest
cab-rank was no great distance away, but, excluding the possibility of
no cab being there, it might, for all practical purposes, as well have
been a mile off.

The beat of the retreating motor was scarcely audible; the lights
might but just be distinguished. Then, coming in an opposite direction,
appeared the headlamp of another car, of a car that raced nearer and
nearer to us, so that, within a few seconds of its first appearance, we
found ourselves bathed in the beam of its headlights.

Smith bounded out into the road, and stood, a weird silhouette, with
upraised arms, fully in its course!

The brakes were applied hurriedly. It was a big limousine, and its
driver swerved perilously in avoiding Smith and nearly ran into me.
But, the breathless moment past, the car was pulled up, head on to the
railings; and a man in evening clothes was demanding excitedly what had
happened. Smith, a hatless, disheveled figure, stepped up to the door.

“My name is Nayland Smith,” he said rapidly--“Burmese Commissioner.” He
snatched a letter from his pocket and thrust it into the hands of the
bewildered man. “Read that. It is signed by another Commissioner--the
Commissioner of Police.”

With amazement written all over him, the other obeyed.

“You see,” continued my friend, tersely--“it is carte blanche. I wish to
commandeer your car, sir, on a matter of life and death!”.

The other returned the letter.

“Allow me to offer it!” he said, descending. “My man will take your
orders. I can finish my journey by cab. I am--”

But Smith did not wait to learn whom he might be.

“Quick!” he cried to the stupefied chauffeur--“You passed a car a minute
ago--yonder. Can you overtake it?”

“I can try, sir, if I don’t lose her track.”

Smith leaped in, pulling me after him.

“Do it!” he snapped. “There are no speed limits for me. Thanks!
Goodnight, sir!”

We were off! The car swung around and the chase commenced.

One last glimpse I had of the man we had dispossessed, standing alone by
the roadside, and at ever increasing speed, we leaped away in the track
of Eltham’s captors.

Smith was too highly excited for ordinary conversation, but he threw out
short, staccato remarks.

“I have followed Fu-Manchu from Hongkong,” he jerked. “Lost him at Suez.
He got here a boat ahead of me. Eltham has been corresponding with some
mandarin up-country. Knew that. Came straight to you. Only got in this
evening. He--Fu-Manchu--has been sent here to get Eltham. My God! and
he has him! He will question him! The interior of China--a seething
pot, Petrie! They had to stop the leakage of information. He is here for
that.”

The car pulled up with a jerk that pitched me out of my seat, and the
chauffeur leaped to the road and ran ahead. Smith was out in a trice, as
the man, who had run up to a constable, came racing back.

“Jump in, sir--jump in!” he cried, his eyes bright with the lust of the
chase; “they are making for Battersea!”

And we were off again.

Through the empty streets we roared on. A place of gasometers and
desolate waste lots slipped behind and we were in a narrow way where
gates of yards and a few lowly houses faced upon a prospect of high
blank wall.

“Thames on our right,” said Smith, peering ahead. “His rathole is by the
river as usual. Hi!”--he grabbed up the speaking-tube--“Stop! Stop!”

The limousine swung in to the narrow sidewalk, and pulled up close by a
yard gate. I, too, had seen our quarry--a long, low bodied car, showing
no inside lights. It had turned the next corner, where a street lamp
shone greenly, not a hundred yards ahead.

Smith leaped out, and I followed him.

“That must be a cul de sac,” he said, and turned to the eager-eyed
chauffeur. “Run back to that last turning,” he ordered, “and wait there,
out of sight. Bring the car up when you hear a police-whistle.”

The man looked disappointed, but did not question the order. As he began
to back away, Smith grasped me by the arm and drew me forward.

“We must get to that corner,” he said, “and see where the car stands,
without showing ourselves.”



CHAPTER III. THE WIRE JACKET

I suppose we were not more than a dozen paces from the lamp when we
heard the thudding of the motor. The car was backing out!

It was a desperate moment, for it seemed that we could not fail to be
discovered. Nayland Smith began to look about him, feverishly, for a
hiding-place, a quest in which I seconded with equal anxiety. And Fate
was kind to us--doubly kind as after events revealed. A wooden gate
broke the expanse of wall hard by upon the right, and, as the result of
some recent accident, a ragged gap had been torn in the panels close to
the top.

The chain of the padlock hung loosely; and in a second Smith was up,
with his foot in this as in a stirrup. He threw his arm over the top and
drew himself upright. A second later he was astride the broken gate.

“Up you come, Petrie!” he said, and reached down his hand to aid me.

I got my foot into the loop of chain, grasped at a projection in the
gatepost and found myself up.

“There is a crossbar on this side to stand on,” said Smith.

He climbed over and vanished in the darkness. I was still astride the
broken gate when the car turned the corner, slowly, for there was scanty
room; but I was standing upon the bar on the inside and had my head
below the gap ere the driver could possibly have seen me.

“Stay where you are until he passes,” hissed my companion, below. “There
is a row of kegs under you.”

The sound of the motor passing outside grew loud--louder--then began to
die away. I felt about with my left foot; discerned the top of a keg,
and dropped, panting, beside Smith.

“Phew!” I said--“that was a close thing! Smith--how do we know--”

“That we have followed the right car?” he interrupted. “Ask yourself the
question: what would any ordinary man be doing motoring in a place like
this at two o’clock in the morning?”

“You are right, Smith,” I agreed. “Shall we get out again?”

“Not yet. I have an idea. Look yonder.”

He grasped my arm, turning me in the desired direction.

Beyond a great expanse of unbroken darkness a ray of moonlight slanted
into the place wherein we stood, spilling its cold radiance upon rows of
kegs.

“That’s another door,” continued my friend--I now began dimly to
perceive him beside me. “If my calculations are not entirely wrong, it
opens on a wharf gate--”

A steam siren hooted dismally, apparently from quite close at hand.

“I’m right!” snapped Smith. “That turning leads down to the gate. Come
on, Petrie!”

He directed the light of the electric torch upon a narrow path through
the ranks of casks, and led the way to the further door. A good two feet
of moonlight showed along the top. I heard Smith straining; then--

“These kegs are all loaded with grease!” he said, “and I want to
reconnoiter over that door.”

“I am leaning on a crate which seems easy to move,” I reported. “Yes,
it’s empty. Lend a hand.”

We grasped the empty crate, and between us, set it up on a solid
pedestal of casks. Then Smith mounted to this observation platform and I
scrambled up beside him, and looked down upon the lane outside.

It terminated as Smith had foreseen at a wharf gate some six feet to
the right of our post. Piled up in the lane beneath us, against the
warehouse door, was a stack of empty casks. Beyond, over the way, was a
kind of ramshackle building that had possibly been a dwelling-house at
some time. Bills were stuck in the ground-floor window indicating that
the three floors were to let as offices; so much was discernible in that
reflected moonlight.

I could hear the tide, lapping upon the wharf, could feel the chill from
the river and hear the vague noises which, night nor day, never cease
upon the great commercial waterway.

“Down!” whispered Smith. “Make no noise! I suspected it. They heard the
car following!”

I obeyed, clutching at him for support; for I was suddenly dizzy, and my
heart was leaping wildly--furiously.

“You saw her?” he whispered.

Saw her! yes, I had seen her! And my poor dream-world was toppling about
me, its cities, ashes and its fairness, dust.

Peering from the window, her great eyes wondrous in the moonlight and
her red lips parted, hair gleaming like burnished foam and her anxious
gaze set upon the corner of the lane--was Karamaneh... Karamaneh whom
once we had rescued from the house of this fiendish Chinese doctor;
Karamaneh who had been our ally; in fruitless quest of whom,--when, too
late, I realized how empty my life was become--I had wasted what little
of the world’s goods I possessed;--Karamaneh!

“Poor old Petrie,” murmured Smith--“I knew, but I hadn’t the heart--He
has her again--God knows by what chains he holds her. But she’s only
a woman, old boy, and women are very much alike--very much alike from
Charing Cross to Pagoda Road.”

He rested his hand on my shoulder for a moment; I am ashamed to confess
that I was trembling; then, clenching my teeth with that mechanical
physical effort which often accompanies a mental one, I swallowed the
bitter draught of Nayland Smith’s philosophy. He was raising himself, to
peer, cautiously, over the top of the door. I did likewise.

The window from which the girl had looked was nearly on a level with our
eyes, and as I raised my head above the woodwork, I quite distinctly
saw her go out of the room. The door, as she opened it, admitted a dull
light, against which her figure showed silhouetted for a moment. Then
the door was reclosed.

“We must risk the other windows,” rapped Smith.

Before I had grasped the nature of his plan he was over and had dropped
almost noiselessly upon the casks outside. Again I followed his lead.

“You are not going to attempt anything, singlehanded--against him?” I
asked.

“Petrie--Eltham is in that house. He has been brought here to be put
to the question, in the medieval, and Chinese, sense! Is there time to
summon assistance?”

I shuddered. This had been in my mind, certainly, but so expressed it
was definitely horrible--revolting, yet stimulating.

“You have the pistol,” added Smith--“follow closely, and quietly.”

He walked across the tops of the casks and leaped down, pointing to that
nearest to the closed door of the house. I helped him place it under the
open window. A second we set beside it, and, not without some noise, got
a third on top.

Smith mounted.

His jaw muscles were very prominent and his eyes shone like steel; but
he was as cool as though he were about to enter a theater and not the
den of the most stupendous genius who ever worked for evil. I would
forgive any man who, knowing Dr. Fu-Manchu, feared him; I feared him
myself--feared him as one fears a scorpion; but when Nayland Smith
hauled himself up on the wooden ledge above the door and swung thence
into the darkened room, I followed and was in close upon his heels. But
I admired him, for he had every ampere of his self-possession in hand;
my own case was different.

He spoke close to my ear.

“Is your hand steady? We may have to shoot.”

I thought of Karamaneh, of lovely dark-eyed Karamaneh whom this
wonderful, evil product of secret China had stolen from me--for so I now
adjudged it.

“Rely upon me!” I said grimly. “I...”

The words ceased--frozen on my tongue.

There are things that one seeks to forget, but it is my lot often to
remember the sound which at that moment literally struck me rigid with
horror. Yet it was only a groan; but, merciful God! I pray that it may
never be my lot to listen to such a groan again.

Smith drew a sibilant breath.

“It’s Eltham!” he whispered hoarsely--“they’re torturing--”

“No, no!” screamed a woman’s voice--a voice that thrilled me anew, but
with another emotion--

“Not that, not--”

I distinctly heard the sound of a blow. Followed a sort of vague
scuffling. A door somewhere at the back of the house opened--and shut
again. Some one was coming along the passage toward us!

“Stand back!” Smith’s voice was low, but perfectly steady. “Leave it to
me!”

Nearer came the footsteps and nearer. I could hear suppressed sobs. The
door opened, admitting again the faint light--and Karamaneh came in. The
place was quite unfurnished, offering no possibility of hiding; but to
hide was unnecessary.

Her slim figure had not crossed the threshold ere Smith had his arm
about the girl’s waist and one hand clapped to her mouth. A stifled gasp
she uttered, and he lifted her into the room.

I stepped forward and closed the door. A faint perfume stole to my
nostrils--a vague, elusive breath of the East, reminiscent of strange
days that, now, seemed to belong to a remote past. Karamaneh! that
faint, indefinable perfume was part of her dainty personality; it may
appear absurd--impossible--but many and many a time I had dreamt of it.

“In my breast pocket,” rapped Smith; “the light.”

I bent over the girl as he held her. She was quite still, but I could
have wished that I had had more certain mastery of myself. I took the
torch from Smith’s pocket, and, mechanically, directed it upon the
captive.

She was dressed very plainly, wearing a simple blue skirt, and white
blouse. It was easy to divine that it was she whom Eltham had mistaken
for a French maid. A brooch set with a ruby was pinned at the point
where the blouse opened--gleaming fierily and harshly against the soft
skin. Her face was pale and her eyes wide with fear.

“There is some cord in my right-hand pocket,” said Smith; “I came
provided. Tie her wrists.”

I obeyed him, silently. The girl offered no resistance, but I think
I never essayed a less congenial task than that of binding her white
wrists. The jeweled fingers lay quite listlessly in my own.

“Make a good job of it!” rapped Smith, significantly.

A flush rose to my cheeks, for I knew well enough what he meant.

“She is fastened,” I said, and I turned the ray of the torch upon her
again.

Smith removed his hand from her mouth but did not relax his grip of her.
She looked up at me with eyes in which I could have sworn there was no
recognition. But a flush momentarily swept over her face, and left it
pale again.

“We shall have to--gag her--”

“Smith, I can’t do it!”

The girl’s eyes filled with tears and she looked up at my companion
pitifully.

“Please don’t be cruel to me,” she whispered, with that soft accent
which always played havoc with my composure. “Every one--every one-is
cruel to me. I will promise--indeed I will swear, to be quiet. Oh,
believe me, if you can save him I will do nothing to hinder you.” Her
beautiful head drooped. “Have some pity for me as well.”

“Karamaneh” I said. “We would have believed you once. We cannot, now.”

She started violently.

“You know my name!” Her voice was barely audible. “Yet I have never seen
you in my life--”

“See if the door locks,” interrupted Smith harshly.

Dazed by the apparent sincerity in the voice of our lovely
captive--vacant from wonder of it all--I opened the door, felt for, and
found, a key.

We left Karamaneh crouching against the wall; her great eyes were turned
towards me fascinatedly. Smith locked the door with much care. We began
a tip-toed progress along the dimly lighted passage.

From beneath a door on the left, and near the end, a brighter light
shone. Beyond that again was another door. A voice was speaking in the
lighted room; yet I could have sworn that Karamaneh had come, not from
there but from the room beyond--from the far end of the passage.

But the voice!--who, having once heard it, could ever mistake that
singular voice, alternately guttural and sibilant!

Dr. Fu-Manchu was speaking!

“I have asked you,” came with ever-increasing clearness (Smith had begun
to turn the knob), “to reveal to me the name of your correspondent in
Nan-Yang. I have suggested that he may be the Mandarin Yen-Sun-Yat, but
you have declined to confirm me. Yet I know” (Smith had the door open
a good three inches and was peering in) “that some official, some high
official, is a traitor. Am I to resort again to the question to learn
his name?”

Ice seemed to enter my veins at the unseen inquisitor’s intonation of
the words “the question.” This was the Twentieth Century, yet there, in
that damnable room...

Smith threw the door open.

Through a sort of haze, born mostly of horror, but not entirely, I saw
Eltham, stripped to the waist and tied, with his arms upstretched, to a
rafter in the ancient ceiling. A Chinaman who wore a slop-shop blue suit
and who held an open knife in his hand, stood beside him. Eltham was
ghastly white. The appearance of his chest puzzled me momentarily, then
I realized that a sort of tourniquet of wire-netting was screwed so
tightly about him that the flesh swelled out in knobs through the mesh.
There was blood--

“God in heaven!” screamed Smith frenziedly--“they have the wire-jacket
on him! Shoot down that damned Chinaman, Petrie! Shoot! Shoot!”

Lithely as a cat the man with the knife leaped around--but I raised the
Browning, and deliberately--with a cool deliberation that came to me
suddenly--shot him through the head. I saw his oblique eyes turn up to
the whites; I saw the mark squarely between his brows; and with no word
nor cry he sank to his knees and toppled forward with one yellow hand
beneath him and one outstretched, clutching--clutching--convulsively.
His pigtail came unfastened and began to uncoil, slowly, like a snake.

I handed the pistol to Smith; I was perfectly cool, now; and I leaped
forward, took up the bloody knife from the floor and cut Eltham’s
lashings. He sank into my arms.

“Praise God,” he murmured, weakly. “He is more merciful to me than
perhaps I deserve. Unscrew... the jacket, Petrie... I think ... I was
very near to.... weakening. Praise the good God, Who... gave me...
fortitude...”

I got the screw of the accursed thing loosened, but the act of removing
the jacket was too agonizing for Eltham--man of iron though he was. I
laid him swooning on the floor.

“Where is Fu-Manchu?”

Nayland Smith, from just within the door, threw out the query in a tone
of stark amaze. I stood up--I could do nothing more for the poor victim
at the moment--and looked about me. The room was innocent of furniture,
save for heaps of rubbish on the floor, and a tin oil-lamp hung, on
the wall. The dead Chinaman lay close beside Smith. There was no second
door, the one window was barred, and from this room we had heard the
voice, the unmistakable, unforgettable voice, of Dr. Fu-Manchu.

But Dr. Fu-Manchu was not there!

Neither of us could accept the fact for a moment; we stood there,
looking from the dead man to the tortured man who only swooned, in a
state of helpless incredulity.

Then the explanation flashed upon us both, simultaneously, and with a
cry of baffled rage Smith leaped along the passage to the second door.
It was wide open. I stood at his elbow when he swept its emptiness with
the ray of his pocket-lamp.

There was a speaking-tube fixed between the two rooms!

Smith literally ground his teeth.

“Yet, Petrie,” he said, “we have learnt something. Fu-Manchu had
evidently promised Eltham his life if he would divulge the name of
his correspondent. He meant to keep his word; it is a sidelight on his
character.”

“How so?”

“Eltham has never seen Dr. Fu-Manchu, but Eltham knows certain parts of
China better than you know the Strand. Probably, if he saw Fu-Manchu, he
would recognize him for who he really is, and this, it seems, the Doctor
is anxious to avoid.”

We ran back to where we had left Karamaneh.

The room was empty!

“Defeated, Petrie!” said Smith, bitterly. “The Yellow Devil is loosed on
London again!”

He leaned from the window and the skirl of a police whistle split the
stillness of the night.



CHAPTER IV. THE CRY OF A NIGHTHAWK

Such were the episodes that marked the coming of Dr. Fu-Manchu to
London, that awakened fears long dormant and reopened old wounds--nay,
poured poison into them. I strove desperately, by close attention to
my professional duties, to banish the very memory of Karamaneh from my
mind; desperately, but how vainly! Peace was for me no more, joy was
gone from the world, and only mockery remained as my portion.

Poor Eltham we had placed in a nursing establishment, where his
indescribable hurts could be properly tended: and his uncomplaining
fortitude not infrequently made me thoroughly ashamed of myself.
Needless to say, Smith had made such other arrangements as were
necessary to safeguard the injured man, and these proved so successful
that the malignant being whose plans they thwarted abandoned his designs
upon the heroic clergyman and directed his attention elsewhere, as I
must now proceed to relate.

Dusk always brought with it a cloud of apprehensions, for darkness must
ever be the ally of crime; and it was one night, long after the clocks
had struck the mystic hour “when churchyards yawn,” that the hand of
Dr. Fu-Manchu again stretched out to grasp a victim. I was dismissing a
chance patient.

“Good night, Dr. Petrie,” he said.

“Good night, Mr. Forsyth,” I replied; and, having conducted my late
visitor to the door, I closed and bolted it, switched off the light and
went upstairs.

My patient was chief officer of one of the P. and O. boats. He had cut
his hand rather badly on the homeward run, and signs of poisoning
having developed, had called to have the wound treated, apologizing for
troubling me at so late an hour, but explaining that he had only just
come from the docks. The hall clock announced the hour of one as I
ascended the stairs. I found myself wondering what there was in Mr.
Forsyth’s appearance which excited some vague and elusive memory. Coming
to the top floor, I opened the door of a front bedroom and was surprised
to find the interior in darkness.

“Smith!” I called.

“Come here and watch!” was the terse response. Nayland Smith was sitting
in the dark at the open window and peering out across the common. Even
as I saw him, a dim silhouette, I could detect that tensity in his
attitude which told of high-strung nerves.

I joined him.

