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The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu

by Sax Rohmer · English · Gutenberg #173 · 435,236 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu

Author: Sax Rohmer


        
Release date: October 1, 1994 [eBook #173]
                Most recently updated: July 22, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/173

Credits: This etext was updated by Stewart A. Levin of Englewood, CO


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INSIDIOUS DR. FU MANCHU ***




The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu


by

Sax Rohmer





CHAPTER I


"A GENTLEMAN to see you, Doctor."

From across the common a clock sounded the half-hour.

"Ten-thirty!" I said.  "A late visitor.  Show him up, if you please."

I pushed my writing aside and tilted the lamp-shade, as footsteps
sounded on the landing.  The next moment I had jumped to my feet, for a
tall, lean man, with his square-cut, clean-shaven face sun-baked to the
hue of coffee, entered and extended both hands, with a cry:

"Good old Petrie!  Didn't expect me, I'll swear!"

It was Nayland Smith--whom I had thought to be in Burma!

"Smith," I said, and gripped his hands hard, "this is a delightful
surprise!  Whatever--however--"

"Excuse me, Petrie!" he broke in.  "Don't put it down to the sun!" And
he put out the lamp, plunging the room into darkness.

I was too surprised to speak.

"No doubt you will think me mad," he continued, and, dimly, I could see
him at the window, peering out into the road, "but before you are many
hours older you will know that I have good reason to be cautious.  Ah,
nothing suspicious!  Perhaps I am first this time."  And, stepping back
to the writing-table he relighted the lamp.

"Mysterious enough for you?" he laughed, and glanced at my unfinished
MS.  "A story, eh?  From which I gather that the district is beastly
healthy--what, Petrie?  Well, I can put some material in your way that,
if sheer uncanny mystery is a marketable commodity, ought to make you
independent of influenza and broken legs and shattered nerves and all
the rest."

I surveyed him doubtfully, but there was nothing in his appearance to
justify me in supposing him to suffer from delusions.  His eyes were
too bright, certainly, and a hardness now had crept over his face.  I
got out the whisky and siphon, saying:

"You have taken your leave early?"

"I am not on leave," he replied, and slowly filled his pipe.  "I am on
duty."

"On duty!" I exclaimed.  "What, are you moved to London or something?"

"I have got a roving commission, Petrie, and it doesn't rest with me
where I am to-day nor where I shall be to-morrow."

There was something ominous in the words, and, putting down my glass,
its contents untasted, I faced round and looked him squarely in the
eyes.  "Out with it!" I said.  "What is it all about?"

Smith suddenly stood up and stripped off his coat.  Rolling back his
left shirt-sleeve he revealed a wicked-looking wound in the fleshy part
of the forearm.  It was quite healed, but curiously striated for an
inch or so around.

"Ever seen one like it?" he asked.

"Not exactly," I confessed.  "It appears to have been deeply
cauterized."

"Right!  Very deeply!" he rapped.  "A barb steeped in the venom of a
hamadryad went in there!"

A shudder I could not repress ran coldly through me at mention of that
most deadly of all the reptiles of the East.

"There's only one treatment," he continued, rolling his sleeve down
again, "and that's with a sharp knife, a match, and a broken cartridge.
I lay on my back, raving, for three days afterwards, in a forest that
stank with malaria, but I should have been lying there now if I had
hesitated.  Here's the point.  It was not an accident!"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that it was a deliberate attempt on my life, and I am hard upon
the tracks of the man who extracted that venom--patiently, drop by
drop--from the poison-glands of the snake, who prepared that arrow, and
who caused it to be shot at me."

"What fiend is this?"

"A fiend who, unless my calculations are at fault is now in London, and
who regularly wars with pleasant weapons of that kind.  Petrie, I have
traveled from Burma not in the interests of the British Government
merely, but in the interests of the entire white race, and I honestly
believe--though I pray I may be wrong--that its survival depends
largely upon the success of my mission."

To say that I was perplexed conveys no idea of the mental chaos created
by these extraordinary statements, for into my humdrum suburban life
Nayland Smith had brought fantasy of the wildest.  I did not know what
to think, what to believe.

"I am wasting precious time!" he rapped decisively, and, draining his
glass, he stood up.  "I came straight to you, because you are the only
man I dare to trust.  Except the big chief at headquarters, you are the
only person in England, I hope, who knows that Nayland Smith has
quitted Burma.  I must have someone with me, Petrie, all the time--it's
imperative!  Can you put me up here, and spare a few days to the
strangest business, I promise you, that ever was recorded in fact or
fiction?"

I agreed readily enough, for, unfortunately, my professional duties
were not onerous.

"Good man!" he cried, wringing my hand in his impetuous way.  "We start
now."

"What, to-night?"

"To-night!  I had thought of turning in, I must admit.  I have not
dared to sleep for forty-eight hours, except in fifteen-minute
stretches.  But there is one move that must be made to-night and
immediately.  I must warn Sir Crichton Davey."

"Sir Crichton Davey--of the India--"

"Petrie, he is a doomed man!  Unless he follows my instructions without
question, without hesitation--before Heaven, nothing can save him!  I
do not know when the blow will fall, how it will fall, nor from whence,
but I know that my first duty is to warn him.  Let us walk down to the
corner of the common and get a taxi."

How strangely does the adventurous intrude upon the humdrum; for, when
it intrudes at all, more often than not its intrusion is sudden and
unlooked for.  To-day, we may seek for romance and fail to find it:
unsought, it lies in wait for us at most prosaic corners of life's
highway.

The drive that night, though it divided the drably commonplace from the
wildly bizarre--though it was the bridge between the ordinary and the
outre--has left no impression upon my mind.  Into the heart of a weird
mystery the cab bore me; and in reviewing my memories of those days I
wonder that the busy thoroughfares through which we passed did not
display before my eyes signs and portents--warnings.