“What is it?” I said, curiously.

“I don’t know. Watch that clump of elms.”

His masterful voice had the dry tone in it betokening excitement. I
leaned on the ledge beside him and looked out. The blaze of stars almost
compensated for the absence of the moon and the night had a quality of
stillness that made for awe. This was a tropical summer, and the common,
with its dancing lights dotted irregularly about it, had an unfamiliar
look to-night. The clump of nine elms showed as a dense and irregular
mass, lacking detail.

Such moods as that which now claimed my friend are magnetic. I had no
thought of the night’s beauty, for it only served to remind me that
somewhere amid London’s millions was lurking an uncanny being, whose
life was a mystery, whose very existence was a scientific miracle.

“Where’s your patient?” rapped Smith.

His abrupt query diverted my thoughts into a new channel. No footstep
disturbed the silence of the highroad; where was my patient?

I craned from the window. Smith grabbed my arm.

“Don’t lean out,” he said.

I drew back, glancing at him surprisedly.

“For Heaven’s sake, why not?”

“I’ll tell you presently, Petrie. Did you see him?”

“I did, and I can’t make out what he is doing. He seems to have remained
standing at the gate for some reason.”

“He has seen it!” snapped Smith. “Watch those elms.”

His hand remained upon my arm, gripping it nervously. Shall I say that
I was surprised? I can say it with truth. But I shall add that I was
thrilled, eerily; for this subdued excitement and alert watching of
Smith could only mean one thing:

Fu-Manchu!

And that was enough to set me watching as keenly as he; to set me
listening; not only for sounds outside the house but for sounds within.
Doubts, suspicions, dreads, heaped themselves up in my mind. Why was
Forsyth standing there at the gate? I had never seen him before, to
my knowledge, yet there was something oddly reminiscent about the man.
Could it be that his visit formed part of a plot? Yet his wound had been
genuine enough. Thus my mind worked, feverishly; such was the effect of
an unspoken thought--Fu-Manchu.

Nayland Smith’s grip tightened on my arm.

“There it is again, Petrie!” he whispered.

“Look, look!”

His words were wholly unnecessary. I, too, had seen it; a wonderful and
uncanny sight. Out of the darkness under the elms, low down upon the
ground, grew a vaporous blue light. It flared up, elfinish, then
began to ascend. Like an igneous phantom, a witch flame, it rose,
high--higher--higher, to what I adjudged to be some twelve feet or more
from the ground. Then, high in the air, it died away again as it had
come!

“For God’s sake, Smith, what was it?”

“Don’t ask me, Petrie. I have seen it twice. We--”

He paused. Rapid footsteps sounded below. Over Smith’s shoulder I saw
Forsyth cross the road, climb the low rail, and set out across the
common.

Smith sprang impetuously to his feet.

“We must stop him!” he said hoarsely; then, clapping a hand to my mouth
as I was about to call out--“Not a sound, Petrie!”

He ran out of the room and went blundering downstairs in the dark,
crying:

“Out through the garden--the side entrance!”

I overtook him as he threw wide the door of my dispensing room. Through
it he ran and opened the door at the other end. I followed him
out, closing it behind me. The smell from some tobacco plants in a
neighboring flower-bed was faintly perceptible; no breeze stirred; and
in the great silence I could hear Smith, in front of me, tugging at the
bolt of the gate.

Then he had it open, and I stepped out, close on his heels, and left the
door ajar.

“We must not appear to have come from your house,” explained Smith
rapidly. “I will go along the highroad and cross to the common a hundred
yards up, where there is a pathway, as though homeward bound to the
north side. Give me half a minute’s start, then you proceed in an
opposite direction and cross from the corner of the next road. Directly
you are out of the light of the street lamps, get over the rails and run
for the elms!”

He thrust a pistol into my hand and was off.

While he had been with me, speaking in that incisive, impetuous way of
his, with his dark face close to mine, and his eyes gleaming like steel,
I had been at one with him in his feverish mood, but now, when I stood
alone, in that staid and respectable byway, holding a loaded pistol in
my hand, the whole thing became utterly unreal.

It was in an odd frame of mind that I walked to the next corner, as
directed; for I was thinking, not of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the great and evil
man who dreamed of Europe and America under Chinese rule, not of Nayland
Smith, who alone stood between the Chinaman and the realization of his
monstrous schemes, not even of Karamaneh the slave girl, whose glorious
beauty was a weapon of might in Fu-Manchu’s hand, but of what impression
I must have made upon a patient had I encountered one then.

Such were my ideas up to the moment that I crossed to the common and
vaulted into the field on my right. As I began to run toward the elms I
found myself wondering what it was all about, and for what we were
come. Fifty yards west of the trees it occurred to me that if Smith had
counted on cutting Forsyth off we were too late, for it appeared to me
that he must already be in the coppice.

I was right. Twenty paces more I ran, and ahead of me, from the elms,
came a sound. Clearly it came through the still air--the eerie hoot of a
nighthawk. I could not recall ever to have heard the cry of that bird on
the common before, but oddly enough I attached little significance to it
until, in the ensuing instant, a most dreadful scream--a scream in which
fear, and loathing, and anger were hideously blended--thrilled me with
horror.

After that I have no recollection of anything until I found myself
standing by the southernmost elm.

“Smith!” I cried breathlessly. “Smith! my God! where are you?”

As if in answer to my cry came an indescribable sound, a mingled sobbing
and choking. Out from the shadows staggered a ghastly figure--that of a
man whose face appeared to be streaked. His eyes glared at me madly and
he mowed the air with his hands like one blind and insane with fear.

I started back; words died upon my tongue. The figure reeled and the man
fell babbling and sobbing at my very feet.

Inert I stood, looking down at him. He writhed a moment--and was still.
The silence again became perfect. Then, from somewhere beyond the elms,
Nayland Smith appeared. I did not move. Even when he stood beside me, I
merely stared at him fatuously.

“I let him walk to his death, Petrie,” I heard dimly. “God forgive
me--God forgive me!”

The words aroused me.

“Smith”--my voice came as a whisper--“for one awful moment I thought--”

“So did some one else,” he rapped. “Our poor sailor has met the end
designed for me, Petrie!”

At that I realized two things: I knew why Forsyth’s face had struck me
as being familiar in some puzzling way, and I knew why Forsyth now
lay dead upon the grass. Save that he was a fair man and wore a slight
mustache, he was, in features and build, the double of Nayland Smith!



CHAPTER V. THE NET

We raised the poor victim and turned him over on his back. I dropped
upon my knees, and with unsteady fingers began to strike a match. A
slight breeze was arising and sighing gently through the elms, but,
screened by my hands, the flame of the match took life. It illuminated
wanly the sun-baked face of Nayland Smith, his eyes gleaming with
unnatural brightness. I bent forward, and the dying light of the match
touched that other face.

“Oh, God!” whispered Smith.

A faint puff of wind extinguished the match.

In all my surgical experience I had never met with anything quite so
horrible. Forsyth’s livid face was streaked with tiny streams of blood,
which proceeded from a series of irregular wounds. One group of these
clustered upon his left temple, another beneath his right eye, and
others extended from the chin down to the throat. They were black,
almost like tattoo marks, and the entire injured surface was bloated
indescribably. His fists were clenched; he was quite rigid.

Smith’s piercing eyes were set upon me eloquently as I knelt on the path
and made my examination--an examination which that first glimpse when
Forsyth came staggering out from the trees had rendered useless--a mere
matter of form.

“He’s quite dead, Smith,” I said huskily. “It’s--unnatural--it--”

Smith began beating his fist into his left palm and taking little,
short, nervous strides up and down beside the dead man. I could hear a
car humming along the highroad, but I remained there on my knees staring
dully at the disfigured bloody face which but a matter of minutes
since had been that of a clean looking British seaman. I found myself
contrasting his neat, squarely trimmed mustache with the bloated face
above it, and counting the little drops of blood which trembled upon
its edge. There were footsteps approaching. I stood up. The footsteps
quickened; and I turned as a constable ran up.

“What’s this?” he demanded gruffly, and stood with his fists clenched,
looking from Smith to me and down at that which lay between us. Then his
hand flew to his breast; there was a silvern gleam and--

“Drop that whistle!” snapped Smith--and struck it from the man’s hand.
“Where’s your lantern? Don’t ask questions!”

The constable started back and was evidently debating upon his chances
with the two of us, when my friend pulled a letter from his pocket and
thrust it under the man’s nose.

“Read that!” he directed harshly, “and then listen to my orders.”

There was something in his voice which changed the officer’s opinion of
the situation. He directed the light of his lantern upon the open letter
and seemed to be stricken with wonder.

“If you have any doubts,” continued Smith--“you may not be familiar with
the Commissioner’s signature--you have only to ring up Scotland Yard
from Dr. Petrie’s house, to which we shall now return, to disperse
them.” He pointed to Forsyth. “Help us to carry him there. We must not
be seen; this must be hushed up. You understand? It must not get into
the press--”

The man saluted respectfully; and the three of us addressed ourselves
to the mournful task. By slow stages we bore the dead man to the edge
of the common, carried him across the road and into my house, without
exciting attention even on the part of those vagrants who nightly slept
out in the neighborhood.

We laid our burden upon the surgery table.

“You will want to make an examination, Petrie,” said Smith in his
decisive way, “and the officer here might ‘phone for the ambulance. I
have some investigations to make also. I must have the pocket lamp.”

He raced upstairs to his room, and an instant later came running down
again. The front door banged.

“The telephone is in the hall,” I said to the constable.

“Thank you, sir.”

He went out of the surgery as I switched on the lamp over the table and
began to examine the marks upon Forsyth’s skin. These, as I have said,
were in groups and nearly all in the form of elongated punctures; a
fairly deep incision with a pear-shaped and superficial scratch beneath
it. One of the tiny wounds had penetrated the right eye.

The symptoms, or those which I had been enabled to observe as Forsyth
had first staggered into view from among the elms, were most puzzling.
Clearly enough, the muscles of articulation and the respiratory muscles
had been affected; and now the livid face, dotted over with tiny wounds
(they were also on the throat), set me mentally groping for a clue to
the manner of his death.

No clue presented itself; and my detailed examination of the body
availed me nothing. The gray herald of dawn was come when the police
arrived with the ambulance and took Forsyth away.

I was just taking my cap from the rack when Nayland Smith returned.

“Smith!” I cried--“have you found anything?”

He stood there in the gray light of the hallway, tugging at the lobe of
his left ear, an old trick of his.

The bronzed face looked very gaunt, I thought, and his eyes were bright
with that febrile glitter which once I had disliked, but which I had
learned from experience were due to tremendous nervous excitement.
At such times he could act with icy coolness and his mental faculties
seemed temporarily to acquire an abnormal keenness. He made no direct
reply; but--

“Have you any milk?” he jerked abruptly.

So wholly unexpected was the question, that for a moment I failed to
grasp it. Then--

“Milk!” I began.

“Exactly, Petrie! If you can find me some milk, I shall be obliged.”

I turned to descend to the kitchen, when--

“The remains of the turbot from dinner, Petrie, would also be welcome,
and I think I should like a trowel.”

I stopped at the stairhead and faced him.

“I cannot suppose that you are joking, Smith,” I said, “but--”

He laughed dryly.

“Forgive me, old man,” he replied. “I was so preoccupied with my own
train of thought that it never occurred to me how absurd my request must
have sounded. I will explain my singular tastes later; at the moment,
hustle is the watchword.”

Evidently he was in earnest, and I ran downstairs accordingly, returning
with a garden trowel, a plate of cold fish and a glass of milk.

“Thanks, Petrie,” said Smith--“If you would put the milk in a jug--”

I was past wondering, so I simply went and fetched a jug, into which he
poured the milk. Then, with the trowel in his pocket, the plate of cold
turbot in one hand and the milk jug in the other, he made for the door.
He had it open when another idea evidently occurred to him.

“I’ll trouble you for the pistol, Petrie.”

I handed him the pistol without a word.

“Don’t assume that I want to mystify you,” he added, “but the presence
of any one else might jeopardize my plan. I don’t expect to be long.”

The cold light of dawn flooded the hallway momentarily; then the door
closed again and I went upstairs to my study, watching Nayland Smith as
he strode across the common in the early morning mist. He was making for
the Nine Elms, but I lost sight of him before he reached them.

I sat there for some time, watching for the first glow of sunrise. A
policeman tramped past the house, and, a while later, a belated reveler
in evening clothes. That sense of unreality assailed me again. Out there
in the gray mists a man who was vested with powers which rendered him a
law unto himself, who had the British Government behind him in all that
he might choose to do, who had been summoned from Rangoon to London on
singular and dangerous business, was employing himself with a plate of
cold turbot, a jug of milk, and a trowel!

Away to the right, and just barely visible, a tramcar stopped by the
common; then proceeded on its way, coming in a westerly direction. Its
lights twinkled yellowly through the grayness, but I was less concerned
with the approaching car than with the solitary traveler who had
descended from it.

As the car went rocking by below me, I strained my eyes in an endeavor
more clearly to discern the figure, which, leaving the highroad, had
struck out across the common. It was that of a woman, who seemingly
carried a bulky bag or parcel.

One must be a gross materialist to doubt that there are latent powers in
man which man, in modern times, neglects, or knows not how to develop. I
became suddenly conscious of a burning curiosity respecting this lonely
traveler who traveled at an hour so strange. With no definite plan in
mind, I went downstairs, took a cap from the rack, and walked briskly
out of the house and across the common in a direction which I thought
would enable me to head off the woman.

I had slightly miscalculated the distance, as Fate would have it, and
with a patch of gorse effectually screening my approach, I came upon
her, kneeling on the damp grass and unfastening the bundle which had
attracted my attention. I stopped and watched her.

She was dressed in bedraggled fashion in rusty black, wore a common
black straw hat and a thick veil; but it seemed to me that the dexterous
hands at work untying the bundle were slim and white; and I perceived a
pair of hideous cotton gloves lying on the turf beside her. As she threw
open the wrappings and lifted out something that looked like a
small shrimping net, I stepped around the bush, crossed silently the
intervening patch of grass, and stood beside her.

A faint breath of perfume reached me--of a perfume which, like the
secret incense of Ancient Egypt, seemed to assail my soul. The glamour
of the Orient was in that subtle essence; and I only knew one woman who
used it. I bent over the kneeling figure.

“Good morning,” I said; “can I assist you in any way?”

She came to her feet like a startled deer, and flung away from me with
the lithe movement of some Eastern dancing girl.

Now came the sun, and its heralding rays struck sparks from the
jewels upon the white fingers of this woman who wore the garments of
a mendicant. My heart gave a great leap. It was with difficulty that I
controlled my voice.

“There is no cause for alarm,” I added.

She stood watching me; even through the coarse veil I could see how her
eyes glittered. I stooped and picked up the net.

“Oh!” The whispered word was scarcely audible, but it was enough; I
doubted no longer.

“This is a net for bird snaring,” I said. “What strange bird are you
seeking--Karamaneh?”

With a passionate gesture Karamaneh snatched off the veil, and with
it the ugly black hat. The cloud of wonderful, intractable hair came
rumpling about her face, and her glorious eyes blazed out upon me. How
beautiful they were, with the dark beauty of an Egyptian night; how
often had they looked into mine in dreams!

To labor against a ceaseless yearning for a woman whom one knows, upon
evidence that none but a fool might reject, to be worthless--evil; is
there any torture to which the soul of man is subject, more pitiless?
Yet this was my lot, for what past sins assigned to me I was unable to
conjecture; and this was the woman, this lovely slave of a monster, this
creature of Dr. Fu-Manchu.

“I suppose you will declare that you do not know me!” I said harshly.

Her lips trembled, but she made no reply.

“It is very convenient to forget, sometimes,” I ran on bitterly, then
checked myself; for I knew that my words were prompted by a feckless
desire to hear her defense, by a fool’s hope that it might be an
acceptable one.

I looked again at the net contrivance in my hand; it had a strong spring
fitted to it and a line attached. Quite obviously it was intended for
snaring.

“What were you about to do?” I demanded sharply--but in my heart,
poor fool that I was, I found admiration for the exquisite arch of
Karamaneh’s lips, and reproach because they were so tremulous.

She spoke then.

“Dr. Petrie--”

“Well?”

“You seem to be--angry with me, not so much because of what I do, as
because I do not remember you. Yet--”

“Kindly do not revert to the matter,” I interrupted. “You have chosen,
very conveniently, to forget that once we were friends. Please yourself.
But answer my question.”

She clasped her hands with a sort of wild abandon.

“Why do you treat me so!” she cried; she had the most fascinating accent
imaginable. “Throw me into prison, kill me if you like, for what I have
done!” She stamped her foot. “For what I have done! But do not torture
me, try to drive me mad with your reproaches--that I forget you! I tell
you--again I tell you--that until you came one night, last week, to
rescue some one from--” There was the old trick of hesitating before the
name of Fu-Manchu--“from him, I had never, never seen you!”

The dark eyes looked into mine, afire with a positive hunger for
belief--or so I was sorely tempted to suppose. But the facts were
against her.

“Such a declaration is worthless,” I said, as coldly as I could. “You
are a traitress; you betray those who are mad enough to trust you--”

“I am no traitress!” she blazed at me; her eyes were magnificent.

“This is mere nonsense. You think that it will pay you better to serve
Fu-Manchu than to remain true to your friends. Your ‘slavery’--for I
take it you are posing as a slave again--is evidently not very harsh.
You serve Fu-Manchu, lure men to their destruction, and in return he
loads you with jewels, lavishes gifts--”

“Ah! so!”

She sprang forward, raising flaming eyes to mine; her lips were slightly
parted. With that wild abandon which betrayed the desert blood in her
veins, she wrenched open the neck of her bodice and slipped a soft
shoulder free of the garment. She twisted around, so that the white skin
was but inches removed from me.

“These are some of the gifts that he lavishes upon me!”

I clenched my teeth. Insane thoughts flooded my mind. For that creamy
skin was red with the marks of the lash!

She turned, quickly rearranging her dress, and watching me the while. I
could not trust myself to speak for a moment, then:

“If I am a stranger to you, as you claim, why do you give me your
confidence?” I asked.

“I have known you long enough to trust you!” she said simply, and turned
her head aside.

“Then why do you serve this inhuman monster?”

She snapped her fingers oddly, and looked up at me from under her
lashes. “Why do you question me if you think that everything I say is a
lie?”

It was a lesson in logic--from a woman! I changed the subject.

“Tell me what you came here to do,” I demanded.

She pointed to the net in my hands.

“To catch birds; you have said so yourself.”

“What bird?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

And now a memory was born within my brain; it was that of the cry of
the nighthawk which had harbingered the death of Forsyth! The net was
a large and strong one; could it be that some horrible fowl of the
air--some creature unknown to Western naturalists--had been released
upon the common last night? I thought of the marks upon Forsyth’s face
and throat; I thought of the profound knowledge of obscure and dreadful
things possessed by the Chinaman.

The wrapping, in which the net had been, lay at my feet. I stooped and
took out from it a wicker basket. Karamaneh stood watching me and biting
her lip, but she made no move to check me. I opened the basket. It
contained a large phial, the contents of which possessed a pungent and
peculiar smell.

I was utterly mystified.

“You will have to accompany me to my house,” I said sternly.

Karamaneh upturned her great eyes to mine. They were wide with fear. She
was on the point of speaking when I extended my hand to grasp her. At
that, the look of fear was gone and one of rebellion held its place. Ere
I had time to realize her purpose, she flung back from me with that wild
grace which I had met with in no other woman, turned and ran!

Fatuously, net and basket in hand, I stood looking after her. The idea
of pursuit came to me certainly; but I doubted if I could have outrun
her. For Karamaneh ran, not like a girl used to town or even country
life, but with the lightness and swiftness of a gazelle; ran like the
daughter of the desert that she was.

Some two hundred yards she went, stopped, and looked back. It would seem
that the sheer joy of physical effort had aroused the devil in her, the
devil that must lie latent in every woman with eyes like the eyes of
Karamaneh.

In the ever brightening sunlight I could see the lithe figure swaying;
no rags imaginable could mask its beauty. I could see the red lips
and gleaming teeth. Then--and it was music good to hear, despite its
taunt--she laughed defiantly, turned, and ran again!

I resigned myself to defeat; I blush to add, gladly! Some evidences of
a world awakening were perceptible about me now. Feathered choirs hailed
the new day joyously. Carrying the mysterious contrivance which I had
captured from the enemy, I set out in the direction of my house, my mind
very busy with conjectures respecting the link between this bird snare
and the cry like that of a nighthawk which we had heard at the moment of
Forsyth’s death.

The path that I had chosen led me around the border of the Mound Pond--a
small pool having an islet in the center. Lying at the margin of the
pond I was amazed to see the plate and jug which Nayland Smith had
borrowed recently!

Dropping my burden, I walked down to the edge of the water. I was filled
with a sudden apprehension. Then, as I bent to pick up the now empty
jug, came a hail:

“All right, Petrie! Shall join you in a moment!”

I started up, looked to right and left; but, although the voice had been
that of Nayland Smith, no sign could I discern of his presence!

“Smith!” I cried--“Smith!”

“Coming!”

Seriously doubting my senses, I looked in the direction from which the
voice had seemed to proceed--and there was Nayland Smith.

He stood on the islet in the center of the pond, and, as I perceived
him, he walked down into the shallow water and waded across to me!

“Good heavens!” I began--

One of his rare laughs interrupted me.

“You must think me mad this morning, Petrie!” he said. “But I have made
several discoveries. Do you know what that islet in the pond really is?”

“Merely an islet, I suppose--”

“Nothing of the kind; it is a burial mound, Petrie! It marks the site of
one of the Plague Pits where victims were buried during the Great
Plague of London. You will observe that, although you have seen it every
morning for some years, it remains for a British Commissioner resident
in Burma to acquaint you with its history! Hullo!”--the laughter was
gone from his eyes, and they were steely hard again--“what the blazes
have we here!”

He picked up the net. “What! a bird trap!”

“Exactly!” I said.

Smith turned his searching gaze upon me. “Where did you find it,
Petrie?”

“I did not exactly find it,” I replied; and I related to him the
circumstances of my meeting with Karamaneh.

He directed that cold stare upon me throughout the narrative, and when,
with some embarrassment, I had told him of the girl’s escape--

“Petrie,” he said succinctly, “you are an imbecile!”

I flushed with anger, for not even from Nayland Smith, whom I esteemed
above all other men, could I accept such words uttered as he had uttered
them. We glared at one another.

“Karamaneh,” he continued coldly, “is a beautiful toy, I grant you; but
so is a cobra. Neither is suitable for playful purposes.”

“Smith!” I cried hotly--“drop that! Adopt another tone or I cannot
listen to you!”

“You must listen,” he said, squaring his lean jaw truculently. “You are
playing, not only with a pretty girl who is the favorite of a Chinese
Nero, but with my life! And I object, Petrie, on purely personal
grounds!”

I felt my anger oozing from me; for this was strictly just. I had
nothing to say, and Smith continued:

“You know that she is utterly false, yet a glance or two from those dark
eyes of hers can make a fool of you! A woman made a fool of me, once;
but I learned my lesson; you have failed to learn yours. If you are
determined to go to pieces on the rock that broke up Adam, do so! But
don’t involve me in the wreck, Petrie--for that might mean a yellow
emperor of the world, and you know it!”

“Your words are unnecessarily brutal, Smith,” I said, feeling very
crestfallen, “but there--perhaps I fully deserve them all.”

“You do!” he assured me, but he relaxed immediately. “A murderous
attempt is made upon my life, resulting in the death of a perfectly
innocent man in no way concerned. Along you come and let an accomplice,
perhaps a participant, escape, merely, because she has a red mouth, or
black lashes, or whatever it is that fascinates you so hopelessly!”

He opened the wicker basket, sniffing at the contents.

“Ah!” he snapped, “do you recognize this odor?”

“Certainly.”

“Then you have some idea respecting Karamaneh’s quarry?”

“Nothing of the kind!”

Smith shrugged his shoulders.

“Come along, Petrie,” he said, linking his arm in mine.

We proceeded. Many questions there were that I wanted to put to him, but
one above all.

“Smith,” I said, “what, in Heaven’s name, were you doing on the mound?
Digging something up?”

“No,” he replied, smiling dryly; “burying something!”



CHAPTER VI. UNDER THE ELMS

Dusk found Nayland Smith and me at the top bedroom window. We knew, now
that poor Forsyth’s body had been properly examined, that he had died
from poisoning. Smith, declaring that I did not deserve his confidence,
had refused to confide in me his theory of the origin of the peculiar
marks upon the body.

“On the soft ground under the trees,” he said, “I found his tracks right
up to the point where something happened. There were no other fresh
tracks for several yards around. He was attacked as he stood close to
the trunk of one of the elms. Six or seven feet away I found some other
tracks, very much like this.”

He marked a series of dots upon the blotting pad at his elbow.

“Claws!” I cried. “That eerie call! like the call of a nighthawk--is it
some unknown species of--flying thing?”

“We shall see, shortly; possibly to-night,” was his reply. “Since,
probably owing to the absence of any moon, a mistake was made,” his jaw
hardened at the thoughts of poor Forsyth--“another attempt along the
same lines will almost certainly follow--you know Fu-Manchu’s system?”

So in the darkness, expectant, we sat watching the group of nine elms.
To-night the moon was come, raising her Aladdin’s lamp up to the star
world and summoning magic shadows into being. By midnight the highroad
showed deserted, the common was a place of mystery; and save for the
periodical passage of an electric car, in blazing modernity, this was a
fit enough stage for an eerie drama.

No notice of the tragedy had appeared in print; Nayland Smith was vested
with powers to silence the press. No detectives, no special constables,
were posted. My friend was of opinion that the publicity which had
been given to the deeds of Dr. Fu-Manchu in the past, together with
the sometimes clumsy co-operation of the police, had contributed not a
little to the Chinaman’s success.

“There is only one thing to fear,” he jerked suddenly; “he may not be
ready for another attempt to-night.”

“Why?”

“Since he has only been in England for a short time, his menagerie of
venomous things may be a limited one at present.”

Earlier in the evening there had been a brief but violent thunderstorm,
with a tropical downpour of rain, and now clouds were scudding across
the blue of the sky. Through a temporary rift in the veiling the
crescent of the moon looked down upon us. It had a greenish tint, and it
set me thinking of the filmed, green eyes of Fu-Manchu.

The cloud passed and a lake of silver spread out to the edge of the
coppice, where it terminated at a shadow bank.

“There it is, Petrie!” hissed Nayland Smith.

A lambent light was born in the darkness; it rose slowly, unsteadily, to
a great height, and died.

“It’s under the trees, Smith!”

But he was already making for the door. Over his shoulder:

“Bring the pistol, Petrie!” he cried; “I have another. Give me at least
twenty yards’ start or no attempt may be made. But the instant I’m under
the trees, join me.”

Out of the house we ran, and over onto the common, which latterly had
been a pageant ground for phantom warring. The light did not appear
again; and as Smith plunged off toward the trees, I wondered if he knew
what uncanny thing was hidden there. I more than suspected that he had
solved the mystery.

His instructions to keep well in the rear I understood. Fu-Manchu, or
the creature of Fu-Manchu, would attempt nothing in the presence of a
witness. But we knew full well that the instrument of death which was
hidden in the elm coppice could do its ghastly work and leave no clue,
could slay and vanish. For had not Forsyth come to a dreadful end while
Smith and I were within twenty yards of him?

Not a breeze stirred, as Smith, ahead of me--for I had slowed my
pace--came up level with the first tree. The moon sailed clear of the
straggling cloud wisps which alone told of the recent storm; and I noted
that an irregular patch of light lay silvern on the moist ground under
the elms where otherwise lay shadow.

He passed on, slowly. I began to run again. Black against the silvern
patch, I saw him emerge--and look up.

“Be careful, Smith!” I cried--and I was racing under the trees to join
him.

Uttering a loud cry, he leaped--away from the pool of light.

“Stand back, Petrie!” he screamed--“Back! further!”

He charged into me, shoulder lowered, and sent me reeling!

Mixed up with his excited cry I had heard a loud splintering and
sweeping of branches overhead; and now as we staggered into the shadows
it seemed that one of the elms was reaching down to touch us! So, at
least, the phenomenon presented itself to my mind in that fleeting
moment while Smith, uttering his warning cry, was hurling me back.

Then the truth became apparent.

With an appalling crash, a huge bough fell from above. One piercing,
awful shriek there was, a crackling of broken branches, and a choking
groan...

The crack of Smith’s pistol close beside me completed my confusion of
mind.

“Missed!” he yelled. “Shoot it, Petrie! On your left! For God’s sake
don’t miss it!”

I turned. A lithe black shape was streaking past me. I
fired--once--twice. Another frightful cry made yet more hideous the
nocturne.

Nayland Smith was directing the ray of a pocket torch upon the fallen
bough.

“Have you killed it, Petrie?” he cried.

“Yes, yes!”

I stood beside him, looking down. From the tangle of leaves and twigs
an evil yellow face looked up at us. The features were contorted with
agony, but the malignant eyes, wherein light was dying, regarded us with
inflexible hatred. The man was pinned beneath the heavy bough; his back
was broken; and as we watched, he expired, frothing slightly at the
mouth, and quitted his tenement of clay, leaving those glassy eyes set
hideously upon us.

“The pagan gods fight upon our side,” said Smith strangely. “Elms have a
dangerous habit of shedding boughs in still weather--particularly after
a storm. Pan, god of the woods, with this one has performed Justice’s
work of retribution.”

“I don’t understand. Where was this man--”

“Up the tree, lying along the bough which fell, Petrie! That is why he
left no footmarks. Last night no doubt he made his escape by swinging
from bough to bough, ape fashion, and descending to the ground somewhere
at the other side of the coppice.”

He glanced at me.

“You are wondering, perhaps,” he suggested, “what caused the mysterious
light? I could have told you this morning, but I fear I was in a bad
temper, Petrie. It’s very simple: a length of tape soaked in spirit or
something of the kind, and sheltered from the view of any one watching
from your windows, behind the trunk of the tree; then, the end ignited,
lowered, still behind the tree, to the ground. The operator swinging it
around, the flame ascended, of course. I found the unburned fragment of
the tape last night, a few yards from here.”

I was peering down at Fu-Manchu’s servant, the hideous yellow man who
lay dead in a bower of elm leaves.

“He has some kind of leather bag beside him,” I began--

“Exactly!” rapped Smith. “In that he carried his dangerous instrument of
death; from that he released it!”

“Released what?”

“What your fascinating friend came to recapture this morning.”

“Don’t taunt me, Smith!” I said bitterly. “Is it some species of bird?”

“You saw the marks on Forsyth’s body, and I told you of those which I
had traced upon the ground here. They were caused by claws, Petrie!”

“Claws! I thought so! But what claws?”

“The claws of a poisonous thing. I recaptured the one used last night,
killed it--against my will--and buried it on the mound. I was afraid to
throw it in the pond, lest some juvenile fisherman should pull it out
and sustain a scratch. I don’t know how long the claws would remain
venomous.”

“You are treating me like a child, Smith,” I said slowly. “No doubt I
am hopelessly obtuse, but perhaps you will tell me what this Chinaman
carried in a leather bag and released upon Forsyth. It was something
which you recaptured, apparently with the aid of a plate of cold turbot
and a jug of milk! It was something, also, which Karamaneh had been sent
to recapture with the aid--”

I stopped.

“Go on,” said Nayland Smith, turning the ray to the left, “what did she
have in the basket?”

“Valerian,” I replied mechanically.

The ray rested upon the lithe creature that I had shot down.

It was a black cat!

“A cat will go through fire and water for valerian,” said Smith; “but I
got first innings this morning with fish and milk! I had recognized the
imprints under the trees for those of a cat, and I knew, that if a cat
had been released here it would still be hiding in the neighborhood,
probably in the bushes. I finally located a cat, sure enough, and
came for bait! I laid my trap, for the animal was too frightened to be
approachable, and then shot it; I had to. That yellow fiend used the
light as a decoy. The branch which killed him jutted out over the path
at a spot where an opening in the foliage above allowed some moon rays
to penetrate. Directly the victim stood beneath, the Chinaman uttered
his bird cry; the one below looked up, and the cat, previously held
silent and helpless in the leather sack, was dropped accurately upon his
head!”

“But”--I was growing confused.

Smith stooped lower.

“The cat’s claws are sheathed now,” he said; “but if you could examine
them you would find that they are coated with a shining black substance.
Only Fu-Manchu knows what that substance is, Petrie, but you and I know
what it can do!”



CHAPTER VII. ENTER MR. ABEL SLATTIN

“I don’t blame you!” rapped Nayland Smith. “Suppose we say, then, a
thousand pounds if you show us the present hiding-place of Fu-Manchu,
the payment to be in no way subject to whether we profit by your
information or not?”

Abel Slattin shrugged his shoulders, racially, and returned to the
armchair which he had just quitted. He reseated himself, placing his hat
and cane upon my writing-table.

“A little agreement in black and white?” he suggested smoothly.

Smith raised himself up out of the white cane chair, and, bending
forward over a corner of the table, scribbled busily upon a sheet of
notepaper with my fountain-pen.

The while he did so, I covertly studied our visitor. He lay back in
the armchair, his heavy eyelids lowered deceptively. He was a thought
overdressed--a big man, dark-haired and well groomed, who toyed with a
monocle most unsuitable to his type. During the preceding conversation,
I had been vaguely surprised to note Mr. Abel Slattin’s marked American
accent.

Sometimes, when Slattin moved, a big diamond which he wore upon the
third finger of his right hand glittered magnificently. There was a sort
of bluish tint underlying the dusky skin, noticeable even in his hands
but proclaiming itself significantly in his puffy face and especially
under the eyes. I diagnosed a laboring valve somewhere in the heart
system.

Nayland Smith’s pen scratched on. My glance strayed from our Semitic
caller to his cane, lying upon the red leather before me. It was of most
unusual workmanship, apparently Indian, being made of some kind of dark
brown, mottled wood, bearing a marked resemblance to a snake’s skin; and
the top of the cane was carved in conformity, to represent the head
of what I took to be a puff-adder, fragments of stone, or beads, being
inserted to represent the eyes, and the whole thing being finished with
an artistic realism almost startling.

When Smith had tossed the written page to Slattin, and he, having read
it with an appearance of carelessness, had folded it neatly and placed
it in his pocket, I said:

“You have a curio here?”

Our visitor, whose dark eyes revealed all the satisfaction which, by his
manner, he sought to conceal, nodded and took up the cane in his hand.

“It comes from Australia, Doctor,” he replied; “it’s aboriginal work,
and was given to me by a client. You thought it was Indian? Everybody
does. It’s my mascot.”

“Really?”

“It is indeed. Its former owner ascribed magical powers to it! In
fact, I believe he thought that it was one of those staffs mentioned in
biblical history--”

“Aaron’s rod?” suggested Smith, glancing at the cane.

“Something of the sort,” said Slattin, standing up and again preparing
to depart.

“You will ‘phone us, then?” asked my friend.

“You will hear from me to-morrow,” was the reply.

Smith returned to the cane armchair, and Slattin, bowing to both of us,
made his way to the door as I rang for the girl to show him out.

“Considering the importance of his proposal,” I began, as the door
closed, “you hardly received our visitor with cordiality.”

“I hate to have any relations with him,” answered my friend; “but we
must not be squeamish respecting our instruments in dealing with Dr.
Fu-Manchu. Slattin has a rotten reputation--even for a private inquiry
agent. He is little better than a blackmailer--”

“How do you know?”

“Because I called on our friend Weymouth at the Yard yesterday and
looked up the man’s record.”

“Whatever for?”

“I knew that he was concerning himself, for some reason, in the case.
Beyond doubt he has established some sort of communication with the
Chinese group; I am only wondering--”

“You don’t mean--”

“Yes--I do, Petrie! I tell you he is unscrupulous enough to stoop even
to that.”

No doubt, Slattin knew that this gaunt, eager-eyed Burmese commissioner
was vested with ultimate authority in his quest of the mighty Chinaman
who represented things unutterable, whose potentialities for evil were
boundless as his genius, who personified a secret danger, the extent
and nature of which none of us truly understood. And, learning of these
things, with unerring Semitic instinct he had sought an opening in this
glittering Rialto. But there were two bidders!

“You think he may have sunk so low as to become a creature of
Fu-Manchu?” I asked, aghast.

“Exactly! If it paid him well I do not doubt that he would serve that
master as readily as any other. His record is about as black as it
well could be. Slattin is of course an assumed name; he was known as
Lieutenant Pepley when he belonged to the New York Police, and he was
kicked out of the service for complicity in an unsavory Chinatown case.”

“Chinatown!”

“Yes, Petrie, it made me wonder, too; and we must not forget that he is
undeniably a clever scoundrel.”

“Shall you keep any appointment which he may suggest?”

“Undoubtedly. But I shall not wait until tomorrow.”

“What!”

“I propose to pay a little informal visit to Mr. Abel Slattin,
to-night.”

“At his office?”

“No; at his private residence. If, as I more than suspect, his object
is to draw us into some trap, he will probably report his favorable
progress to his employer to-night!”

“Then we should have followed him!”

Nayland Smith stood up and divested himself of the old shooting-jacket.

“He has been followed, Petrie,” he replied, with one of his rare smiles.
“Two C.I.D. men have been watching the house all night!”

This was entirely characteristic of my friend’s farseeing methods.

“By the way,” I said, “you saw Eltham this morning. He will soon be
convalescent. Where, in heaven’s name, can he--”

“Don’t be alarmed on his behalf, Petrie,” interrupted Smith. “His life
is no longer in danger.”

I stared, stupidly.

“No longer in danger!”

“He received, some time yesterday, a letter, written in Chinese, upon
Chinese paper, and enclosed in an ordinary business envelope, having a
typewritten address and bearing a London postmark.”

“Well?”

“As nearly as I can render the message in English, it reads: ‘Although,
because you are a brave man, you would not betray your correspondent in
China, he has been discovered. He was a mandarin, and as I cannot write
the name of a traitor, I may not name him. He was executed four days
ago. I salute you and pray for your speedy recovery. Fu-Manchu.’”

“Fu-Manchu! But it is almost certainly a trap.”

“On the contrary, Petrie--Fu-Manchu would not have written in Chinese
unless he were sincere; and, to clear all doubt, I received a cable this
morning reporting that the Mandarin Yen-Sun-Yat was assassinated in his
own garden, in Nan-Yang, one day last week.”



CHAPTER VIII. DR. FU-MANCHU STRIKES

Together we marched down the slope of the quiet, suburban avenue; to
take pause before a small, detached house displaying the hatchet boards
of the Estate Agent. Here we found unkempt laurel bushes and acacias
run riot, from which arboreal tangle protruded the notice--“To be Let or
Sold.”

Smith, with an alert glance to right and left, pushed open the wooden
gate and drew me in upon the gravel path. Darkness mantled all; for the
nearest street lamp was fully twenty yards beyond.

From the miniature jungle bordering the path, a soft whistle sounded.