It was not so.  I recall nothing of the route and little of import that
passed between us (we both were strangely silent, I think) until we
were come to our journey's end.  Then:

"What's this?" muttered my friend hoarsely.

Constables were moving on a little crowd of curious idlers who pressed
about the steps of Sir Crichton Davey's house and sought to peer in at
the open door.  Without waiting for the cab to draw up to the curb,
Nayland Smith recklessly leaped out and I followed close at his heels.

"What has happened?" he demanded breathlessly of a constable.

The latter glanced at him doubtfully, but something in his voice and
bearing commanded respect.

"Sir Crichton Davey has been killed, sir."

Smith lurched back as though he had received a physical blow, and
clutched my shoulder convulsively.  Beneath the heavy tan his face had
blanched, and his eyes were set in a stare of horror.

"My God!" he whispered.  "I am too late!"

With clenched fists he turned and, pressing through the group of
loungers, bounded up the steps.  In the hall a man who unmistakably was
a Scotland Yard official stood talking to a footman.  Other members of
the household were moving about, more or less aimlessly, and the chilly
hand of King Fear had touched one and all, for, as they came and went,
they glanced ever over their shoulders, as if each shadow cloaked a
menace, and listened, as it seemed, for some sound which they dreaded
to hear.  Smith strode up to the detective and showed him a card, upon
glancing at which the Scotland Yard man said something in a low voice,
and, nodding, touched his hat to Smith in a respectful manner.

A few brief questions and answers, and, in gloomy silence, we followed
the detective up the heavily carpeted stair, along a corridor lined
with pictures and busts, and into a large library.  A group of people
were in this room, and one, in whom I recognized Chalmers Cleeve, of
Harley Street, was bending over a motionless form stretched upon a
couch.  Another door communicated with a small study, and through the
opening I could see a man on all fours examining the carpet.  The
uncomfortable sense of hush, the group about the physician, the bizarre
figure crawling, beetle-like, across the inner room, and the grim hub,
around which all this ominous activity turned, made up a scene that
etched itself indelibly on my mind.

As we entered Dr. Cleeve straightened himself, frowning thoughtfully.

"Frankly, I do not care to venture any opinion at present regarding the
immediate cause of death," he said.  "Sir Crichton was addicted to
cocaine, but there are indications which are not in accordance with
cocaine-poisoning. I fear that only a post-mortem can establish the
facts--if," he added, "we ever arrive at them.  A most mysterious case!"

Smith stepping forward and engaging the famous pathologist in
conversation, I seized the opportunity to examine Sir Crichton's body.

The dead man was in evening dress, but wore an old smoking-jacket. He
had been of spare but hardy build, with thin, aquiline features, which
now were oddly puffy, as were his clenched hands.  I pushed back his
sleeve, and saw the marks of the hypodermic syringe upon his left arm.
Quite mechanically I turned my attention to the right arm.  It was
unscarred, but on the back of the hand was a faint red mark, not unlike
the imprint of painted lips.  I examined it closely, and even tried to
rub it off, but it evidently was caused by some morbid process of local
inflammation, if it were not a birthmark.

Turning to a pale young man whom I had understood to be Sir Crichton's
private secretary, I drew his attention to this mark, and inquired if
it were constitutional.  "It is not, sir," answered Dr. Cleeve,
overhearing my question.  "I have already made that inquiry.  Does it
suggest anything to your mind?  I must confess that it affords me no
assistance."

"Nothing," I replied.  "It is most curious."

"Excuse me, Mr. Burboyne," said Smith, now turning to the secretary,
"but Inspector Weymouth will tell you that I act with authority.  I
understand that Sir Crichton was--seized with illness in his study?"

"Yes--at half-past ten.  I was working here in the library, and he
inside, as was our custom."

"The communicating door was kept closed?"

"Yes, always.  It was open for a minute or less about ten-twenty-five,
when a message came for Sir Crichton.  I took it in to him, and he then
seemed in his usual health."

"What was the message?"

"I could not say.  It was brought by a district messenger, and he
placed it beside him on the table.  It is there now, no doubt."

"And at half-past ten?"

"Sir Crichton suddenly burst open the door and threw himself, with a
scream, into the library.  I ran to him but he waved me back.  His eyes
were glaring horribly.  I had just reached his side when he fell,
writhing, upon the floor.  He seemed past speech, but as I raised him
and laid him upon the couch, he gasped something that sounded like 'The
red hand!' Before I could get to bell or telephone he was dead!"

Mr. Burboyne's voice shook as he spoke the words, and Smith seemed to
find this evidence confusing.

"You do not think he referred to the mark on his own hand?"

"I think not.  From the direction of his last glance, I feel sure he
referred to something in the study."

"What did you do?"

"Having summoned the servants, I ran into the study. But there was
absolutely nothing unusual to be seen.  The windows were closed and
fastened.  He worked with closed windows in the hottest weather.  There
is no other door, for the study occupies the end of a narrow wing, so
that no one could possibly have gained access to it, whilst I was in
the library, unseen by me.  Had someone concealed himself in the study
earlier in the evening--and I am convinced that it offers no
hiding-place--he could only have come out again by passing through
here."

Nayland Smith tugged at the lobe of his left ear, as was his habit when
meditating.

"You had been at work here in this way for some time?"

"Yes.  Sir Crichton was preparing an important book."

"Had anything unusual occurred prior to this evening?"

"Yes," said Mr. Burboyne, with evident perplexity; "though I attached
no importance to it at the time.  Three nights ago Sir Crichton came
out to me, and appeared very nervous; but at times his nerves--you
know?  Well, on this occasion he asked me to search the study.  He had
an idea that something was concealed there."