“Is that Carter?” called Smith, sharply.

A shadowy figure uprose, and vaguely I made it out for that of a man in
the unobtrusive blue serge which is the undress uniform of the Force.

“Well?” rapped my companion.

“Mr. Slattin returned ten minutes ago, sir,” reported the constable. “He
came in a cab which he dismissed--”

“He has not left again?”

“A few minutes after his return,” the man continued, “another cab came
up, and a lady alighted.”

“A lady!”

“The same, sir, that has called upon him before.”

“Smith!” I whispered, plucking at his arm--“is it--”

He half turned, nodding his head; and my heart began to throb foolishly.
For now the manner of Slattin’s campaign suddenly was revealed to me. In
our operations against the Chinese murder-group two years before, we had
had an ally in the enemy’s camp--Karamaneh the beautiful slave, whose
presence in those happenings of the past had colored the sometimes
sordid drama with the opulence of old Arabia; who had seemed a fitting
figure for the romances of Bagdad during the Caliphate--Karamaneh, whom
I had thought sincere, whose inscrutable Eastern soul I had presumed,
fatuously, to have laid bare and analyzed.

Now, once again she was plying her old trade of go-between; professing
to reveal the secrets of Dr. Fu-Manchu, and all the time--I could not
doubt it--inveigling men into the net of this awful fisher.

Yesterday, I had been her dupe; yesterday, I had rejoiced in my
captivity. To-day, I was not the favored one; to-day I had not been
selected recipient of her confidences--confidences sweet, seductive,
deadly: but Abel Slattin, a plausible rogue, who, in justice, should
be immured in Sing Sing, was chosen out, was enslaved by those lovely
mysterious eyes, was taking to his soul the lies which fell from those
perfect lips, triumphant in a conquest that must end in his undoing;
deeming, poor fool, that for love of him this pearl of the Orient was
about to betray her master, to resign herself a prize to the victor!

Companioned by these bitter reflections, I had lost the remainder of the
conversation between Nayland Smith and the police officer; now, casting
off the succubus memory which threatened to obsess me, I put forth a
giant mental effort to purge my mind of this uncleanness, and became
again an active participant in the campaign against the Master--the
director of all things noxious.

Our plans being evidently complete, Smith seized my arm, and I found
myself again out upon the avenue. He led me across the road and into the
gate of a house almost opposite. From the fact that two upper windows
were illuminated, I adduced that the servants were retiring; the other
windows were in darkness, except for one on the ground floor to the
extreme left of the building, through the lowered venetian blinds
whereof streaks of light shone out.

“Slattin’s study!” whispered Smith. “He does not anticipate
surveillance, and you will note that the window is wide open!”

With that my friend crossed the strip of lawn, and careless of the fact
that his silhouette must have been visible to any one passing the gate,
climbed carefully up the artificial rockery intervening, and crouched
upon the window-ledge peering into the room.

A moment I hesitated, fearful that if I followed, I should stumble or
dislodge some of the larva blocks of which the rockery was composed.

Then I heard that which summoned me to the attempt, whatever the cost.

Through the open window came the sound of a musical voice--a voice
possessing a haunting accent, possessing a quality which struck upon my
heart and set it quivering as though it were a gong hung in my bosom.

Karamaneh was speaking.

Upon hands and knees, heedless of damage to my garments, I crawled up
beside Smith. One of the laths was slightly displaced and over this my
friend was peering in. Crouching close beside him, I peered in also.

I saw the study of a business man, with its files, neatly arranged works
of reference, roll-top desk, and Milner safe. Before the desk, in a
revolving chair, sat Slattin. He sat half turned toward the window,
leaning back and smiling; so that I could note the gold crown which
preserved the lower left molar. In an armchair by the window, close,
very close, and sitting with her back to me, was Karamaneh!

She, who, in my dreams, I always saw, was ever seeing, in an Eastern
dress, with gold bands about her white ankles, with jewel-laden fingers,
with jewels in her hair, wore now a fashionable costume and a hat that
could only have been produced in Paris. Karamaneh was the one Oriental
woman I had ever known who could wear European clothes; and as I watched
that exquisite profile, I thought that Delilah must have been just such
another as this, that, excepting the Empress Poppaea, history has record
of no woman, who, looking so innocent, was yet so utterly vile.

“Yes, my dear,” Slattin was saying, and through his monocle ogling his
beautiful visitor, “I shall be ready for you to-morrow night.”

I felt Smith start at the words.

“There will be a sufficient number of men?”

Karamaneh put the question in a strangely listless way.

“My dear little girl,” replied Slattin, rising and standing looking down
at her, with his gold tooth twinkling in the lamplight, “there will be a
whole division, if a whole division is necessary.”

He sought to take her white gloved hand, which rested upon the chair
arm; but she evaded the attempt with seeming artlessness, and stood up.
Slattin fixed his bold gaze upon her.

“So now, give me my orders,” he said.

“I am not prepared to do so, yet,” replied the girl, composedly; “but
now that I know you are ready, I can make my plans.”

She glided past him to the door, avoiding his outstretched arm with an
artless art which made me writhe; for once I had been the willing victim
of all these wiles.

“But--” began Slattin.

“I will ring you up in less than half an hour,” said Karamaneh and
without further ceremony, she opened the door.

I still had my eyes glued to the aperture in the blind, when Smith began
tugging at my arm.

“Down! you fool!” he hissed harshly--“if she sees us, all is lost!”

Realizing this, and none too soon, I turned, and rather clumsily
followed my friend. I dislodged a piece of granite in my descent; but,
fortunately, Slattin had gone out into the hall and could not well have
heard it.

We were crouching around an angle of the house, when a flood of light
poured down the steps, and Karamaneh rapidly descended. I had a glimpse
of a dark-faced man who evidently had opened the door for her, then all
my thoughts were centered upon that graceful figure receding from me
in the direction of the avenue. She wore a loose cloak, and I saw this
fluttering for a moment against the white gate posts; then she was gone.

Yet Smith did not move. Detaining me with his hand he crouched there
against a quick-set hedge; until, from a spot lower down the hill,
we heard the start of the cab which had been waiting. Twenty seconds
elapsed, and from some other distant spot a second cab started.

“That’s Weymouth!” snapped Smith. “With decent luck, we should know
Fu-Manchu’s hiding-place before Slattin tells us!”

“But--”

“Oh! as it happens, he’s apparently playing the game.”--In the
half-light, Smith stared at me significantly--“Which makes it all the
more important,” he concluded, “that we should not rely upon his aid!”

Those grim words were prophetic.

My companion made no attempt to communicate with the detective (or
detectives) who shared our vigil; we took up a position close under the
lighted study window and waited--waited.

Once, a taxi-cab labored hideously up the steep gradient of the avenue
... It was gone. The lights at the upper windows above us became
extinguished. A policeman tramped past the gateway, casually flashing
his lamp in at the opening. One by one the illuminated windows in other
houses visible to us became dull; then lived again as mirrors for the
pallid moon. In the silence, words spoken within the study were clearly
audible; and we heard someone--presumably the man who had opened the
door--inquire if his services would be wanted again that night.

Smith inclined his head and hung over me in a tense attitude, in order
to catch Slattin’s reply.

“Yes, Burke,” it came--“I want you to sit up until I return; I shall be
going out shortly.”

Evidently the man withdrew at that; for a complete silence followed
which prevailed for fully half an hour. I sought cautiously to move my
cramped limbs, unlike Smith, who seeming to have sinews of piano-wire,
crouched beside me immovable, untiringly. Then loud upon the stillness,
broke the strident note of the telephone bell.

I started, nervously, clutching at Smith’s arm. It felt hard as iron to
my grip.

“Hullo!” I heard Slattin call--“who is speaking?... Yes, yes! This is
Mr. A. S.... I am to come at once?... I know where--yes I ... you
will meet me there?... Good!--I shall be with you in half an hour....
Good-by!”

Distinctly I heard the creak of the revolving office-chair as Slattin
rose; then Smith had me by the arm, and we were flying swiftly away from
the door to take up our former post around the angle of the building.
This gained:

“He’s going to his death!” rapped Smith beside me; “but Carter has a cab
from the Yard waiting in the nearest rank. We shall follow to see where
he goes--for it is possible that Weymouth may have been thrown off the
scent; then, when we are sure of his destination, we can take a hand in
the game! We...”

The end of the sentence was lost to me--drowned in such a frightful wave
of sound as I despair to describe. It began with a high, thin scream,
which was choked off staccato fashion; upon it followed a loud and
dreadful cry uttered with all the strength of Slattin’s lungs--

“Oh, God!” he cried, and again--“Oh, God!”

This in turn merged into a sort of hysterical sobbing.

I was on my feet now, and automatically making for the door. I had a
vague impression of Nayland Smith’s face beside me, the eyes glassy with
a fearful apprehension. Then the door was flung open, and, in the bright
light of the hall-way, I saw Slattin standing--swaying and seemingly
fighting with the empty air.

“What is it? For God’s sake, what has happened!” reached my ears
dimly--and the man Burke showed behind his master. White-faced I saw him
to be; for now Smith and I were racing up the steps.

Ere we could reach him, Slattin, uttering another choking cry, pitched
forward and lay half across the threshold.

We burst into the hall, where Burke stood with both his hands raised
dazedly to his head. I could hear the sound of running feet upon the
gravel, and knew that Carter was coming to join us.

Burke, a heavy man with a lowering, bull-dog type of face, collapsed
onto his knees beside Slattin, and began softly to laugh in little
rising peals.

“Drop that!” snapped Smith, and grasping him by the shoulders, he sent
him spinning along the hallway, where he sank upon the bottom step of
the stairs, to sit with his outstretched fingers extended before his
face, and peering at us grotesquely through the crevices.

There were rustlings and subdued cries from the upper part of the
house. Carter came in out of the darkness, carefully stepping over the
recumbent figure; and the three of us stood there in the lighted hall
looking down at Slattin.

“Help us to move him back,” directed Smith, tensely; “far enough to
close the door.”

Between us we accomplished this, and Carter fastened the door. We were
alone with the shadow of Fu-Manchu’s vengeance; for as I knelt beside
the body on the floor, a look and a touch sufficed to tell me that this
was but clay from which the spirit had fled!

Smith met my glance as I raised my head, and his teeth came together
with a loud snap; the jaw muscles stood out prominently beneath the
dark skin; and his face was grimly set in that odd, half-despairful
expression which I knew so well but which boded so ill for whomsoever
occasioned it.

“Dead, Petrie!--already?”

“Lightning could have done the work no better. Can I turn him over?”

Smith nodded.

Together we stooped and rolled the heavy body on its back. A flood of
whispers came sibilantly from the stairway. Smith spun around rapidly,
and glared upon the group of half-dressed servants.

“Return to your rooms!” he rapped, imperiously; “let no one come into
the hall without my orders.”

The masterful voice had its usual result; there was a hurried retreat
to the upper landing. Burke, shaking like a man with an ague, sat on the
lower step, pathetically drumming his palms upon his uplifted knees.

“I warned him, I warned him!” he mumbled monotonously, “I warned him,
oh, I warned him!”

“Stand up!” shouted Smith--“stand up and come here!”

The man, with his frightened eyes turning to right and left, and seeming
to search for something in the shadows about him, advanced obediently.

“Have you a flask?” demanded Smith of Carter.

The detective silently administered to Burke a stiff restorative.

“Now,” continued Smith, “you, Petrie, will want to examine him, I
suppose?” He pointed to the body. “And in the meantime I have some
questions to put to you, my man.”

He clapped his hand upon Burke’s shoulder.

“My God!” Burke broke out, “I was ten yards from him when it happened!”

“No one is accusing you,” said Smith, less harshly; “but since you were
the only witness, it is by your aid that we hope to clear the matter
up.”

Exerting a gigantic effort to regain control of himself, Burke nodded,
watching my friend with a childlike eagerness. During the ensuing
conversation, I examined Slattin for marks of violence; and of what I
found, more anon.

“In the first place,” said Smith, “you say that you warned him. When did
you warn him and of what?”

“I warned him, sir, that it would come to this--”

“That what would come to this?”’

“His dealings with the Chinaman!”

“He had dealings with Chinamen?”

“He accidentally met a Chinaman at an East End gaming-house, a man he
had known in Frisco--a man called Singapore Charlie--”

“What! Singapore Charlie!”

“Yes, sir, the same man that had a dope-shop, two years ago, down
Ratcliffe way--”

“There was a fire--”

“But Singapore Charlie escaped, sir.”

“And he is one of the gang?”

“He is one of what we used to call in New York, the Seven Group.”

Smith began to tug at the lobe of his left ear, reflectively, as I saw
out of the corner of my eye.

“The Seven Group!” he mused. “That is significant. I always suspected
that Dr. Fu-Manchu and the notorious Seven Group were one and the same.
Go on, Burke.”

“Well, sir,” the man continued, more calmly, “the lieutenant--”

“The lieutenant!” began Smith; then: “Oh! of course; Slattin used to be
a police lieutenant!”

“Well, sir, he--Mr. Slattin--had a sort of hold on this Singapore
Charlie, and two years ago, when he first met him, he thought that with
his aid he was going to pull off the biggest thing of his life--”

“Forestall me, in fact?”

“Yes, sir; but you got in first, with the big raid and spoiled it.”

Smith nodded grimly, glancing at the Scotland Yard man, who returned his
nod with equal grimness.

“A couple of months ago,” resumed Burke, “he met Charlie again down
East, and the Chinaman introduced him to a girl--some sort of an
Egyptian girl.”

“Go on!” snapped Smith--“I know her.”

“He saw her a good many times--and she came here once or twice. She made
out that she and Singapore Charlie were prepared to give away the boss
of the Yellow gang--”

“For a price, of course?”

“I suppose so,” said Burke; “but I don’t know. I only know that I warned
him.”

“H’m!” muttered Smith. “And now, what took place to-night?”

“He had an appointment here with the girl,” began Burke

“I know all that,” interrupted Smith. “I merely want to know, what took
place after the telephone call?”

“Well, he told me to wait up, and I was dozing in the next room to the
study--the dining-room--when the ‘phone bell aroused me. I heard the
lieutenant--Mr. Slattin, coming out, and I ran out too, but only in time
to see him taking his hat from the rack--”

“But he wears no hat!”

“He never got it off the peg! Just as he reached up to take it, he gave
a most frightful scream, and turned around like lightning as though some
one had attacked him from behind!”

“There was no one else in the hall?”

“No one at all. I was standing down there outside the dining-room just
by the stairs, but he didn’t turn in my direction, he turned and looked
right behind him--where there was no one--nothing. His cries were
frightful.” Burke’s voice broke, and he shuddered feverishly. “Then he
made a rush for the front door. It seemed as though he had not seen me.
He stood there screaming; but, before I could reach him, he fell....”

Nayland Smith fixed a piercing gaze upon Burke.

“Is that all you know?” he demanded slowly.

“As God is my judge, sir, that’s all I know, and all I saw. There was no
living thing near him when he met his death.”

“We shall see,” muttered Smith. He turned to me--“What killed him?” he
asked, shortly.

“Apparently, a minute wound on the left wrist,” I replied, and,
stooping, I raised the already cold hand in mine.

A tiny, inflamed wound showed on the wrist; and a certain puffiness was
becoming observable in the injured hand and arm. Smith bent down and
drew a quick, sibilant breath.

“You know what this is, Petrie?” he cried.

“Certainly. It was too late to employ a ligature and useless to inject
ammonia. Death was practically instantaneous. His heart...”

There came a loud knocking and ringing.

“Carter!” cried Smith, turning to the detective, “open that door to no
one--no one. Explain who I am--”

“But if it is the inspector?--”

“I said, open the door to no one!” snapped Smith.

“Burke, stand exactly where you are! Carter, you can speak to whoever
knocks, through the letter-box. Petrie, don’t move for your life! It may
be here, in the hallway!--”



CHAPTER IX. THE CLIMBER

Our search of the house of Abel Slattin ceased only with the coming of
the dawn, and yielded nothing but disappointment. Failure followed upon
failure; for, in the gray light of the morning, our own quest concluded,
Inspector Weymouth returned to report that the girl, Karamaneh, had
thrown him off the scent.

Again he stood before me, the big, burly friend of old and dreadful
days, a little grayer above the temples, which I set down for a record
of former horrors, but deliberate, stoical, thorough, as ever. His blue
eyes melted in the old generous way as he saw me, and he gripped my hand
in greeting.

“Once again,” he said, “your dark-eyed friend has been too clever for
me, Doctor. But the track as far as I could follow, leads to the old
spot. In fact,”--he turned to Smith, who, grim-faced and haggard,
looked thoroughly ill in that gray light--“I believe Fu-Manchu’s lair is
somewhere near the former opium-den of Shen-Yan--‘Singapore Charlie.’”

Smith nodded.

“We will turn our attention in that direction,” he replied, “at a very
early date.”

Inspector Weymouth looked down at the body of Abel Slattin.

“How was it done?” he asked softly.

“Clumsily for Fu-Manchu,” I replied. “A snake was introduced into the
house by some means--”

“By Karamaneh!” rapped Smith.

“Very possibly by Karamaneh,” I continued firmly. “The thing has escaped
us.”

“My own idea,” said Smith, “is that it was concealed about his clothing.
When he fell by the open door it glided out of the house. We must have
the garden searched thoroughly by daylight.”

“He”--Weymouth glanced at that which lay upon the floor--“must be moved;
but otherwise we can leave the place untouched, clear out the servants,
and lock the house up.”

“I have already given orders to that effect,” answered Smith. He spoke
wearily and with a note of conscious defeat in his voice. “Nothing has
been disturbed;”--he swept his arm around comprehensively--“papers and
so forth you can examine at leisure.”

Presently we quitted that house upon which the fateful Chinaman had
set his seal, as the suburb was awakening to a new day. The clank of
milk-cans was my final impression of the avenue to which a dreadful
minister of death had come at the bidding of the death lord. We
left Inspector Weymouth in charge and returned to my rooms, scarcely
exchanging a word upon the way.

Nayland Smith, ignoring my entreaties, composed himself for slumber in
the white cane chair in my study. About noon he retired to the bathroom,
and returning, made a pretense of breakfast; then resumed his seat in
the cane armchair. Carter reported in the afternoon, but his report was
merely formal. Returning from my round of professional visits at half
past five, I found Nayland Smith in the same position; and so the day
waned into evening, and dusk fell uneventfully.

In the corner of the big room by the empty fireplace, Nayland Smith lay,
with his long, lean frame extended in the white cane chair. A tumbler,
from which two straws protruded, stood by his right elbow, and a perfect
continent of tobacco smoke lay between us, wafted toward the door by the
draught from an open window. He had littered the hearth with matches and
tobacco ash, being the most untidy smoker I have ever met; and save
for his frequent rapping-out of his pipe bowl and perpetual striking of
matches, he had shown no sign of activity for the past hour. Collarless
and wearing an old tweed jacket, he had spent the evening, as he had
spent the day, in the cane chair, only quitting it for some ten minutes,
or less, to toy with dinner.

My several attempts at conversation had elicited nothing but growls;
therefore, as dusk descended, having dismissed my few patients, I
busied myself collating my notes upon the renewed activity of the Yellow
Doctor, and was thus engaged when the ‘phone bell disturbed me. It was
Smith who was wanted, however; and he went out eagerly, leaving me to my
task.

At the end of a lengthy conversation, he returned from the ‘phone and
began, restlessly, to pace the room. I made a pretense of continuing my
labors, but covertly I was watching him. He was twitching at the lobe of
his left ear, and his face was a study in perplexity. Abruptly he burst
out:

“I shall throw the thing up, Petrie! Either I am growing too old to cope
with such an adversary as Fu-Manchu, or else my intellect has become
dull. I cannot seem to think clearly or consistently. For the Doctor,
this crime, this removal of Slattin, is clumsy--unfinished. There are
two explanations. Either he, too, is losing his old cunning or he has
been interrupted!”

“Interrupted!”

“Take the facts, Petrie,”--Smith clapped his hands upon my table and
bent down, peering into my eyes--“is it characteristic of Fu-Manchu to
kill a man by the direct agency of a snake and to implicate one of his
own damnable servants in this way?”

“But we have found no snake!”

“Karamaneh introduced one in some way. Do you doubt it?”

“Certainly Karamaneh visited him on the evening of his death, but you
must be perfectly well aware that even if she had been arrested, no jury
could convict her.”

Smith resumed his restless pacings up and down.

“You are very useful to me, Petrie,” he replied; “as a counsel for
the defense you constantly rectify my errors of prejudice. Yet I am
convinced that our presence at Slattin’s house last night prevented
Fu-Manchu from finishing off this little matter as he had designed to
do.”

“What has given you this idea?”

“Weymouth is responsible. He has rung me up from the Yard. The constable
on duty at the house where the murder was committed, reports that some
one, less than an hour ago, attempted to break in.”

“Break in!”

“Ah! you are interested? I thought the circumstance illuminating, also!”

“Did the officer see this person?”

“No; he only heard him. It was some one who endeavored to enter by the
bathroom window, which, I am told, may be reached fairly easily by an
agile climber.”

“The attempt did not succeed?”

“No; the constable interrupted, but failed to make a capture or even to
secure a glimpse of the man.”

We were both silent for some moments; then:

“What do you propose to do?” I asked.

“We must not let Fu-Manchu’s servants know,” replied Smith, “but
to-night I shall conceal myself in Slattin’s house and remain there
for a week or a day--it matters not how long--until that attempt is
repeated. Quite obviously, Petrie, we have overlooked something which
implicates the murderer with the murder! In short, either by accident,
by reason of our superior vigilance, or by the clumsiness of his plans,
Fu-Manchu for once in an otherwise blameless career, has left a clue!”



CHAPTER X. THE CLIMBER RETURNS

In utter darkness we groped our way through into the hallway of
Slattin’s house, having entered, stealthily, from the rear; for Smith
had selected the study as a suitable base of operations. We reached it
without mishap, and presently I found myself seated in the very chair
which Karamaneh had occupied; my companion took up a post just within
the widely opened door.

So we commenced our ghostly business in the house of the murdered man--a
house from which, but a few hours since, his body had been removed. This
was such a vigil as I had endured once before, when, with Nayland Smith
and another, I had waited for the coming of one of Fu-Manchu’s death
agents.

Of all the sounds which, one by one, now began to detach themselves
from the silence, there was a particular sound, homely enough at another
time, which spoke to me more dreadfully than the rest. It was the
ticking of the clock upon the mantelpiece; and I thought how this sound
must have been familiar to Abel Slattin, how it must have formed
part and parcel of his life, as it were, and how it went on
now--tick-tick-tick-tick--whilst he, for whom it had ticked, lay
unheeding--would never heed it more.

As I grew more accustomed to the gloom, I found myself staring at his
office chair; once I found myself expecting Abel Slattin to enter the
room and occupy it. There was a little China Buddha upon the bureau in
one corner, with a gilded cap upon its head, and as some reflection of
the moonlight sought out this little cap, my thoughts grotesquely turned
upon the murdered man’s gold tooth.

Vague creakings from within the house, sounds as though of stealthy
footsteps upon the stair, set my nerves tingling; but Nayland Smith gave
no sign, and I knew that my imagination was magnifying these ordinary
night sounds out of all proportion to their actual significance.
Leaves rustled faintly outside the window at my back: I construed their
sibilant whispers into the dreaded name--Fu-Manchu-Fu-Manchu--Fu-Manchu!

So wore on the night; and, when the ticking clock hollowly boomed the
hour of one, I almost leaped out of my chair, so highly strung were my
nerves, and so appallingly did the sudden clangor beat upon them. Smith,
like a man of stone, showed no sign. He was capable of so subduing his
constitutionally high-strung temperament, at times, that temporarily
he became immune from human dreads. On such occasions he would be icily
cool amid universal panic; but, his object accomplished, I have seen him
in such a state of collapse, that utter nervous exhaustion is the only
term by which I can describe it.

Tick-tick-tick-tick went the clock, and, with my heart still thumping
noisily in my breast, I began to count the tickings; one, two, three,
four, five, and so on to a hundred, and from one hundred to many
hundreds.

Then, out from the confusion of minor noises, a new, arresting sound
detached itself. I ceased my counting; no longer I noted the tick-tick
of the clock, nor the vague creakings, rustlings and whispers. I saw
Smith, shadowly, raise his hand in warning--in needless warning, for I
was almost holding my breath in an effort of acute listening.

From high up in the house this new sound came from above the topmost
room, it seemed, up under the roof; a regular squeaking, oddly familiar,
yet elusive. Upon it followed a very soft and muffled thud; then a
metallic sound as of a rusty hinge in motion; then a new silence,
pregnant with a thousand possibilities more eerie than any clamor.

My mind was rapidly at work. Lighting the topmost landing of the house
was a sort of glazed trap, evidently set in the floor of a loft-like
place extending over the entire building. Somewhere in the red-tiled
roof above, there presumably existed a corresponding skylight or
lantern.

So I argued; and, ere I had come to any proper decision, another sound,
more intimate, came to interrupt me.

This time I could be in no doubt; some one was lifting the trap above
the stairhead--slowly, cautiously, and all but silently. Yet to my ears,
attuned to trifling disturbances, the trap creaked and groaned noisily.

Nayland Smith waved to me to take a stand on the other side of the
opened door--behind it, in fact, where I should be concealed from the
view of any one descending the stair.

I stood up and crossed the floor to my new post.

A dull thud told of the trap fully raised and resting upon some
supporting joist. A faint rustling (of discarded garments, I told
myself) spoke to my newly awakened, acute perceptions, of the visitor
preparing to lower himself to the landing. Followed a groan of woodwork
submitted to sudden strain--and the unmistakable pad of bare feet upon
the linoleum of the top corridor.

I knew now that one of Dr. Fu-Manchu’s uncanny servants had gained the
roof of the house by some means, had broken through the skylight and had
descended by means of the trap beneath on to the landing.

In such a tensed-up state as I cannot describe, nor, at this hour
mentally reconstruct, I waited for the creaking of the stairs which
should tell of the creature’s descent.

I was disappointed. Removed scarce a yard from me as he was, I could
hear Nayland Smith’s soft, staccato breathing; but my eyes were all for
the darkened hallway, for the smudgy outline of the stair-rail with the
faint patterning in the background which, alone, indicated the wall.

It was amid an utter silence, unheralded by even so slight a sound
as those which I had acquired the power of detecting--that I saw the
continuity of the smudgy line of stair-rail to be interrupted.

A dark patch showed upon it, just within my line of sight, invisible to
Smith on the other side of the doorway, and some ten or twelve stairs
up.

No sound reached me, but the dark patch vanished and reappeared three
feet lower down.

Still I knew that this phantom approach must be unknown to my
companion--and I knew that it was impossible for me to advise him of it
unseen by the dreaded visitor.

A third time the dark patch--the hand of one who, ghostly, silent, was
creeping down into the hallway--vanished and reappeared on a level with
my eyes. Then a vague shape became visible; no more than a blur upon the
dim design of the wall-paper... and Nayland Smith got his first sight of
the stranger.

The clock on the mantelpiece boomed out the half-hour.

At that, such was my state (I blush to relate it) I uttered a faint cry!

It ended all secrecy--that hysterical weakness of mine. It might have
frustrated our hopes; that it did not do so was in no measure due to me.
But in a sort of passionate whirl, the ensuing events moved swiftly.

Smith hesitated not one instant. With a panther-like leap he hurled
himself into the hall.

“The lights, Petrie!” he cried--“the lights! The switch is near the
street-door!”

I clenched my fists in a swift effort to regain control of my
treacherous nerves, and, bounding past Smith, and past the foot of the
stair, I reached out my hand to the switch, the situation of which,
fortunately, I knew.

Around I came, in response to a shrill cry from behind me--an inhuman
cry, less a cry than the shriek of some enraged animal....

With his left foot upon the first stair, Nayland Smith stood, his lean
body bent perilously backward, his arms rigidly thrust out, and his
sinewy fingers gripping the throat of an almost naked man--a man whose
brown body glistened unctuously, whose shaven head was apish low, whose
bloodshot eyes were the eyes of a mad dog! His teeth, upper and lower,
were bared; they glistened, they gnashed, and a froth was on his lips.
With both his hands, he clutched a heavy stick, and once--twice, he
brought it down upon Nayland Smith’s head!

I leaped forward to my friend’s aid; but as though the blows had been
those of a feather, he stood like some figure of archaic statuary, nor
for an instant relaxed the death grip which he had upon his adversary’s
throat.

Thrusting my way up the stairs, I wrenched the stick from the hand of
the dacoit--for in this glistening brown man, I recognized one of that
deadly brotherhood who hailed Dr. Fu-Manchu their Lord and Master.

                  *       *       *       *       *

I cannot dwell upon the end of that encounter; I cannot hope to make
acceptable to my readers an account of how Nayland Smith, glassy-eyed,
and with consciousness ebbing from him instant by instant, stood there,
a realization of Leighton’s “Athlete,” his arms rigid as iron bars even
after Fu-Manchu’s servant hung limply in that frightful grip.

In his last moments of consciousness, with the blood from his wounded
head trickling down into his eyes, he pointed to the stick which I had
torn from the grip of the dacoit, and which I still held in my hand.

“Not Aaron’s rod, Petrie!” he gasped hoarsely--“the rod of
Moses!--Slattin’s stick!”

Even in upon my anxiety for my friend, amazement intruded.

“But,” I began--and turned to the rack in which Slattin’s favorite cane
at that moment reposed--had reposed at the time of his death.

Yes!--there stood Slattin’s cane; we had not moved it; we had disturbed
nothing in that stricken house; there it stood, in company with an
umbrella and a malacca.

I glanced at the cane in my hand. Surely there could not be two such in
the world?

Smith collapsed on the floor at my feet.

“Examine the one in the rack, Petrie,” he whispered, almost inaudibly,
“but do not touch it. It may not be yet....”

I propped him up against the foot of the stairs, and as the constable
began knocking violently at the street door, crossed to the rack and
lifted out the replica of the cane which I held in my hand.

A faint cry from Smith--and as if it had been a leprous thing, I dropped
the cane instantly.

“Merciful God!” I groaned.

Although, in every other particular, it corresponded with that which I
held--which I had taken from the dacoit--which he had come to substitute
for the cane now lying upon the floor--in one dreadful particular it
differed.

Up to the snake’s head it was an accurate copy; but the head lived!

Either from pain, fear or starvation, the thing confined in the hollow
tube of this awful duplicate was become torpid. Otherwise, no power
on earth could have saved me from the fate of Abel Slattin; for the
creature was an Australian death-adder.



CHAPTER XI. THE WHITE PEACOCK

Nayland Smith wasted no time in pursuing the plan of campaign which he
had mentioned to Inspector Weymouth. Less than forty-eight hours after
quitting the house of the murdered Slattin, I found myself bound along
Whitechapel Road upon strange enough business.

A very fine rain was falling, which rendered it difficult to see clearly
from the windows; but the weather apparently had little effect upon the
commercial activities of the district. The cab was threading a hazardous
way through the cosmopolitan throng crowding the street. On either side
of me extended a row of stalls, seemingly established in opposition to
the more legitimate shops upon the inner side of the pavement.

Jewish hawkers, many of them in their shirt-sleeves, acclaimed the
rarity of the bargains which they had to offer; and, allowing for the
difference of costume, these tireless Israelites, heedless of climatic
conditions, sweating at their mongery, might well have stood, not in a
squalid London thoroughfare, but in an equally squalid market-street of
the Orient.

They offered linen and fine raiment; from footgear to hair-oil their
wares ranged. They enlivened their auctioneering with conjuring tricks
and witty stories, selling watches by the aid of legerdemain, and fancy
vests by grace of a seasonable anecdote.

Poles, Russians, Serbs, Roumanians, Jews of Hungary, and Italians
of Whitechapel mingled in the throng. Near East and Far East rubbed
shoulders. Pidgin English contested with Yiddish for the ownership of
some tawdry article offered by an auctioneer whose nationality defied
conjecture, save that always some branch of his ancestry had drawn
nourishment from the soil of Eternal Judea.

Some wearing mens’ caps, some with shawls thrown over their oily locks,
and some, more true to primitive instincts, defying, bare-headed, the
unkindly elements, bedraggled women--more often than not burdened with
muffled infants--crowded the pavements and the roadway, thronged about
the stalls like white ants about some choicer carrion.

And the fine drizzling rain fell upon all alike, pattering upon the hood
of the taxi-cab, trickling down the front windows; glistening upon the
unctuous hair of those in the street who were hatless; dewing the bare
arms of the auctioneers, and dripping, melancholy, from the tarpaulin
coverings of the stalls. Heedless of the rain above and of the mud
beneath, North, South, East, and West mingled their cries, their bids,
their blandishments, their raillery, mingled their persons in that
joyless throng.

Sometimes a yellow face showed close to one of the streaming windows;
sometimes a black-eyed, pallid face, but never a face wholly sane and
healthy. This was an underworld where squalor and vice went hand in hand
through the beautiless streets, a melting-pot of the world’s outcasts;
this was the shadowland, which last night had swallowed up Nayland
Smith.

Ceaselessly I peered to right and left, searching amid that rain-soaked
company for any face known to me. Whom I expected to find there, I know
not, but I should have counted it no matter for surprise had I detected
amid that ungracious ugliness the beautiful face of Karamaneh the
Eastern slave-girl, the leering yellow face of a Burmese dacoit, the
gaunt, bronzed features of Nayland Smith; a hundred times I almost
believed that I had seen the ruddy countenance of Inspector Weymouth,
and once (at which instant my heart seemed to stand still) I suffered
from the singular delusion that the oblique green eyes of Dr. Fu-Manchu
peered out from the shadows between two stalls.

It was mere phantasy, of course, the sick imaginings of a mind
overwrought. I had not slept and had scarcely tasted food for more
than thirty hours; for, following up a faint clue supplied by Burke,
Slattin’s man, and, like his master, an ex-officer of New York Police,
my friend, Nayland Smith, on the previous evening had set out in quest
of some obscene den where the man called Shen-Yan--former keeper of an
opium-shop--was now said to be in hiding.

Shen-Yan we knew to be a creature of the Chinese doctor, and only a most
urgent call had prevented me from joining Smith upon this promising,
though hazardous expedition.

At any rate, Fate willing it so, he had gone without me; and
now--although Inspector Weymouth, assisted by a number of C. I. D. men,
was sweeping the district about me--to the time of my departure nothing
whatever had been heard of Smith. The ordeal of waiting finally had
proved too great to be borne. With no definite idea of what I proposed
to do, I had thrown myself into the search, filled with such dreadful
apprehensions as I hope never again to experience.

I did not know the exact situation of the place to which Smith was gone,
for owing to the urgent case which I have mentioned, I had been absent
at the time of his departure; nor could Scotland Yard enlighten me
upon this point. Weymouth was in charge of the case--under Smith’s
direction--and since the inspector had left the Yard, early that
morning, he had disappeared as completely as Smith, no report having
been received from him.

As my driver turned into the black mouth of a narrow, ill-lighted
street, and the glare and clamor of the greater thoroughfare died behind
me, I sank into the corner of the cab burdened with such a sense of
desolation as mercifully comes but rarely.

We were heading now for that strange settlement off the West India Dock
Road, which, bounded by Limehouse Causeway and Pennyfields, and narrowly
confined within four streets, composes an unique Chinatown, a miniature
of that at Liverpool, and of the greater one in San Francisco. Inspired
with an idea which promised hopefully, I raised the speaking tube.

“Take me first to the River Police Station,” I directed; “along
Ratcliffe Highway.”

The man turned and nodded comprehendingly, as I could see through the
wet pane.

Presently we swerved to the right and into an even narrower street. This
inclined in an easterly direction, and proved to communicate with a wide
thoroughfare along which passed brilliantly lighted electric trams. I
had lost all sense of direction, and when, swinging to the left and to
the right again, I looked through the window and perceived that we were
before the door of the Police Station, I was dully surprised.

In quite mechanical fashion I entered the depot. Inspector Ryman, our
associate in one of the darkest episodes of the campaign with the Yellow
Doctor two years before, received me in his office.

By a negative shake of the head, he answered my unspoken question.

“The ten o’clock boat is lying off the Stone Stairs, Doctor,” he said,
“and co-operating with some of the Scotland Yard men who are dragging
that district--”

I shuddered at the word “dragging”; Ryman had not used it literally, but
nevertheless it had conjured up a dread possibility--a possibility in
accordance with the methods of Dr. Fu-Manchu. All within space of an
instant I saw the tide of Limehouse Reach, the Thames lapping about
the green-coated timbers of a dock pier; and rising--falling--sometimes
disclosing to the pallid light a rigid hand, sometimes a horribly
bloated face--I saw the body of Nayland Smith at the mercy of those oily
waters. Ryman continued:

“There is a launch out, too, patrolling the riverside from here to
Tilbury. Another lies at the breakwater”--he jerked his thumb over his
shoulder. “Should you care to take a run down and see for yourself?”

“No, thanks,” I replied, shaking my head. “You are doing all that can be
done. Can you give me the address of the place to which Mr. Smith went
last night?”

“Certainly,” said Ryman; “I thought you knew it. You remember Shen-Yan’s
place--by Limehouse Basin? Well, further east--east of the Causeway,
between Gill Street and Three Colt Street--is a block of wooden
buildings. You recall them?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Is the man established there again, then?”

“It appears so, but, although you have evidently not been informed of
the fact, Weymouth raided the establishment in the early hours of this
morning!”

“Well?” I cried.

“Unfortunately with no result,” continued the inspector. “The notorious
Shen-Yan was missing, and although there is no real doubt that the place
is used as a gaming-house, not a particle of evidence to that effect
could be obtained. Also--there was no sign of Mr. Nayland Smith, and no
sign of the American, Burke, who had led him to the place.”

“Is it certain that they went there?”

“Two C. I. D. men who were shadowing, actually saw the pair of them
enter. A signal had been arranged, but it was never given; and at about
half past four, the place was raided.”

“Surely some arrests were made?”

“But there was no evidence!” cried Ryman. “Every inch of the rat-burrow
was searched. The Chinese gentleman who posed as the proprietor of what
he claimed to be a respectable lodging-house offered every facility to
the police. What could we do?”

“I take it that the place is being watched?”

“Certainly,” said Ryman. “Both from the river and from the shore. Oh!
they are not there! God knows where they are, but they are not there!”

I stood for a moment in silence, endeavoring to determine my course;
then, telling Ryman that I hoped to see him later, I walked out slowly
into the rain and mist, and nodding to the taxi-driver to proceed to our
original destination, I re-entered the cab.

As we moved off, the lights of the River Police depot were swallowed up
in the humid murk, and again I found myself being carried through the
darkness of those narrow streets, which, like a maze, hold secret within
their labyrinth mysteries as great, and at least as foul, as that of
Pasiphae.

The marketing centers I had left far behind me; to my right stretched
the broken range of riverside buildings, and beyond them flowed the
Thames, a stream more heavily burdened with secrets than ever was Tiber
or Tigris. On my left, occasional flickering lights broke through the
mist, for the most part the lights of taverns; and saving these rents
in the veil, the darkness was punctuated with nothing but the faint and
yellow luminance of the street lamps.