"Some THING or someone?"

"'Something' was the word he used.  I searched, but fruitlessly, and he
seemed quite satisfied, and returned to his work."

"Thank you, Mr. Burboyne.  My friend and I would like a few minutes'
private investigation in the study."



CHAPTER II


SIR CRICHTON DAVEY'S study was a small one, and a glance sufficed to
show that, as the secretary had said, it offered no hiding-place. It
was heavily carpeted, and over-full of Burmese and Chinese ornaments
and curios, and upon the mantelpiece stood several framed photographs
which showed this to be the sanctum of a wealthy bachelor who was no
misogynist.  A map of the Indian Empire occupied the larger part of one
wall.  The grate was empty, for the weather was extremely warm, and a
green-shaded lamp on the littered writing-table afforded the only
light.  The air was stale, for both windows were closed and fastened.

Smith immediately pounced upon a large, square envelope that lay beside
the blotting-pad. Sir Crichton had not even troubled to open it, but my
friend did so.  It contained a blank sheet of paper!

"Smell!" he directed, handing the letter to me.  I raised it to my
nostrils.  It was scented with some pungent perfume.

"What is it?"  I asked.

"It is a rather rare essential oil," was the reply, "which I have met
with before, though never in Europe.  I begin to understand, Petrie."

He tilted the lamp-shade and made a close examination of the scraps of
paper, matches, and other debris that lay in the grate and on the
hearth.  I took up a copper vase from the mantelpiece, and was
examining it curiously, when he turned, a strange expression upon his
face.

"Put that back, old man," he said quietly.

Much surprised, I did as he directed.

"Don't touch anything in the room.  It may be dangerous."

Something in the tone of his voice chilled me, and I hastily replaced
the vase, and stood by the door of the study, watching him search,
methodically, every inch of the room--behind the books, in all the
ornaments, in table drawers, in cupboards, on shelves.

"That will do," he said at last.  "There is nothing here and I have no
time to search farther."

We returned to the library.

"Inspector Weymouth," said my friend, "I have a particular reason for
asking that Sir Crichton's body be removed from this room at once and
the library locked.  Let no one be admitted on any pretense whatever
until you hear from me." It spoke volumes for the mysterious
credentials borne by my friend that the man from Scotland Yard accepted
his orders without demur, and, after a brief chat with Mr. Burboyne,
Smith passed briskly downstairs.  In the hall a man who looked like a
groom out of livery was waiting.

"Are you Wills?" asked Smith.

"Yes, sir."

"It was you who heard a cry of some kind at the rear of the house about
the time of Sir Crichton's death?"

"Yes, sir.  I was locking the garage door, and, happening to look up at
the window of Sir Crichton's study, I saw him jump out of his chair.
Where he used to sit at his writing, sir, you could see his shadow on
the blind.  Next minute I heard a call out in the lane."

"What kind of call?"

The man, whom the uncanny happening clearly had frightened, seemed
puzzled for a suitable description.

"A sort of wail, sir," he said at last.  "I never heard anything like
it before, and don't want to again."

"Like this?" inquired Smith, and he uttered a low, wailing cry,
impossible to describe.  Wills perceptibly shuddered; and, indeed, it
was an eerie sound.

"The same, sir, I think," he said, "but much louder."

"That will do," said Smith, and I thought I detected a note of triumph
in his voice.  "But stay!  Take us through to the back of the house."

The man bowed and led the way, so that shortly we found ourselves in a
small, paved courtyard.  It was a perfect summer's night, and the deep
blue vault above was jeweled with myriads of starry points.  How
impossible it seemed to reconcile that vast, eternal calm with the
hideous passions and fiendish agencies which that night had loosed a
soul upon the infinite.

"Up yonder are the study windows, sir.  Over that wall on your left is
the back lane from which the cry came, and beyond is Regent's Park."

"Are the study windows visible from there?"

"Oh, yes, sir."

"Who occupies the adjoining house?"

"Major-General Platt-Houston, sir; but the family is out of town."

"Those iron stairs are a means of communication between the domestic
offices and the servants' quarters, I take it?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then send someone to make my business known to the Major-General's
housekeeper; I want to examine those stairs."

Singular though my friend's proceedings appeared to me, I had ceased to
wonder at anything.  Since Nayland Smith's arrival at my rooms I seemed
to have been moving through the fitful phases of a nightmare.  My
friend's account of how he came by the wound in his arm; the scene on
our arrival at the house of Sir Crichton Davey; the secretary's story
of the dying man's cry, "The red hand!"; the hidden perils of the
study; the wail in the lane--all were fitter incidents of delirium than
of sane reality.  So, when a white-faced butler made us known to a
nervous old lady who proved to be the housekeeper of the next-door
residence, I was not surprised at Smith's saying:

"Lounge up and down outside, Petrie.  Everyone has cleared off now.  It
is getting late.  Keep your eyes open and be on your guard.  I thought
I had the start, but he is here before me, and, what is worse, he
probably knows by now that I am here, too."

With which he entered the house and left me out in the square, with
leisure to think, to try to understand.

The crowd which usually haunts the scene of a sensational crime had
been cleared away, and it had been circulated that Sir Crichton had
died from natural causes.  The intense heat having driven most of the
residents out of town, practically I had the square to myself, and I
gave myself up to a brief consideration of the mystery in which I so
suddenly had found myself involved.

By what agency had Sir Crichton met his death?  Did Nayland Smith know?
I rather suspected that he did.  What was the hidden significance of
the perfumed envelope?  Who was that mysterious personage whom Smith so
evidently dreaded, who had attempted his life, who, presumably, had
murdered Sir Crichton?  Sir Crichton Davey, during the time that he had
held office in India, and during his long term of service at home, had
earned the good will of all, British and native alike.  Who was his
secret enemy?

Something touched me lightly on the shoulder.

I turned, with my heart fluttering like a child's. This night's work
had imposed a severe strain even upon my callous nerves.

A girl wrapped in a hooded opera-cloak stood at my elbow, and, as she
glanced up at me, I thought that I never had seen a face so seductively
lovely nor of so unusual a type.  With the skin of a perfect blonde,
she had eyes and lashes as black as a Creole's, which, together with
her full red lips, told me that this beautiful stranger, whose touch
had so startled me, was not a child of our northern shores.

"Forgive me," she said, speaking with an odd, pretty accent, and laying
a slim hand, with jeweled fingers, confidingly upon my arm, "if I
startled you.  But--is it true that Sir Crichton Davey has
been--murdered?"

I looked into her big, questioning eyes, a harsh suspicion laboring in
my mind, but could read nothing in their mysterious depths--only I
wondered anew at my questioner's beauty.  The grotesque idea
momentarily possessed me that, were the bloom of her red lips due to
art and not to nature, their kiss would leave--though not
indelibly--just such a mark as I had seen upon the dead man's hand.
But I dismissed the fantastic notion as bred of the night's horrors,
and worthy only of a mediaeval legend.  No doubt she was some friend or
acquaintance of Sir Crichton who lived close by.

"I cannot say that he has been murdered," I replied, acting upon the
latter supposition, and seeking to tell her what she asked as gently as
possible.

"But he is--Dead?"

I nodded.

She closed her eyes and uttered a low, moaning sound, swaying dizzily.
Thinking she was about to swoon, I threw my arm round her shoulder to
support her, but she smiled sadly, and pushed me gently away.

"I am quite well, thank you," she said.

"You are certain?  Let me walk with you until you feel quite sure of
yourself."

She shook her head, flashed a rapid glance at me with her beautiful
eyes, and looked away in a sort of sorrowful embarrassment, for which I
was entirely at a loss to account.  Suddenly she resumed:

"I cannot let my name be mentioned in this dreadful matter, but--I
think I have some information--for the police.  Will you give this
to--whomever you think proper?"

She handed me a sealed envelope, again met my eyes with one of her
dazzling glances, and hurried away.  She had gone no more than ten or
twelve yards, and I still was standing bewildered, watching her
graceful, retreating figure, when she turned abruptly and came back.

Without looking directly at me, but alternately glancing towards a
distant corner of the square and towards the house of Major-General
Platt-Houston, she made the following extraordinary request:

"If you would do me a very great service, for which I always would be
grateful,"--she glanced at me with passionate intentness--"when you
have given my message to the proper person, leave him and do not go
near him any more to-night!"

Before I could find words to reply she gathered up her cloak and ran.
Before I could determine whether or not to follow her (for her words
had aroused anew all my worst suspicions) she had disappeared!  I heard
the whir of a restarted motor at no great distance, and, in the instant
that Nayland Smith came running down the steps, I knew that I had
nodded at my post.

"Smith!"  I cried as he joined me, "tell me what we must do!" And
rapidly I acquainted him with the incident.

My friend looked very grave; then a grim smile crept round his lips.

"She was a big card to play," he said; "but he did not know that I held
one to beat it."

"What!  You know this girl!  Who is she?"

"She is one of the finest weapons in the enemy's armory, Petrie.  But a
woman is a two-edged sword, and treacherous.  To our great good
fortune, she has formed a sudden predilection, characteristically
Oriental, for yourself.  Oh, you may scoff, but it is evident.  She was
employed to get this letter placed in my hands.  Give it to me."

I did so.

"She has succeeded.  Smell."

He held the envelope under my nose, and, with a sudden sense of nausea,
I recognized the strange perfume.

"You know what this presaged in Sir Crichton's case?  Can you doubt any
longer?  She did not want you to share my fate, Petrie."

"Smith," I said unsteadily, "I have followed your lead blindly in this
horrible business and have not pressed for an explanation, but I must
insist before I go one step farther upon knowing what it all means."

"Just a few steps farther," he rejoined; "as far as a cab.  We are
hardly safe here.  Oh, you need not fear shots or knives.  The man
whose servants are watching us now scorns to employ such clumsy,
tell-tale weapons."

Only three cabs were on the rank, and, as we entered the first,
something hissed past my ear, missed both Smith and me by a miracle,
and, passing over the roof of the taxi, presumably fell in the enclosed
garden occupying the center of the square.

"What was that?" I cried.

"Get in--quickly!"  Smith rapped back.  "It was attempt number one!
More than that I cannot say.  Don't let the man hear.  He has noticed
nothing.  Pull up the window on your side, Petrie, and look out behind.
Good!  We've started."

The cab moved off with a metallic jerk, and I turned and looked back
through the little window in the rear.

"Someone has got into another cab.  It is following ours, I think."

Nayland Smith lay back and laughed unmirthfully.

"Petrie," he said, "if I escape alive from this business I shall know
that I bear a charmed life."

I made no reply, as he pulled out the dilapidated pouch and filled his
pipe.

"You have asked me to explain matters," he continued, "and I will do so
to the best of my ability.  You no doubt wonder why a servant of the
British Government, lately stationed in Burma, suddenly appears in
London, in the character of a detective.  I am here, Petrie--and I bear
credentials from the very highest sources--because, quite by accident,
I came upon a clew.  Following it up, in the ordinary course of
routine, I obtained evidence of the existence and malignant activity of
a certain man.  At the present stage of the case I should not be
justified in terming him the emissary of an Eastern Power, but I may
say that representations are shortly to be made to that Power's
ambassador in London."

He paused and glanced back towards the pursuing cab.