Ahead was a black mouth, which promised to swallow me up as it had
swallowed up my friend.

In short, what with my lowered condition and consequent frame of mind,
and what with the traditions, for me inseparable from that gloomy
quarter of London, I was in the grip of a shadowy menace which at any
moment might become tangible--I perceived, in the most commonplace
objects, the yellow hand of Dr. Fu-Manchu.

When the cab stopped in a place of utter darkness, I aroused myself with
an effort, opened the door, and stepped out into the mud of a narrow
lane. A high brick wall frowned upon me from one side, and, dimly
perceptible, there towered a smoke stack, beyond. On my right uprose
the side of a wharf building, shadowly, and some distance ahead, almost
obscured by the drizzling rain, a solitary lamp flickered. I turned up
the collar of my raincoat, shivering, as much at the prospect as from
physical chill.

“You will wait here,” I said to the man; and, feeling in my
breast-pocket, I added: “If you hear the note of a whistle, drive on and
rejoin me.”

He listened attentively and with a certain eagerness. I had selected
him that night for the reason that he had driven Smith and myself
on previous occasions and had proved himself a man of intelligence.
Transferring a Browning pistol from my hip-pocket to that of my
raincoat, I trudged on into the mist.

The headlights of the taxi were swallowed up behind me, and just abreast
of the street lamp I stood listening.

Save for the dismal sound of rain, and the trickling of water along the
gutters, all about me was silent. Sometimes this silence would be broken
by the distant, muffled note of a steam siren; and always, forming
a sort of background to the near stillness, was the remote din of
riverside activity.

I walked on to the corner just beyond the lamp. This was the street in
which the wooden buildings were situated. I had expected to detect some
evidences of surveillances, but if any were indeed being observed, the
fact was effectively masked. Not a living creature was visible, peer as
I could.

Plans, I had none, and perceiving that the street was empty, and that
no lights showed in any of the windows, I passed on, only to find that I
had entered a cul-de-sac.

A rickety gate gave access to a descending flight of stone steps, the
bottom invisible in the denser shadows of an archway, beyond which, I
doubted not, lay the river.

Still uninspired by any definite design, I tried the gate and found that
it was unlocked. Like some wandering soul, as it has since seemed to
me, I descended. There was a lamp over the archway, but the glass was
broken, and the rain apparently had extinguished the light; as I passed
under it, I could hear the gas whistling from the burner.

Continuing my way, I found myself upon a narrow wharf with the Thames
flowing gloomily beneath me. A sort of fog hung over the river, shutting
me in. Then came an incident.

Suddenly, quite near, there arose a weird and mournful cry--a cry
indescribable, and inexpressibly uncanny!

I started back so violently that how I escaped falling into the river
I do not know to this day. That cry, so eerie and so wholly unexpected,
had unnerved me; and realizing the nature of my surroundings, and the
folly of my presence alone in such a place, I began to edge back toward
the foot of the steps, away from the thing that cried; when--a great
white shape uprose like a phantom before me!...

There are few men, I suppose, whose lives have been crowded with so many
eerie happenings as mine, but this phantom thing which grew out of the
darkness, which seemed about to envelope me, takes rank in my memory
amongst the most fearsome apparitions which I have witnessed.

I knew that I was frozen with a sort of supernatural terror. I stood
there with hands clenched, staring--staring at that white shape, which
seemed to float.

As I stared, every nerve in my body thrilling, I distinguished the
outline of the phantom. With a subdued cry, I stepped forward. A new
sensation claimed me. In that one stride I passed from the horrible to
the bizarre.

I found myself confronted with something tangible, certainly, but
something whose presence in that place was utterly extravagant--could
only be reconcilable in the dreams of an opium slave.

Was I awake, was I sane? Awake and sane beyond doubt, but surely
moving, not in the purlieus of Limehouse, but in the fantastic realms of
fairyland.

Swooping, with open arms, I rounded up in an angle against the building
and gathered in this screaming thing which had inspired in me so keen a
terror.

The great, ghostly fan was closed as I did so, and I stumbled back
toward the stair with my struggling captive tucked under my arm; I
mounted into one of London’s darkest slums, carrying a beautiful white
peacock!



CHAPTER XII. DARK EYES LOOKED INTO MINE

My adventure had done nothing to relieve the feeling of unreality which
held me enthralled. Grasping the struggling bird firmly by the body, and
having the long white tail fluttering a yard or so behind me, I returned
to where the taxi waited.

“Open the door!” I said to the man--who greeted me with such a stare of
amazement that I laughed outright, though my mirth was but hollow.

He jumped into the road and did as I directed. Making sure that both
windows were closed, I thrust the peacock into the cab and shut the door
upon it.

“For God’s sake, sir!” began the driver--

“It has probably escaped from some collector’s place on the riverside,”
 I explained, “but one never knows. See that it does not escape again,
and if at the end of an hour, as arranged, you do not hear from me, take
it back with you to the River Police Station.”

“Right you are, sir,” said the man, remounting his seat. “It’s the first
time I ever saw a peacock in Limehouse!”

It was the first time I had seen one, and the incident struck me as
being more than odd; it gave me an idea, and a new, faint hope. I
returned to the head of the steps, at the foot of which I had met with
this singular experience, and gazed up at the dark building beneath
which they led. Three windows were visible, but they were broken and
neglected. One, immediately above the arch, had been pasted up with
brown paper, and this was now peeling off in the rain, a little stream
of which trickled down from the detached corner to drop, drearily, upon
the stone stairs beneath.

Where were the detectives? I could only assume that they had directed
their attention elsewhere, for had the place not been utterly deserted,
surely I had been challenged.

In pursuit of my new idea, I again descended the steps. The persuasion
(shortly to be verified) that I was close upon the secret hold of the
Chinaman, grew stronger, unaccountably. I had descended some eight
steps, and was at the darkest part of the archway or tunnel, when
confirmation of my theories came to me.

A noose settled accurately upon my shoulders, was snatched tightly about
my throat, and with a feeling of insupportable agony at the base of
my skull, and a sudden supreme knowledge that I was being
strangled--hanged--I lost consciousness!

How long I remained unconscious, I was unable to determine at the time,
but I learned later, that it was for no more than half an hour; at any
rate, recovery was slow.

The first sensation to return to me was a sort of repetition of
the asphyxia. The blood seemed to be forcing itself into my eyes--I
choked--I felt that my end was come. And, raising my hands to my throat,
I found it to be swollen and inflamed. Then the floor upon which I lay
seemed to be rocking like the deck of a ship, and I glided back again
into a place of darkness and forgetfulness.

My second awakening was heralded by a returning sense of smell; for I
became conscious of a faint, exquisite perfume.

It brought me to my senses as nothing else could have done, and I sat
upright with a hoarse cry. I could have distinguished that perfume amid
a thousand others, could have marked it apart from the rest in a scent
bazaar. For me it had one meaning, and one meaning only--Karamaneh.

She was near to me, or had been near to me!

And in the first moments of my awakening, I groped about in the darkness
blindly seeking her.

Then my swollen throat and throbbing head, together with my utter
inability to move my neck even slightly, reminded me of the facts as
they were. I knew in that bitter moment that Karamaneh was no longer my
friend; but, for all her beauty and charm, was the most heartless, the
most fiendish creature in the service of Dr. Fu-Manchu. I groaned aloud
in my despair and misery.

Something stirred, near to me in the room, and set my nerves creeping
with a new apprehension. I became fully alive to the possibilities of
the darkness.

To my certain knowledge, Dr. Fu-Manchu at this time had been in England
for fully three months, which meant that by now he must be equipped with
all the instruments of destruction, animate and inanimate, which dread
experience had taught me to associate with him.

Now, as I crouched there in that dark apartment listening for a
repetition of the sound, I scarcely dared to conjecture what might have
occasioned it, but my imagination peopled the place with reptiles which
writhed upon the floor, with tarantulas and other deadly insects which
crept upon the walls, which might drop upon me from the ceiling at any
moment.

Then, since nothing stirred about me, I ventured to move, turning my
shoulders, for I was unable to move my aching head; and I looked in the
direction from which a faint, very faint, light proceeded.

A regular tapping sound now began to attract my attention, and, having
turned about, I perceived that behind me was a broken window, in places
patched with brown paper; the corner of one sheet of paper was detached,
and the rain trickled down upon it with a rhythmical sound.

In a flash I realized that I lay in the room immediately above the
archway; and listening intently, I perceived above the other faint
sounds of the night, or thought that I perceived, the hissing of the gas
from the extinguished lamp-burner.

Unsteadily I rose to my feet, but found myself swaying like a drunken
man. I reached out for support, stumbling in the direction of the wall.
My foot came in contact with something that lay there, and I pitched
forward and fell....

I anticipated a crash which would put an end to my hopes of escape, but
my fall was comparatively noiseless--for I fell upon the body of a man
who lay bound up with rope close against the wall!

A moment I stayed as I fell, the chest of my fellow captive rising and
falling beneath me as he breathed. Knowing that my life depended
upon retaining a firm hold upon myself, I succeeded in overcoming the
dizziness and nausea which threatened to drown my senses, and, moving
back so that I knelt upon the floor, I fumbled in my pocket for the
electric lamp which I had placed there. My raincoat had been removed
whilst I was unconscious, and with it my pistol, but the lamp was
untouched.

I took it out, pressed the button, and directed the ray upon the face of
the man beside me.

It was Nayland Smith!

Trussed up and fastened to a ring in the wall he lay, having a cork gag
strapped so tightly between his teeth that I wondered how he had escaped
suffocation.

But, although a grayish pallor showed through the tan of his skin, his
eyes were feverishly bright, and there, as I knelt beside him, I thanked
heaven, silently but fervently.

Then, in furious haste, I set to work to remove the gag. It was most
ingeniously secured by means of leather straps buckled at the back of
his head, but I unfastened these without much difficulty, and he spat
out the gag, uttering an exclamation of disgust.

“Thank God, old man!” he said, huskily. “Thank God that you are alive! I
saw them drag you in, and I thought...”

“I have been thinking the same about you for more than twenty-four
hours,” I said, reproachfully. “Why did you start without--”

“I did not want you to come, Petrie,” he replied. “I had a sort of
premonition. You see it was realized; and instead of being as helpless
as I, Fate has made you the instrument of my release. Quick! You have a
knife? Good!” The old, feverish energy was by no means extinguished
in him. “Cut the ropes about my wrists and ankles, but don’t otherwise
disturb them--”

I set to work eagerly.

“Now,” Smith continued, “put that filthy gag in place again--but you
need not strap it so tightly! Directly they find that you are alive,
they will treat you the same--you understand? She has been here three
times--”

“Karamaneh?”...

“Ssh!”

I heard a sound like the opening of a distant door.

“Quick! the straps of the gag!” whispered Smith, “and pretend to recover
consciousness just as they enter--”

Clumsily I followed his directions, for my fingers were none too steady,
replaced the lamp in my pocket, and threw myself upon the floor.

Through half-shut eyes, I saw the door open and obtained a glimpse of
a desolate, empty passage beyond. On the threshold stood Karamaneh. She
held in her hand a common tin oil lamp which smoked and flickered with
every movement, filling the already none too cleanly air with an odor of
burning paraffin. She personified the outre; nothing so incongruous as
her presence in that place could well be imagined. She was dressed as I
remembered once to have seen her two years before, in the gauzy silks of
the harem. There were pearls glittering like great tears amid the cloud
of her wonderful hair. She wore broad gold bangles upon her bare arms,
and her fingers were laden with jewelry. A heavy girdle swung from her
hips, defining the lines of her slim shape, and about one white ankle
was a gold band.

As she appeared in the doorway I almost entirely closed my eyes, but my
gaze rested fascinatedly upon the little red slippers which she wore.

Again I detected the exquisite, elusive perfume, which, like a breath
of musk, spoke of the Orient; and, as always, it played havoc with my
reason, seeming to intoxicate me as though it were the very essence of
her loveliness.

But I had a part to play, and throwing out one clenched hand so that my
fist struck upon the floor, I uttered a loud groan, and made as if to
rise upon my knees.

One quick glimpse I had of her wonderful eyes, widely opened and turned
upon me with such an enigmatical expression as set my heart leaping
wildly--then, stepping back, Karamaneh placed the lamp upon the boards
of the passage and clapped her hands.

As I sank upon the floor in assumed exhaustion, a Chinaman with
a perfectly impassive face, and a Burman, whose pock-marked, evil
countenance was set in an apparently habitual leer, came running into
the room past the girl.

With a hand which trembled violently, she held the lamp whilst the two
yellow ruffians tied me. I groaned and struggled feebly, fixing my gaze
upon the lamp-bearer in a silent reproach which was by no means without
its effect.

She lowered her eyes, and I could see her biting her lip, whilst the
color gradually faded from her cheeks. Then, glancing up again quickly,
and still meeting that reproachful stare, she turned her head aside
altogether, and rested one hand upon the wall, swaying slightly as she
did so.

It was a singular ordeal for more than one of that incongruous group;
but in order that I may not be charged with hypocrisy or with seeking
to hide my own folly, I confess, here, that when again I found myself
in darkness, my heart was leaping not because of the success of my
strategy, but because of the success of that reproachful glance which
I had directed toward the lovely, dark-eyed Karamaneh, toward the
faithless, evil Karamaneh! So much for myself.

The door had not been closed ten seconds, ere Smith again was spitting
out the gag, swearing under his breath, and stretching his cramped limbs
free from their binding. Within a minute from the time of my trussing,
I was a free man again; save that look where I would--to right, to left,
or inward, to my own conscience--two dark eyes met mine, enigmatically.

“What now?” I whispered.

“Let me think,” replied Smith. “A false move would destroy us.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Since last night.”

“Is Fu-Manchu--”

“Fu-Manchu is here!” replied Smith, grimly--“and not only Fu-Manchu,
but--another.”

“Another!”

“A higher than Fu-Manchu, apparently. I have an idea of the identity of
this person, but no more than an idea. Something unusual is going on,
Petrie; otherwise I should have been a dead man twenty-four hours
ago. Something even more important than my death engages Fu-Manchu’s
attention--and this can only be the presence of the mysterious visitor.
Your seductive friend, Karamaneh, is arrayed in her very becoming
national costume in his honor, I presume.” He stopped abruptly; then
added: “I would give five hundred pounds for a glimpse of that visitor’s
face!”

“Is Burke--”

“God knows what has become of Burke, Petrie! We were both caught napping
in the establishment of the amiable Shen-Yan, where, amid a very mixed
company of poker players, we were losing our money like gentlemen.”

“But Weymouth--”

“Burke and I had both been neatly sand-bagged, my dear Petrie, and
removed elsewhere, some hours before Weymouth raided the gaming-house.
Oh! I don’t know how they smuggled us away with the police watching the
place; but my presence here is sufficient evidence of the fact. Are you
armed?”

“No; my pistol was in my raincoat, which is missing.”

In the dim light from the broken window, I could see Smith tugging
reflectively at the lobe of his left ear.

“I am without arms, too,” he mused. “We might escape from the window--”

“It’s a long drop!”

“Ah! I imagined so. If only I had a pistol, or a revolver--”

“What should you do?”

“I should present myself before the important meeting, which, I am
assured, is being held somewhere in this building; and to-night would
see the end of my struggle with the Fu-Manchu group--the end of the
whole Yellow menace! For not only is Fu-Manchu here, Petrie, with all
his gang of assassins, but he whom I believe to be the real head of the
group--a certain mandarin--is here also!”



CHAPTER XIII. THE SACRED ORDER

Smith stepped quietly across the room and tried the door. It proved to
be unlocked, and an instant later, we were both outside in the passage.
Coincident with our arrival there, arose a sudden outcry from some place
at the westward end. A high-pitched, grating voice, in which guttural
notes alternated with a serpent-like hissing, was raised in anger.

“Dr. Fu-Manchu!” whispered Smith, grasping my arm.

Indeed, it was the unmistakable voice of the Chinaman, raised
hysterically in one of those outbursts which in the past I had diagnosed
as symptomatic of dangerous mania.

The voice rose to a scream, the scream of some angry animal rather than
anything human. Then, chokingly, it ceased. Another short sharp cry
followed--but not in the voice of Fu-Manchu--a dull groan, and the sound
of a fall.

With Smith still grasping my wrist, I shrank back into the doorway, as
something that looked in the darkness like a great ball of fluff came
rapidly along the passage toward me. Just at my feet the thing stopped
and I made it out for a small animal. The tiny, gleaming eyes looked up
at me, and, chattering wickedly, the creature bounded past and was lost
from view.

It was Dr. Fu-Manchu’s marmoset.

Smith dragged me back into the room which we had just left. As he partly
reclosed the door, I heard the clapping of hands. In a condition of
most dreadful suspense, we waited; until a new, ominous sound proclaimed
itself. Some heavy body was being dragged into the passage. I heard the
opening of a trap. Exclamations in guttural voices told of a heavy task
in progress; there was a great straining and creaking--whereupon the
trap was softly reclosed.

Smith bent to my ear.

“Fu-Manchu has chastised one of his servants,” he whispered. “There will
be food for the grappling-irons to-night!”

I shuddered violently, for, without Smith’s words, I knew that a bloody
deed had been done in that house within a few yards of where we stood.

In the new silence, I could hear the drip, drip, drip of the rain
outside the window; then a steam siren hooted dismally upon the river,
and I thought how the screw of that very vessel, even as we listened,
might be tearing the body of Fu-Manchu’s servant!

“Have you some one waiting?” whispered Smith, eagerly.

“How long was I insensible?”

“About half an hour.”

“Then the cabman will be waiting.”

“Have you a whistle with you?”

I felt in my coat pocket.

“Yes,” I reported.

“Good! Then we will take a chance.”

Again we slipped out into the passage and began a stealthy progress
to the west. Ten paces amid absolute darkness, and we found ourselves
abreast of a branch corridor. At the further end, through a kind of
little window, a dim light shone.

“See if you can find the trap,” whispered Smith; “light your lamp.”

I directed the ray of the pocket-lamp upon the floor, and there at my
feet was a square wooden trap. As I stooped to examine it, I glanced
back, painfully, over my shoulder--and saw Nayland Smith tiptoeing away
from me along the passage toward the light!

Inwardly I cursed his folly, but the temptation to peep in at that
little window proved too strong for me, as it had proved too strong for
him.

Fearful that some board would creak beneath my tread, I followed; and
side by side we two crouched, looking into a small rectangular room. It
was a bare and cheerless apartment with unpapered walls and carpetless
floor. A table and a chair constituted the sole furniture.

Seated in the chair, with his back toward us, was a portly Chinaman who
wore a yellow, silken robe. His face, it was impossible to see; but he
was beating his fist upon the table, and pouring out a torrent of words
in a thin, piping voice. So much I perceived at a glance; then, into
view at the distant end of the room, paced a tall, high-shouldered
figure--a figure unforgettable, at once imposing and dreadful, stately
and sinister.

With the long, bony hands behind him, fingers twining and intertwining
serpentinely about the handle of a little fan, and with the pointed chin
resting on the breast of the yellow robe, so that the light from the
lamp swinging in the center of the ceiling gleamed upon the great,
dome-like brow, this tall man paced somberly from left to right.

He cast a sidelong, venomous glance at the voluble speaker out of
half-shut eyes; in the act they seemed to light up as with an internal
luminance; momentarily they sparkled like emeralds; then their
brilliance was filmed over as in the eyes of a bird when the membrane is
lowered.