"There is little to fear until we arrive home," he said calmly.
"Afterwards there is much.  To continue:  This man, whether a fanatic
or a duly appointed agent, is, unquestionably, the most malign and
formidable personality existing in the known world today.  He is a
linguist who speaks with almost equal facility in any of the civilized
languages, and in most of the barbaric.  He is an adept in all the arts
and sciences which a great university could teach him.  He also is an
adept in certain obscure arts and sciences which no university of
to-day can teach.  He has the brains of any three men of genius.
Petrie, he is a mental giant."

"You amaze me!" I said.

"As to his mission among men.  Why did M. Jules Furneaux fall dead in a
Paris opera house?  Because of heart failure?  No!  Because his last
speech had shown that he held the key to the secret of Tongking.  What
became of the Grand Duke Stanislaus?  Elopement?  Suicide?  Nothing of
the kind.  He alone was fully alive to Russia's growing peril.  He
alone knew the truth about Mongolia.  Why was Sir Crichton Davey
murdered?  Because, had the work he was engaged upon ever seen the
light it would have shown him to be the only living Englishman who
understood the importance of the Tibetan frontiers.  I say to you
solemnly, Petrie, that these are but a few.  Is there a man who would
arouse the West to a sense of the awakening of the East, who would
teach the deaf to hear, the blind to see, that the millions only await
their leader?  He will die.  And this is only one phase of the devilish
campaign.  The others I can merely surmise."

"But, Smith, this is almost incredible!  What perverted genius controls
this awful secret movement?"

"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, with all the
resources, if you will, of a wealthy government--which, however,
already has denied all knowledge of his existence.  Imagine that awful
being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril
incarnate in one man."



CHAPTER III


I SANK into an arm-chair in my rooms and gulped down a strong peg of
brandy.

"We have been followed here," I said.  "Why did you make no attempt to
throw the pursuers off the track, to have them intercepted?"

Smith laughed.

"Useless, in the first place.  Wherever we went, HE would find us.  And
of what use to arrest his creatures?  We could prove nothing against
them.  Further, it is evident that an attempt is to be made upon my
life to-night--and by the same means that proved so successful in the
case of poor Sir Crichton."

His square jaw grew truculently prominent, and he leapt stormily to his
feet, shaking his clenched fists towards the window.

"The villain!" he cried.  "The fiendishly clever villain!  I suspected
that Sir Crichton was next, and I was right.  But I came too late,
Petrie!  That hits me hard, old man.  To think that I knew and yet
failed to save him!"

He resumed his seat, smoking hard.

"Fu-Manchu has made the blunder common to all men of unusual genius,"
he said.  "He has underrated his adversary.  He has not given me credit
for perceiving the meaning of the scented messages.  He has thrown away
one powerful weapon--to get such a message into my hands--and he thinks
that once safe within doors, I shall sleep, unsuspecting, and die as
Sir Crichton died.  But without the indiscretion of your charming
friend, I should have known what to expect when I receive her
'information'--which by the way, consists of a blank sheet of paper."

"Smith," I broke in, "who is she?"

"She is either Fu-Manchu's daughter, his wife, or his slave.  I am
inclined to believe the last, for she has no will but his will,
except"--with a quizzical glance--"in a certain instance."

"How can you jest with some awful thing--Heaven knows what--hanging
over your head?  What is the meaning of these perfumed envelopes?  How
did Sir Crichton die?"

"He died of the Zayat Kiss.  Ask me what that is and I reply 'I do not
know.'  The zayats are the Burmese caravanserais, or rest-houses. Along
a certain route--upon which I set eyes, for the first and only time,
upon Dr. Fu-Manchu--travelers who use them sometimes die as Sir
Crichton died, with nothing to show the cause of death but a little
mark upon the neck, face, or limb, which has earned, in those parts,
the title of the 'Zayat Kiss.' The rest-houses along that route are
shunned now.  I have my theory and I hope to prove it to-night, if I
live.  It will be one more broken weapon in his fiendish armory, and it
is thus, and thus only, that I can hope to crush him.  This was my
principal reason for not enlightening Dr. Cleeve.  Even walls have ears
where Fu-Manchu is concerned, so I feigned ignorance of the meaning of
the mark, knowing that he would be almost certain to employ the same
methods upon some other victim.  I wanted an opportunity to study the
Zayat Kiss in operation, and I shall have one."

"But the scented envelopes?"

"In the swampy forests of the district I have referred to a rare
species of orchid, almost green, and with a peculiar scent, is
sometimes met with.  I recognized the heavy perfume at once.  I take it
that the thing which kills the traveler is attracted by this orchid.
You will notice that the perfume clings to whatever it touches.  I
doubt if it can be washed off in the ordinary way.  After at least one
unsuccessful attempt to kill Sir Crichton--you recall that he thought
there was something concealed in his study on a previous
occasion?--Fu-Manchu hit upon the perfumed envelopes.  He may have a
supply of these green orchids in his possession--possibly to feed the
creature."

"What creature?  How could any kind of creature have got into Sir
Crichton's room tonight?"

"You no doubt observed that I examined the grate of the study.  I found
a fair quantity of fallen soot.  I at once assumed, since it appeared
to be the only means of entrance, that something has been dropped down;
and I took it for granted that the thing, whatever it was, must still
be concealed either in the study or in the library.  But when I had
obtained the evidence of the groom, Wills, I perceived that the cry
from the lane or from the park was a signal.  I noted that the
movements of anyone seated at the study table were visible, in shadow,
on the blind, and that the study occupied the corner of a two-storied
wing and, therefore, had a short chimney.  What did the signal mean?
That Sir Crichton had leaped up from his chair, and either had received
the Zayat Kiss or had seen the thing which someone on the roof had
lowered down the straight chimney.  It was the signal to withdraw that
deadly thing.  By means of the iron stairway at the rear of
Major-General Platt-Houston's, I quite easily, gained access to the
roof above Sir Crichton's study--and I found this."