My blood seemed to chill, and my heart to double its pulsations;
beside me Smith was breathing more rapidly than usual. I knew now
the explanation of the feeling which had claimed me when first I had
descended the stone stairs. I knew what it was that hung like a miasma
over that house. It was the aura, the glamour, which radiated from this
wonderful and evil man as light radiates from radium. It was the vril,
the force, of Dr. Fu-Manchu.

I began to move away from the window. But Smith held my wrist as in a
vise. He was listening raptly to the torrential speech of the Chinaman
who sat in the chair; and I perceived in his eyes the light of a sudden
comprehension.

As the tall figure of the Chinese doctor came pacing into view again,
Smith, his head below the level of the window, pushed me gently along
the passage.

Regaining the site of the trap, he whispered to me: “We owe our lives,
Petrie, to the national childishness of the Chinese! A race of ancestor
worshipers is capable of anything, and Dr. Fu-Manchu, the dreadful being
who has rained terror upon Europe stands in imminent peril of disgrace
for having lost a decoration.”

“What do you mean, Smith?”

“I mean that this is no time for delay, Petrie! Here, unless I am
greatly mistaken, lies the rope by means of which you made your
entrance. It shall be the means of your exit. Open the trap!”

Handling the lamp to Smith, I stooped and carefully raised the
trap-door. At which moment, a singular and dramatic thing happened.

A softly musical voice--the voice of my dreams!--spoke.

“Not that way! O God, not that way!”

In my surprise and confusion I all but let the trap fall, but I retained
sufficient presence of mind to replace it gently. Standing upright, I
turned... and there, with her little jeweled hand resting upon Smith’s
arm, stood Karamaneh!

In all my experience of him, I had never seen Nayland Smith so utterly
perplexed. Between anger, distrust and dismay, he wavered; and each
passing emotion was written legibly upon the lean bronzed features.
Rigid with surprise, he stared at the beautiful face of the girl. She,
although her hand still rested upon Smith’s arm, had her dark eyes
turned upon me with that same enigmatical expression. Her lips were
slightly parted, and her breast heaved tumultuously.

This ten seconds of silence in which we three stood looking at one
another encompassed the whole gamut of human emotion. The silence was
broken by Karamaneh.

“They will be coming back that way!” she whispered, bending eagerly
toward me. (How, in the most desperate moments, I loved to listen to
that odd, musical accent!) “Please, if you would save your life, and
spare mine, trust me!”--She suddenly clasped her hands together and
looked up into my face, passionately--“Trust me--just for once--and I
will show you the way!”

Nayland Smith never removed his gaze from her for a moment, nor did he
stir.

“Oh!” she whispered, tremulously, and stamped one little red slipper
upon the floor. “Won’t you heed me? Come, or it will be too late!”

I glanced anxiously at my friend; the voice of Dr. Fu-Manchu, now raised
in anger, was audible above the piping tones of the other Chinaman.
And as I caught Smith’s eye, in silent query--the trap at my feet began
slowly to lift!

Karamaneh stifled a little sobbing cry; but the warning came too late.
A hideous yellow face with oblique squinting eyes, appeared in the
aperture.

I found myself inert, useless; I could neither think nor act. Nayland
Smith, however, as if instinctively, delivered a pitiless kick at the
head protruding above the trap.

A sickening crushing sound, with a sort of muffled snap, spoke of a
broken jaw-bone; and with no word or cry, the Chinaman fell. As the trap
descended with a bang, I heard the thud of his body on the stone stairs
beneath.

But we were lost. Karamaneh fled along one of the passages lightly as a
bird, and disappeared as Dr. Fu-Manchu, his top lip drawn up above his
teeth in the manner of an angry jackal, appeared from the other.

“This way!” cried Smith, in a voice that rose almost to a shriek--“this
way!”--and he led toward the room overhanging the steps.

Off we dashed with panic swiftness, only to find that this retreat also
was cut off. Dimly visible in the darkness was a group of yellow men,
and despite the gloom, the curved blades of the knives which they
carried glittered menacingly. The passage was full of dacoits!

Smith and I turned, together. The trap was raised again, and the Burman,
who had helped to tie me, was just scrambling up beside Dr. Fu-Manchu,
who stood there watching us, a shadowy, sinister figure.

“The game’s up, Petrie!” muttered Smith. “It has been a long fight, but
Fu-Manchu wins!”

“Not entirely!” I cried. I whipped the police whistle from my pocket,
and raised it to my lips; but brief as the interval had been, the
dacoits were upon me.

A sinewy brown arm shot over my shoulder and the whistle was dashed from
my grasp. Then came a whirl of maelstrom fighting with Smith and myself
ever sinking lower amid a whirlpool, as it seemed, of blood-lustful
eyes, yellow fangs, and gleaming blades.

I had some vague idea that the rasping voice of Fu-Manchu broke once
through the turmoil, and when, with my wrists tied behind me, I emerged
from the strife to find myself lying beside Smith in the passage, I
could only assume that the Chinaman had ordered his bloody servants to
take us alive; for saving numerous bruises and a few superficial cuts, I
was unwounded.

The place was utterly deserted again, and we two panting captives found
ourselves alone with Dr. Fu-Manchu. The scene was unforgettable; that
dimly lighted passage, its extremities masked in shadow, and the tall,
yellow-robed figure of the Satanic Chinaman towering over us where we
lay.

He had recovered his habitual calm, and as I peered at him through the
gloom I was impressed anew with the tremendous intellectual force of the
man. He had the brow of a genius, the features of a born ruler; and even
in that moment I could find time to search my memory, and to discover
that the face, saving the indescribable evil of its expression, was
identical with that of Seti, the mighty Pharaoh who lies in the Cairo
Museum.

Down the passage came leaping and gamboling the doctor’s marmoset.
Uttering its shrill, whistling cry, it leaped onto his shoulder,
clutched with its tiny fingers at the scanty, neutral-colored hair
upon his crown, and bent forward, peering grotesquely into that still,
dreadful face.

Dr. Fu-Manchu stroked the little creature; and crooned to it, as a
mother to her infant. Only this crooning, and the labored breathing of
Smith and myself, broke that impressive stillness.

Suddenly the guttural voice began:

“You come at an opportune time, Mr. Commissioner Nayland Smith, and
Dr. Petrie; at a time when the greatest man in China flatters me with
a visit. In my absence from home, a tremendous honor has been conferred
upon me, and, in the hour of this supreme honor, dishonor and calamity
have befallen! For my services to China--the New China, the China of the
future--I have been admitted by the Sublime Prince to the Sacred Order
of the White Peacock.”

Warming to his discourse, he threw wide his arms, hurling the chattering
marmoset fully five yards along the corridor.

“O god of Cathay!” he cried, sibilantly, “in what have I sinned that
this catastrophe has been visited upon my head! Learn, my two dear
friends, that the sacred white peacock brought to these misty shores for
my undying glory, has been lost to me! Death is the penalty of such a
sacrilege; death shall be my lot, since death I deserve.”

Covertly Smith nudged me with his elbow. I knew what the nudge was
designed to convey; he would remind me of his words--anent the childish
trifles which sway the life of intellectual China.

Personally, I was amazed. That Fu-Manchu’s anger, grief, sorrow and
resignation were real, no one watching him, and hearing his voice, could
doubt.

He continued:

“By one deed, and one deed alone, may I win a lighter punishment. By
one deed, and the resignation of all my titles, all my lands, and all my
honors, may I merit to be spared to my work--which has only begun.”

I knew now that we were lost, indeed; these were confidences which our
graves should hold inviolate! He suddenly opened fully those blazing
green eyes and directed their baneful glare upon Nayland Smith.

“The Director of the Universe,” he continued, softly, “has relented
toward me. To-night, you die! To-night, the arch-enemy of our caste
shall be no more. This is my offering--the price of redemption...”

My mind was working again, and actively. I managed to grasp the
stupendous truth--and the stupendous possibility.

Dr. Fu-Manchu was in the act of clapping his hands, when I spoke.

“Stop!” I cried.

He paused, and the weird film, which sometimes became visible in his
eyes, now obscured their greenness, and lent him the appearance of a
blind man.

“Dr. Petrie,” he said, softly, “I shall always listen to you with
respect.”

“I have an offer to make,” I continued, seeking to steady my voice.
“Give us our freedom, and I will restore your shattered honor--I will
restore the sacred peacock!”

Dr. Fu-Manchu bent forward until his face was so close to mine that I
could see the innumerable lines which, an intricate network, covered his
yellow skin.

“Speak!” he hissed. “You lift up my heart from a dark pit!”

“I can restore your white peacock,” I said; “I and I alone, know where
it is!”--and I strove not to shrink from the face so close to mine.

Upright shot the tall figure; high above his head Fu-Manchu threw
his arms--and a light of exaltation gleamed in the now widely opened,
catlike eyes.

“O god!” he screamed, frenziedly--“O god of the Golden Age! like a
phoenix I arise from the ashes of myself!” He turned to me. “Quick!
Quick! make your bargain! End my suspense!”

Smith stared at me like a man dazed; but, ignoring him, I went on:

“You will release me, now, immediately. In another ten minutes it will
be too late; my friend will remain. One of your--servants--can accompany
me, and give the signal when I return with the peacock. Mr. Nayland
Smith and yourself, or another, will join me at the corner of the street
where the raid took place last night. We shall then give you ten minutes
grace, after which we shall take whatever steps we choose.”

“Agreed!” cried Fu-Manchu. “I ask but one thing from an Englishman; your
word of honor?”

“I give it.”

“I, also,” said Smith, hoarsely.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Ten minutes later, Nayland Smith and I, standing beside the cab, whose
lights gleamed yellowly through the mist, exchanged a struggling,
frightened bird for our lives--capitulated with the enemy of the white
race.

With characteristic audacity--and characteristic trust in the British
sense of honor--Dr. Fu-Manchu came in person with Nayland Smith, in
response to the wailing signal of the dacoit who had accompanied me. No
word was spoken, save that the cabman suppressed a curse of amazement;
and the Chinaman, his sinister servant at his elbow, bowed low--and left
us, surely to the mocking laughter of the gods!



CHAPTER XIV. THE COUGHING HORROR

I leaped up in bed with a great start.

My sleep was troubled often enough in these days, which immediately
followed our almost miraculous escape, from the den of Fu-Manchu; and
now as I crouched there, nerves aquiver--listening--listening--I could
not be sure if this dank panic which possessed me had its origin in
nightmare or in something else.

Surely a scream, a choking cry for help, had reached my ears; but now,
almost holding my breath in that sort of nervous tensity peculiar to one
aroused thus, I listened, and the silence seemed complete. Perhaps I had
been dreaming...

“Help! Petrie! Help!...”

It was Nayland Smith in the room above me!

My doubts were dissolved; this was no trick of an imagination
disordered. Some dreadful menace threatened my friend. Not delaying
even to snatch my dressing-gown, I rushed out on to the landing, up the
stairs, bare-footed as I was, threw open the door of Smith’s room and
literally hurled myself in.

Those cries had been the cries of one assailed, had been uttered, I
judged, in the brief interval of a life and death struggle; had been
choked off...

A certain amount of moonlight found access to the room, without
spreading so far as the bed in which my friend lay. But at the moment
of my headlong entrance, and before I had switched on the light, my gaze
automatically was directed to the pale moonbeam streaming through the
window and down on to one corner of the sheep-skin rug beside the bed.

There came a sound of faint and muffled coughing.

What with my recent awakening and the panic at my heart, I could not
claim that my vision was true; but across this moonbeam passed a sort of
gray streak, for all the world as though some long thin shape had been
withdrawn, snakelike, from the room, through the open window... From
somewhere outside the house, and below, I heard the cough again,
followed by a sharp cracking sound like the lashing of a whip.

I depressed the switch, flooding the room with light, and as I leaped
forward to the bed a word picture of what I had seen formed in my mind;
and I found that I was thinking of a gray feather boa.

“Smith!” I cried (my voice seemed to pitch itself, unwilled, in a very
high key), “Smith, old man!”

He made no reply, and a sudden, sorrowful fear clutched at my
heart-strings. He was lying half out of bed flat upon his back, his head
at a dreadful angle with his body. As I bent over him and seized him by
the shoulders, I could see the whites of his eyes. His arms hung limply,
and his fingers touched the carpet.

“My God!” I whispered--“what has happened?”

I heaved him back onto the pillow, and looked anxiously into his face.
Habitually gaunt, the flesh so refined away by the consuming nervous
energy of the man as to reveal the cheekbones in sharp prominence, he
now looked truly ghastly. His skin was so sunbaked as to have changed
constitutionally; nothing could ever eradicate that tan. But to-night a
fearful grayness was mingled with the brown, his lips were purple... and
there were marks of strangulation upon the lean throat--ever darkening
weals made by clutching fingers.

He began to breathe stentoriously and convulsively, inhalation being
accompanied by a significant gurgling in the throat. But now my calm was
restored in face of a situation which called for professional attention.

I aided my friend’s labored respirations by the usual means, setting to
work vigorously; so that presently he began to clutch at his inflamed
throat which that murderous pressure had threatened to close.

I could hear sounds of movement about the house, showing that not I
alone had been awakened by those hoarse screams.

“It’s all right, old man,” I said, bending over him; “brace up!”

He opened his eyes--they looked bleared and bloodshot--and gave me a
quick glance of recognition.

“It’s all right, Smith!” I said--“no! don’t sit up; lie there for a
moment.”

I ran across to the dressing-table, whereon I perceived his flask to
lie, and mixed him a weak stimulant with which I returned to the bed.

As I bent over him again, my housekeeper appeared in the doorway, pale
and wide-eyed.

“There is no occasion for alarm,” I said over my shoulder; “Mr. Smith’s
nerves are overwrought and he was awakened by some disturbing dream. You
can return to bed, Mrs. Newsome.”

Nayland Smith seemed to experience much difficulty in swallowing the
contents of the tumbler which I held to his lips; and, from the way in
which he fingered the swollen glands, I could see that his throat,
which I had vigorously massaged, was occasioning him great pain. But the
danger was past, and already that glassy look was disappearing from his
eyes, nor did they protrude so unnaturally.

“God, Petrie!” he whispered, “that was a near shave! I haven’t the
strength of a kitten!”

“The weakness will pass off,” I replied; “there will be no collapse,
now. A little more fresh air...”

I stood up, glancing at the windows, then back at Smith, who forced a
wry smile in answer to my look.

“Couldn’t be done, Petrie,” he said, huskily.

His words referred to the state of the windows. Although the night was
oppressively hot, these were only opened some four inches at top and
bottom. Further opening was impossible because of iron brackets screwed
firmly into the casements which prevented the windows being raised or
lowered further.

It was a precaution adopted after long experience of the servants of Dr.
Fu-Manchu.

Now, as I stood looking from the half-strangled man upon the bed to
those screwed-up windows, the fact came home to my mind that this
precaution had proved futile. I thought of the thing which I had likened
to a feather boa; and I looked at the swollen weals made by clutching
fingers upon the throat of Nayland Smith.

The bed stood fully four feet from the nearest window.

I suppose the question was written in my face; for, as I turned again
to Smith, who, having struggled upright, was still fingering his injured
throat ruefully:

“God only knows, Petrie!” he said; “no human arm could have reached
me...”

For us, the night was ended so far as sleep was concerned. Arrayed in
his dressing-gown, Smith sat in the white cane chair in my study with
a glass of brandy-and-water beside him, and (despite my official
prohibition) with the cracked briar which had sent up its incense in
many strange and dark places of the East and which yet survived to
perfume these prosy rooms in suburban London, steaming between his
teeth. I stood with my elbow resting upon the mantelpiece looking down
at him where he sat.

“By God! Petrie,” he said, yet again, with his fingers straying gently
over the surface of his throat, “that was a narrow shave--a damned
narrow shave!”

“Narrower than perhaps you appreciate, old man,” I replied. “You were a
most unusual shade of blue when I found you...”

“I managed,” said Smith evenly, “to tear those clutching fingers away
for a moment and to give a cry for help. It was only for a moment,
though. Petrie! they were fingers of steel--of steel!”

“The bed,” I began...

“I know that,” rapped Smith. “I shouldn’t have been sleeping in it, had
it been within reach of the window; but, knowing that the doctor avoids
noisy methods, I had thought myself fairly safe so long as I made it
impossible for any one actually to enter the room...”

“I have always insisted, Smith,” I cried, “that there was danger! What
of poisoned darts? What of the damnable reptiles and insects which form
part of the armory of Fu-Manchu?”

“Familiarity breeds contempt, I suppose,” he replied. “But as it
happened none of those agents was employed. The very menace that I
sought to avoid reached me somehow. It would almost seem that Dr.
Fu-Manchu deliberately accepted the challenge of those screwed-up
windows! Hang it all, Petrie! one cannot sleep in a room hermetically
sealed, in weather like this! It’s positively Burmese; and although I
can stand tropical heat, curiously enough the heat of London gets me
down almost immediately.”

“The humidity; that’s easily understood. But you’ll have to put up with
it in the future. After nightfall our windows must be closed entirely,
Smith.”

Nayland Smith knocked out his pipe upon the side of the fireplace. The
bowl sizzled furiously, but without delay he stuffed broad-cut mixture
into the hot pipe, dropping a liberal quantity upon the carpet during
the process. He raised his eyes to me, and his face was very grim.

“Petrie,” he said, striking a match on the heel of his slipper, “the
resources of Dr. Fu-Manchu are by no means exhausted. Before we quit
this room it is up to us to come to a decision upon a certain point.” He
got his pipe well alight. “What kind of thing, what unnatural, distorted
creature, laid hands upon my throat to-night? I owe my life, primarily,
to you, old man, but, secondarily, to the fact that I was awakened, just
before the attack--by the creature’s coughing--by its vile, high-pitched
coughing...”

I glanced around at the books upon my shelves. Often enough, following
some outrage by the brilliant Chinese doctor whose genius was directed
to the discovery of new and unique death agents, we had obtained a clue
in those works of a scientific nature which bulk largely in the
library of a medical man. There are creatures, there are drugs, which,
ordinarily innocuous, may be so employed as to become inimical to human
life; and in the distorting of nature, in the disturbing of balances and
the diverting of beneficent forces into strange and dangerous channels,
Dr. Fu-Manchu excelled. I had known him to enlarge, by artificial
culture, a minute species of fungus so as to render it a powerful agent
capable of attacking man; his knowledge of venomous insects has probably
never been paralleled in the history of the world; whilst, in the sphere
of pure toxicology, he had, and has, no rival; the Borgias were children
by comparison. But, look where I would, think how I might, no adequate
explanation of this latest outrage seemed possible along normal lines.

“There’s the clue,” said Nayland Smith, pointing to a little ash-tray
upon the table near by. “Follow it if you can.”

But I could not.

“As I have explained,” continued my friend, “I was awakened by a sound
of coughing; then came a death grip on my throat, and instinctively my
hands shot out in search of my attacker. I could not reach him; my
hands came in contact with nothing palpable. Therefore I clutched at the
fingers which were dug into my windpipe, and found them to be small--as
the marks show--and hairy. I managed to give that first cry for
help, then with all my strength I tried to unfasten the grip that was
throttling the life out of me. At last I contrived to move one of the
hands, and I called out again, though not so loudly. Then both the hands
were back again; I was weakening; but I clawed like a madman at the
thin, hairy arms of the strangling thing, and with a blood-red mist
dancing before my eyes, I seemed to be whirling madly round and round
until all became a blank. Evidently I used my nails pretty freely--and
there’s the trophy.”

For the twentieth time, I should think, I carried the ash-tray in my
hand and laid it immediately under the table-lamp in order to examine
its contents. In the little brass bowl lay a blood-stained fragment of
grayish hair attached to a tatter of skin. This fragment of epidermis
had an odd bluish tinge, and the attached hair was much darker at the
roots than elsewhere. Saving its singular color, it might have been
torn from the forearm of a very hirsute human; but although my thoughts
wandered unfettered, north, south, east and west; although, knowing the
resources of Fu-Manchu, I considered all the recognized Mongolian
types, and, in quest of hirsute mankind, even roamed far north among
the blubbering Esquimo; although I glanced at Australasia, at Central
Africa, and passed in mental review the dark places of the Congo,
nowhere in the known world, nowhere in the history of the human species,
could I come upon a type of man answering to the description suggested
by our strange clue.

Nayland Smith was watching me curiously as I bent over the little brass
ash-tray.

“You are puzzled,” he rapped in his short way.

“So am I--utterly puzzled. Fu-Manchu’s gallery of monstrosities clearly
has become reinforced; for even if we identified the type, we should not
be in sight of our explanation.”

“You mean,” I began...

“Fully four feet from the window, Petrie, and that window but a few
inches open! Look”--he bent forward, resting his chest against the
table, and stretched out his hand toward me. “You have a rule there;
just measure.”

Setting down the ash-tray, I opened out the rule and measured the
distance from the further edge of the table to the tips of Smith’s
fingers.

“Twenty-eight inches--and I have a long reach!” snapped Smith,
withdrawing his arm and striking a match to relight his pipe. “There’s
one thing, Petrie, often proposed before, which now we must do without
delay. The ivy must be stripped from the walls at the back. It’s a
pity, but we can not afford to sacrifice our lives to our sense of the
aesthetic. What do you make of the sound like the cracking of a whip?”

“I make nothing of it, Smith,” I replied, wearily. “It might have been a
thick branch of ivy breaking beneath the weight of a climber.”

“Did it sound like it?”

“I must confess that the explanation does not convince me, but I have no
better one.”

Smith, permitting his pipe to go out, sat staring straight before him,
and tugging at the lobe of his left ear.

“The old bewilderment is seizing me,” I continued. “At first, when I
realized that Dr. Fu-Manchu was back in England, when I realized that
an elaborate murder-machine was set up somewhere in London, it seemed
unreal, fantastical. Then I met--Karamaneh! She, whom we thought to be
his victim, showed herself again to be his slave. Now, with Weymouth and
Scotland Yard at work, the old secret evil is established again in our
midst, unaccountably--our lives are menaced--sleep is a danger--every
shadow threatens death... oh! it is awful.”

Smith remained silent; he did not seem to have heard my words. I knew
these moods and had learnt that it was useless to seek to interrupt
them. With his brows drawn down, and his deep-set eyes staring into
space, he sat there gripping his cold pipe so tightly that my own jaw
muscles ached sympathetically. No man was better equipped than this
gaunt British Commissioner to stand between society and the menace of
the Yellow Doctor; I respected his meditations, for, unlike my own, they
were informed by an intimate knowledge of the dark and secret things of
the East, of that mysterious East out of which Fu-Manchu came, of that
jungle of noxious things whose miasma had been wafted Westward with the
implacable Chinaman.

I walked quietly from the room, occupied with my own bitter reflections.



CHAPTER XV. BEWITCHMENT

“You say you have two items of news for me?” said Nayland Smith, looking
across the breakfast table to where Inspector Weymouth sat sipping
coffee.

“There are two points--yes,” replied the Scotland Yard man, whilst Smith
paused, egg-spoon in hand, and fixed his keen eyes upon the speaker.
“The first is this: the headquarters of the Yellow group is no longer in
the East End.”

“How can you be sure of that?”

“For two reasons. In the first place, that district must now be too hot
to hold Dr. Fu-Manchu; in the second place, we have just completed a
house-to-house inquiry which has scarcely overlooked a rathole or a rat.
That place where you say Fu-Manchu was visited by some Chinese mandarin;
where you, Mr. Smith,” and--glancing in my direction--“you, Doctor, were
confined for a time--”

“Yes?” snapped Smith, attacking his egg.

“Well,” continued the inspector, “it is all deserted, now. There is not
the slightest doubt that the Chinaman has fled to some other abode. I am
certain of it. My second piece of news will interest you very much, I am
sure. You were taken to the establishment of the Chinaman, Shen-Yan, by
a certain ex-officer of New York Police--Burke...”

“Good God!” cried Smith, looking up with a start; “I thought they had
him!”

“So did I,” replied Weymouth grimly; “but they haven’t! He got away in
the confusion following the raid, and has been hiding ever since with a
cousin, a nurseryman out Upminster way...”

“Hiding?” snapped Smith.

“Exactly--hiding. He has been afraid to stir ever since, and has
scarcely shown his nose outside the door. He says he is watched night
and day.”

“Then how...”

“He realized that something must be done,” continued the inspector,
“and made a break this morning. He is so convinced of this constant
surveillance that he came away secretly, hidden under the boxes of a
market-wagon. He landed at Covent Garden in the early hours of this
morning and came straight away to the Yard.”

“What is he afraid of exactly?”

Inspector Weymouth put down his coffee cup and bent forward slightly.

“He knows something,” he said in a low voice, “and they are aware that
he knows it!”

“And what is this he knows?”

Nayland Smith stared eagerly at the detective.

“Every man has his price,” replied Weymouth with a smile, “and Burke
seems to think that you are a more likely market than the police
authorities.”

“I see,” snapped Smith. “He wants to see me?”

“He wants you to go and see him,” was the reply. “I think he anticipates
that you may make a capture of the person or persons spying upon him.”

“Did he give you any particulars?”

“Several. He spoke of a sort of gipsy girl with whom he had a short
conversation one day, over the fence which divides his cousin’s flower
plantations from the lane adjoining.”

“Gipsy girl!” I whispered, glancing rapidly at Smith.

“I think you are right, Doctor,” said Weymouth with his slow smile; “it
was Karamaneh. She asked him the way to somewhere or other and got him
to write it upon a loose page of his notebook, so that she should not
forget it.”

“You hear that, Petrie?” rapped Smith.

“I hear it,” I replied, “but I don’t see any special significance in the
fact.”

“I do!” rapped Smith; “I didn’t sit up the greater part of last night
thrashing my weary brains for nothing! But I am going to the British
Museum to-day, to confirm a certain suspicion.” He turned to Weymouth.
“Did Burke go back?” he demanded abruptly.

“He returned hidden under the empty boxes,” was the reply. “Oh! you
never saw a man in such a funk in all your life!”

“He may have good reasons,” I said.

“He has good reasons!” replied Nayland Smith grimly; “if that man really
possesses information inimical to the safety of Fu-Manchu, he can only
escape doom by means of a miracle similar to that which has hitherto
protected you and me.”

“Burke insists,” said Weymouth at this point, “that something comes
almost every night after dusk, slinking about the house--it’s an old
farmhouse, I understand; and on two or three occasions he has been
awakened (fortunately for him he is a light sleeper) by sounds of
coughing immediately outside his window. He is a man who sleeps with a
pistol under his pillow, and more than once, on running to the window,
he has had a vague glimpse of some creature leaping down from the tiles
of the roof, which slopes up to his room, into the flower beds below...”

“Creature!” said Smith, his gray eyes ablaze now--“you said creature!”

“I used the word deliberately,” replied Weymouth, “because Burke seems
to have the idea that it goes on all fours.”

There was a short and rather strained silence. Then:

“In descending a sloping roof,” I suggested, “a human being would
probably employ his hands as well as his feet.”

“Quite so,” agreed the inspector. “I am merely reporting the impression
of Burke.”

“Has he heard no other sound?” rapped Smith; “one like the cracking of
dry branches, for instance?”

“He made no mention of it,” replied Weymouth, staring.

“And what is the plan?”

“One of his cousin’s vans,” said Weymouth, with his slight smile, “has
remained behind at Covent Garden and will return late this afternoon.
I propose that you and I, Mr. Smith, imitate Burke and ride down to
Upminster under the empty boxes!”

Nayland Smith stood up, leaving his breakfast half finished, and began
to wander up and down the room, reflectively tugging at his ear. Then he
began to fumble in the pockets of his dressing-gown and finally produced
the inevitable pipe, dilapidated pouch, and box of safety matches. He
began to load the much-charred agent of reflection.

“Do I understand that Burke is actually too afraid to go out openly even
in daylight?” he asked suddenly.

“He has not hitherto left his cousin’s plantations at all,” replied
Weymouth. “He seems to think that openly to communicate with the
authorities, or with you, would be to seal his death warrant.”

“He’s right,” snapped Smith.

“Therefore he came and returned secretly,” continued the inspector; “and
if we are to do any good, obviously we must adopt similar precautions.
The market wagon, loaded in such a way as to leave ample space in the
interior for us, will be drawn up outside the office of Messrs. Pike
and Pike, in Covent Garden, until about five o’clock this afternoon. At,
say, half past four, I propose that we meet there and embark upon the
journey.”

The speaker glanced in my direction interrogatively.

“Include me in the program,” I said. “Will there be room in the wagon?”

“Certainly,” was the reply; “it is most commodious, but I cannot
guarantee its comfort.”

Nayland Smith promenaded the room, unceasingly, and presently he walked
out altogether, only to return ere the inspector and I had had time to
exchange more than a glance of surprise, carrying a brass ash-tray. He
placed this on a corner of the breakfast table before Weymouth.

“Ever seen anything like that?” he inquired.

The inspector examined the gruesome relic with obvious curiosity,
turning it over with the tip of his little finger and manifesting
considerable repugnance--in touching it at all. Smith and I watched
him in silence, and, finally, placing the tray again upon the table, he
looked up in a puzzled way.

“It’s something like the skin of a water rat,” he said.

Nayland Smith stared at him fixedly.

“A water rat? Now that you come to mention it, I perceive a certain
resemblance--yes. But”--he had been wearing a silk scarf about his
throat and now he unwrapped it--“did you ever see a water rat that could
make marks like these?”

Weymouth started to his feet with some muttered exclamation.

“What is this?” he cried. “When did it happen, and how?”

In his own terse fashion, Nayland Smith related the happenings of the
night. At the conclusion of the story:

“By heaven!” whispered Weymouth, “the thing on the roof--the coughing
thing that goes on all fours, seen by Burke...”

“My own idea exactly!” cried Smith...

“Fu-Manchu,” I said excitedly, “has brought some new, some dreadful
creature, from Burma...”

“No, Petrie,” snapped Smith, turning upon me suddenly. “Not from
Burma--from Abyssinia.”

That day was destined to be an eventful one; a day never to be forgotten
by any of us concerned in those happenings which I have to record. Early
in the morning Nayland Smith set off for the British Museum to
pursue his mysterious investigations, and having performed my brief
professional round (for, as Nayland Smith had remarked on one occasion,
this was a beastly healthy district), I found, having made the necessary
arrangements, that, with over three hours to spare, I had nothing to
occupy my time until the appointment in Covent Garden Market. My lonely
lunch completed, a restless fit seized me, and I felt unable to remain
longer in the house. Inspired by this restlessness, I attired myself
for the adventure of the evening, not neglecting to place a pistol in
my pocket, and, walking to the neighboring Tube station, I booked to
Charing Cross, and presently found myself rambling aimlessly along the
crowded streets. Led on by what link of memory I know not, I presently
drifted into New Oxford Street, and looked up with a start--to learn
that I stood before the shop of a second-hand book-seller where once two
years before I had met Karamaneh.

The thoughts conjured up at that moment were almost too bitter to be
borne, and without so much as glancing at the books displayed for sale,
I crossed the roadway, entered Museum Street, and, rather in order to
distract my mind than because I contemplated any purchase, began to
examine the Oriental Pottery, Egyptian statuettes, Indian armor, and
other curios, displayed in the window of an antique dealer.

But, strive as I would to concentrate my mind upon the objects in the
window, my memories persistently haunted me, and haunted me to the
exclusion even of the actualities. The crowds thronging the Pavement,
the traffic in New Oxford Street, swept past unheeded; my eyes saw
nothing of pot nor statuette, but only met, in a misty imaginative
world, the glance of two other eyes--the dark and beautiful eyes of
Karamaneh. In the exquisite tinting of a Chinese vase dimly perceptible
in the background of the shop, I perceived only the blushing cheeks
of Karamaneh; her face rose up, a taunting phantom, from out of the
darkness between a hideous, gilded idol and an Indian sandalwood screen.

I strove to dispel this obsessing thought, resolutely fixing my
attention upon a tall Etruscan vase in the corner of the window, near to
the shop door. Was I losing my senses indeed? A doubt of my own sanity
momentarily possessed me. For, struggle as I would to dispel the
illusion--there, looking out at me over that ancient piece of pottery,
was the bewitching face of the slave-girl!

Probably I was glaring madly, and possibly I attracted the notice of the
passers-by; but of this I cannot be certain, for all my attention was
centered upon that phantasmal face, with the cloudy hair, slightly
parted red lips, and the brilliant dark eyes which looked into mine out
of the shadows of the shop.

It was bewildering--it was uncanny; for, delusion or verity, the glamour
prevailed. I exerted a great mental effort, stepped to the door, turned
the handle, and entered the shop with as great a show of composure as I
could muster.

A curtain draped in a little door at the back of one counter swayed
slightly, with no greater violence than may have been occasioned by
the draught. But I fixed my eyes upon this swaying curtain almost
fiercely... as an impassive half-caste of some kind who appeared to be a
strange cross between a Graeco-Hebrew and a Japanese, entered and quite
unemotionally faced me, with a slight bow.

So wholly unexpected was this apparition that I started back.

“Can I show you anything, sir?” inquired the new arrival, with a second
slight inclination of the head.

I looked at him for a moment in silence. Then:

“I thought I saw a lady of my acquaintance here a moment ago,” I said.
“Was I mistaken?”

“Quite mistaken, sir,” replied the shopman, raising his black eyebrows
ever so slightly; “a mistake possibly due to a reflection in the window.
Will you take a look around now that you are here?”

“Thank you,” I replied, staring him hard in the face; “at some other
time.”

I turned and quitted the shop abruptly. Either I was mad, or Karamaneh
was concealed somewhere therein.

However, realizing my helplessness in the matter, I contented myself
with making a mental note of the name which appeared above the
establishment--J. Salaman--and walked on, my mind in a chaotic condition
and my heart beating with unusual rapidity.



CHAPTER XVI. THE QUESTING HANDS

Within my view, from the corner of the room where I sat in deepest
shadow, through the partly opened window (it was screwed, like our own)
were rows of glass-houses gleaming in the moonlight, and, beyond them,
orderly ranks of flower-beds extending into a blue haze of distance. By
reason of the moon’s position, no light entered the room, but my eyes,
from long watching, were grown familiar with the darkness, and I could
see Burke quite clearly as he lay in the bed between my post and the
window. I seemed to be back again in those days of the troubled past
when first Nayland Smith and I had come to grips with the servants of
Dr. Fu-Manchu. A more peaceful scene than this flower-planted corner
of Essex it would be difficult to imagine; but, either because of my
knowledge that its peace was chimerical, or because of that outflung
consciousness of danger which, actually, or in my imagination, preceded
the coming of the Chinaman’s agents, to my seeming the silence throbbed
electrically and the night was laden with stilly omens.

Already cramped by my journey in the market-cart, I found it difficult
to remain very long in any one position. What information had Burke
to sell? He had refused, for some reason, to discuss the matter that
evening, and now, enacting the part allotted him by Nayland Smith, he
feigned sleep consistently, although at intervals he would whisper to me
his doubts and fears.

All the chances were in our favor to-night; for whilst I could not doubt
that Dr. Fu-Manchu was set upon the removal of the ex-officer of New
York police, neither could I doubt that our presence in the farm was
unknown to the agents of the Chinaman. According to Burke, constant
attempts had been made to achieve Fu-Manchu’s purpose, and had only been
frustrated by his (Burke’s) wakefulness.

There was every probability that another attempt would be made to-night.

Any one who has been forced by circumstance to undertake such a vigil as
this will be familiar with the marked changes (corresponding with
phases of the earth’s movement) which take place in the atmosphere, at
midnight, at two o’clock, and again at four o’clock. During those fours
hours falls a period wherein all life is at its lowest ebb, and every
Physician is aware that there is a greater likelihood of a patient’s
passing between midnight and four A. M., than at any other period during
the cycle of the hours.

To-night I became specially aware of this lowering of vitality, and
now, with the night at that darkest phase which precedes the dawn, an
indescribable dread, such as I had known before in my dealings with
the Chinaman, assailed me, when I was least prepared to combat it. The
stillness was intense. Then:

“Here it is!” whispered Burke from the bed.

The chill at the very center of my being, which but corresponded with
the chill of all surrounding nature at that hour, became intensified,
keener, at the whispered words.

I rose stealthily out of my chair, and from my nest of shadows
watched--watched intently, the bright oblong of the window...

Without the slightest heralding sound--a black silhouette crept up
against the pane... the silhouette of a small, malformed head, a
dog-like head, deep-set in square shoulders. Malignant eyes peered
intently in. Higher it arose--that wicked head--against the window,
then crouched down on the sill and became less sharply defined as
the creature stooped to the opening below. There was a faint sound of
sniffing.

Judging from the stark horror which I experienced, myself, I doubted,
now, if Burke could sustain the role allotted him. In beneath the
slightly raised window came a hand, perceptible to me despite the
darkness of the room. It seemed to project from the black silhouette
outside the pane, to be thrust forward--and forward--and forward... that
small hand with the outstretched fingers.

The unknown possesses unique terrors; and since I was unable to conceive
what manner of thing this could be, which, extending its incredibly long
arms, now sought the throat of the man upon the bed, I tasted of that
sort of terror which ordinarily one knows only in dreams.

“Quick, sir--quick!” screamed Burke, starting up from the pillow.

The questing hands had reached his throat!

Choking down an urgent dread that I had of touching the thing which
reached through the window to kill the sleeper, I sprang across the room
and grasped the rigid, hairy forearms.

Heavens! Never have I felt such muscles, such tendons, as those beneath
the hirsute skin! They seemed to be of steel wire, and with a sudden
frightful sense of impotence, I realized that I was as powerless as a
child to relax that strangle-hold. Burke was making the most frightful
sounds and quite obviously was being asphyxiated before my eyes!

“Smith!” I cried, “Smith! Help! help! for God’s sake!”

Despite the confusion of my mind I became aware of sounds outside and
below me. Twice the thing at the window coughed; there was an incessant,
lash-like cracking, then some shouted words which I was unable to make
out; and finally the staccato report of a pistol.

Snarling like that of a wild beast came from the creature with the hairy
arms, together with renewed coughing. But the steel grip relaxed not one
iota.

I realized two things: the first, that in my terror at the suddenness of
the attack I had omitted to act as pre-arranged: the second, that I had
discredited the strength of the visitant, whilst Smith had foreseen it.

Desisting in my vain endeavor to pit my strength against that of the
nameless thing, I sprang back across the room and took up the weapon
which had been left in my charge earlier in the night, but which I had
been unable to believe it would be necessary to employ. This was a sharp
and heavy axe, which Nayland Smith, when I had met him in Covent Garden,
had brought with him, to the great amazement of Weymouth and myself.

As I leaped back to the window and uplifted this primitive weapon, a
second shot sounded from below, and more fierce snarling, coughing, and
guttural mutterings assailed my ears from beyond the pane.

Lifting the heavy blade, I brought it down with all my strength upon the
nearer of those hairy arms where it crossed the window-ledge, severing
muscle, tendon and bone as easily as a knife might cut cheese....

A shriek--a shriek neither human nor animal, but gruesomely compounded
of both--followed... and merged into a choking cough. Like a flash the
other shaggy arm was

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