Out from his pocket Nayland Smith drew a tangled piece of silk, mixed
up with which were a brass ring and a number of unusually large-sized
split-shot, nipped on in the manner usual on a fishing-line.

"My theory proven," he resumed.  "Not anticipating a search on the
roof, they had been careless.  This was to weight the line and to
prevent the creature clinging to the walls of the chimney.  Directly it
had dropped in the grate, however, by means of this ring I assume that
the weighted line was withdrawn, and the thing was only held by one
slender thread, which sufficed, though, to draw it back again when it
had done its work.  It might have got tangled, of course, but they
reckoned on its making straight up the carved leg of the writing-table
for the prepared envelope.  From there to the hand of Sir
Crichton--which, from having touched the envelope, would also be
scented with the perfume--was a certain move."

"My God!  How horrible!" I exclaimed, and glanced apprehensively into
the dusky shadows of the room.  "What is your theory respecting this
creature--what shape, what color--?"

"It is something that moves rapidly and silently.  I will venture no
more at present, but I think it works in the dark.  The study was dark,
remember, save for the bright patch beneath the reading-lamp. I have
observed that the rear of this house is ivy-covered right up to and
above your bedroom.  Let us make ostentatious preparations to retire,
and I think we may rely upon Fu-Manchu's servants to attempt my
removal, at any rate--if not yours."

"But, my dear fellow, it is a climb of thirty-five feet at the very
least."

"You remember the cry in the back lane?  It suggested something to me,
and I tested my idea--successfully.  It was the cry of a dacoit.  Oh,
dacoity, though quiescent, is by no means extinct.  Fu-Manchu has
dacoits in his train, and probably it is one who operates the Zayat
Kiss, since it was a dacoit who watched the window of the study this
evening.  To such a man an ivy-covered wall is a grand staircase."

The horrible events that followed are punctuated, in my mind, by the
striking of a distant clock.  It is singular how trivialities thus
assert themselves in moments of high tension.  I will proceed, then, by
these punctuations, to the coming of the horror that it was written we
should encounter.

The clock across the common struck two.

Having removed all traces of the scent of the orchid from our hands
with a solution of ammonia, Smith and I had followed the programme laid
down.  It was an easy matter to reach the rear of the house, by simply
climbing a fence, and we did not doubt that seeing the light go out in
the front, our unseen watcher would proceed to the back.

The room was a large one, and we had made up my camp-bed at one end,
stuffing odds and ends under the clothes to lend the appearance of a
sleeper, which device we also had adopted in the case of the larger
bed.  The perfumed envelope lay upon a little coffee table in the
center of the floor, and Smith, with an electric pocket lamp, a
revolver, and a brassey beside him, sat on cushions in the shadow of
the wardrobe.  I occupied a post between the windows.

No unusual sound, so far, had disturbed the stillness of the night.
Save for the muffled throb of the rare all-night cars passing the front
of the house, our vigil had been a silent one.  The full moon had
painted about the floor weird shadows of the clustering ivy, spreading
the design gradually from the door, across the room, past the little
table where the envelope lay, and finally to the foot of the bed.

The distant clock struck a quarter-past two.

A slight breeze stirred the ivy, and a new shadow added itself to the
extreme edge of the moon's design.

Something rose, inch by inch, above the sill of the westerly window.  I
could see only its shadow, but a sharp, sibilant breath from Smith told
me that he, from his post, could see the cause of the shadow.

Every nerve in my body seemed to be strung tensely.  I was icy cold,
expectant, and prepared for whatever horror was upon us.

The shadow became stationary.  The dacoit was studying the interior of
the room.

Then it suddenly lengthened, and, craning my head to the left, I saw a
lithe, black-clad form, surmounted by a Yellow face, sketchy in the
moonlight, pressed against the window-panes!

One thin, brown hand appeared over the edge of the lowered sash, which
it grasped--and then another.  The man made absolutely no sound
whatever.  The second hand disappeared--and reappeared.  It held a
small, square box.  There was a very faint CLICK.

The dacoit swung himself below the window with the agility of an ape,
as, with a dull, muffled thud, SOMETHING dropped upon the carpet!

"Stand still, for your life!" came Smith's voice, high-pitched.

A beam of white leaped out across the room and played full upon the
coffee-table in the center.

Prepared as I was for something horrible, I know that I paled at sight
of the thing that was running round the edge of the envelope.

It was an insect, full six inches long, and of a vivid, venomous, red
color!  It had something of the appearance of a great ant, with its
long, quivering antennae and its febrile, horrible vitality; but it was
proportionately longer of body and smaller of head, and had numberless
rapidly moving legs.  In short, it was a giant centipede, apparently of
the scolopendra group, but of a form quite new to me.

These things I realized in one breathless instant; in the next--Smith
had dashed the thing's poisonous life out with one straight, true blow
of the golf club!

I leaped to the window and threw it widely open, feeling a silk thread
brush my hand as I did so.  A black shape was dropping, with incredible
agility from branch to branch of the ivy, and, without once offering a
mark for a revolver-shot, it merged into the shadows beneath the trees
of the garden.  As I turned and switched on the light Nayland Smith
dropped limply into a chair, leaning his head upon his hands.  Even
that grim courage had been tried sorely.

"Never mind the dacoit, Petrie," he said.  "Nemesis will know where to
find him.  We know now what causes the mark of the Zayat Kiss.
Therefore science is richer for our first brush with the enemy, and the
enemy is poorer--unless he has any more unclassified centipedes.  I
understand now something that has been puzzling me since I heard of
it--Sir Crichton's stifled cry.  When we remember that he was almost
past speech, it is reasonable to suppose that his cry was not 'The red
hand!' but 'The red ANT!'  Petrie, to think that I failed, by less than
an hour, to save him from such an end!"



CHAPTER IV


"THE body of a lascar, dressed in the manner usual on the P. & O.
boats, was recovered from the Thames off Tilbury by the river police at
six A.M. this morning.  It is supposed that the man met with an
accident in leaving his ship."

Nayland Smith passed me the evening paper and pointed to the above
paragraph.

"For 'lascar' read 'dacoit,'" he said.  "Our visitor, who came by way
of the ivy, fortunately for us, failed to follow his instructions.
Also, he lost the centipede and left a clew behind him.  Dr. Fu-Manchu
does not overlook such lapses."

It was a sidelight upon the character of the awful being with whom we
had to deal.  My very soul recoiled from bare consideration of the fate
that would be ours if ever we fell into his hands.

The telephone bell rang.  I went out and found that Inspector Weymouth
of New Scotland Yard had called us up.

"Will Mr. Nayland Smith please come to the Wapping River Police Station
at once," was the message.

Peaceful interludes were few enough throughout that wild pursuit.

"It is certainly something important," said my friend; "and, if
Fu-Manchu is at the bottom of it--as we must presume him to
be--probably something ghastly."

A brief survey of the time-tables showed us that there were no trains
to serve our haste.  We accordingly chartered a cab and proceeded east.

Smith, throughout the journey, talked entertainingly about his work in
Burma.  Of intent, I think, he avoided any reference to the
circumstances which first had brought him in contact with the sinister
genius of the Yellow Movement.  His talk was rather of the sunshine of
the East than of its shadows.

But the drive concluded--and all too soon.  In a silence which neither
of us seemed disposed to break, we entered the police depot, and
followed an officer who received us into the room where Weymouth waited.

The inspector greeted us briefly, nodding toward the table.

"Poor Cadby, the most promising lad at the Yard," he said; and his
usually gruff voice had softened strangely.

Smith struck his right fist into the palm of his left hand and swore
under his breath, striding up and down the neat little room.  No one
spoke for a moment, and in the silence I could hear the whispering of
the Thames outside--of the Thames which had so many strange secrets to
tell, and now was burdened with another.

The body lay prone upon the deal table--this latest of the river's
dead--dressed in rough sailor garb, and, to all outward seeming, a
seaman of nondescript nationality--such as is no stranger in Wapping
and Shadwell.  His dark, curly hair clung clammily about the brown
forehead; his skin was stained, they told me.  He wore a gold ring in
one ear, and three fingers of the left hand were missing.

"It was almost the same with Mason."  The river police inspector was
speaking.  "A week ago, on a Wednesday, he went off in his own time on
some funny business down St. George's way--and Thursday night the
ten-o'clock boat got the grapnel on him off Hanover Hole.  His first
two fingers on the right hand were clean gone, and his left hand was
mutilated frightfully."

He paused and glanced at Smith.

"That lascar, too," he continued, "that you came down to see, sir; you
remember his hands?"

Smith nodded.

"He was not a lascar," he said shortly.  "He was a dacoit."

Silence fell again.

I turned to the array of objects lying on the table--those which had
been found in Cadby's clothing.  None of them were noteworthy, except
that which had been found thrust into the loose neck of his shirt.
This last it was which had led the police to send for Nayland Smith,
for it constituted the first clew which had come to light pointing to
the authors of these mysterious tragedies.

It was a Chinese pigtail.  That alone was sufficiently remarkable; but
it was rendered more so by the fact that the plaited queue was a false
one being attached to a most ingenious bald wig.

"You're sure it wasn't part of a Chinese make-up?" questioned Weymouth,
his eye on the strange relic.  "Cadby was clever at disguise."

Smith snatched the wig from my hands with a certain irritation, and
tried to fit it on the dead detective.

"Too small by inches!" he jerked.  "And look how it's padded in the
crown.  This thing was made for a most abnormal head."

He threw it down, and fell to pacing the room again.

"Where did you find him--exactly?" he asked.

"Limehouse Reach--under Commercial Dock Pier--exactly an hour ago."

"And you last saw him at eight o'clock last night?"--to Weymouth.

"Eight to a quarter past."

"You think he has been dead nearly twenty-four hours, Petrie?"

"Roughly, twenty-four hours," I replied.

"Then, we know that he was on the track of the Fu-Manchu group, that he
followed up some clew which led him to the neighborhood of old Ratcliff
Highway, and that he died the same night.  You are sure that is where
he was going?"

"Yes," said Weymouth; "He was jealous of giving anything away, poor
chap; it meant a big lift for him if he pulled the case off.  But he
gave me to understand that he expected to spend last night in that
district.  He left the Yard about eight, as I've said, to go to his
rooms, and dress for the job."

"Did he keep any record of his cases?"

"Of course!  He was most particular.  Cadby was a man with ambitions,
sir!  You'll want to see his book.  Wait while I get his address; it's
somewhere in Brixton."

He went to the telephone, and Inspector Ryman covered up the dead man's
face.

Nayland Smith was palpably excited.

"He almost succeeded where we have failed, Petrie," he said.  "There is
no doubt in my mind that he was hot on the track of Fu-Manchu!  Poor
Mason had probably blundered on the scent, too, and he met with a
similar fate.  Without other evidence, the fact that they both died in
the same way as the dacoit would be conclusive, for we know that
Fu-Manchu killed the dacoit!"

"What is the meaning of the mutilated hands, Smith?"

"God knows!  Cadby's death was from drowning, you say?"

"There are no other marks of violence."

"But he was a very strong swimmer, Doctor," interrupted Inspector
Ryman.  "Why, he pulled off the quarter-mile championship at the
Crystal Palace last year!  Cadby wasn't a man easy to drown.  And as
for Mason, he was an R.N.R., and like a fish in the water!"

Smith shrugged his shoulders helplessly.

"Let us hope that one day we shall know how they died," he said simply.

Weymouth returned from the telephone.

"The address is No.--Cold Harbor Lane," he reported.  "I shall not be
able to come along, but you can't miss it; it's close by the Brixton
Police Station.  There's no family, fortunately; he was quite alone in
the world.  His case-book isn't in the American desk, which you'll find
in his sitting-room; it's in the cupboard in the corner--top shelf.
Here are his keys, all intact.  I think this is the cupboard key."

Smith nodded.

"Come on, Petrie," he said.  "We haven't a second to waste."

Our cab was waiting, and in a few seconds we were speeding along
Wapping High Street.  We had gone no more than a few hundred yards, I
think, when Smith suddenly slapped his open hand down on his knee.

"That pigtail!" he cried.  "I have left it behind!  We must have it,
Petrie!  Stop!  Stop!"

The cab was pulled up, and Smith alighted.

"Don't wait for me," he directed hurriedly.  "Here, take Weymouth's
card.  Remember where he said the book was?  It's all we want.  Come
straight on to Scotland Yard and meet me there."

"But Smith," I protested, "a few minutes can make no difference!"

"Can't it!" he snapped.  "Do you suppose Fu-Manchu is going to leave
evidence like that lying about?  It's a thousand to one he has it
already, but there is just a bare chance."

It was a new aspect of the situation and one that afforded no room for
comment; and so lost in thought did I become that the cab was outside
the house for which I was bound ere I realized that we had quitted the
purlieus of Wapping.  Yet I had had leisure to review the whole troop
of events which had crowded my life since the return of Nayland Smith
from Burma.  Mentally, I had looked again upon the dead Sir Crichton
Davey, and with Smith had waited in the dark for the dreadful thing
that had killed him.  Now, with those remorseless memories jostling in
my mind, I was entering the house of Fu-Manchu's last victim, and the
shadow of that giant evil seemed to be upon it like a palpable cloud.

Cadby's old landlady greeted me with a queer mixture of fear and
embarrassment in her manner.

"I am Dr. Petrie," I said, "and I regret that I bring bad news
respecting Mr. Cadby."

"Oh, sir!" she cried.  "Don't tell me that anything has happened to
him!" And divining something of the mission on which I was come, for
such sad duty often falls to the lot of the medical man: "Oh, the poor,
brave lad!"

Indeed, I respected the dead man's memory more than ever from that
hour, since the sorrow of the worthy old soul was quite pathetic, and
spoke eloquently for the unhappy cause of it.

"There was a terrible wailing at the back of the house last night,
Doctor, and I heard it again to-night, a second before you knocked.
Poor lad!  It was the same when his mother died."

At the moment I paid little attention to her words, for such beliefs
are common, unfortunately; but when she was sufficiently composed I
went on to explain what I thought necessary.  And now the old lady's
embarrassment took precedence of her sorrow, and presently the truth
came out:

"There's a--young lady--in his rooms, sir."

I started.  This might mean little or might mean much.

"She came and waited for him last night, Doctor--from ten until
half-past--and this morning again.  She came the third time about an
hour ago, and has been upstairs since."

"Do you know her, Mrs. Dolan?"

Mrs. Dolan grew embarrassed again.

"Well, Doctor," she said, wiping her eyes the while, "I DO.  And God
knows he was a good lad, and I like a mother to him; but she is not the
girl I should have liked a son of mine to take up with."

At any other time, this would have been amusing; now, it might be
serious.  Mrs. Dolan's account of the wailing became suddenly
significant, for perhaps it meant that one of Fu-Manchu's dacoit
followers was watching the house, to give warning of any stranger's
approach!  Warning to whom?  It was unlikely that I should forget the
dark eyes of another of Fu-Manchu's servants.  Was that lure of men
even now in the house, completing her evil work?

"I should never have allowed her in his rooms--" began Mrs. Dolan
again.  Then there was an interruption.

A soft rustling reached my ears--intimately feminine.  The girl was
stealing down!

I leaped out into the hall, and she turned and fled blindly before
me--back up the stairs!  Taking three steps at a time, I followed her,
bounded into the room above almost at her heels, and stood with my back
to the door.

She cowered against the desk by the window, a slim figure in a clinging
silk gown, which alone explained Mrs. Dolan's distrust.  The gaslight
was turned very low, and her hat shadowed her face, but could not hide
its startling beauty, could not mar the brilliancy of the skin, nor dim
the wonderful eyes of this modern Delilah.  For it was she!

"So I came in time," I said grimly, and turned the key in the lock.

"Oh!" she panted at that, and stood facing me, leaning back with her
jewel-laden hands clutching the desk edge.

"Give me whatever you have removed from here," I said sternly, "and
then prepare to accompany me."

She took a step forward, her eyes wide with fear, her lips parted.

"I have taken nothing," she said.  Her breast was heaving tumultuously.
"Oh, let me go!  Please, let me go!"  And impulsively she threw herself
forward, pressing clasped hands against my shoulder and looking up into
my face with passionate, pleading eyes.

It is with some shame that I confess how her charm enveloped me like a
magic cloud.  Unfamiliar with the complex Oriental temperament, I had
laughed at Nayland Smith when he had spoken of this girl's infatuation.
"Love in the East," he had said, "is like the conjurer's mango-tree; it
is born, grows and flowers at the touch of a hand." Now, in those
pleading eyes I read confirmation of his words.  Her clothes or her
hair exhaled a faint perfume.  Like all Fu-Manchu's servants, she was
perfectly chosen for her peculiar duties.  Her beauty was wholly
intoxicating.

But I thrust her away.

"You have no claim to mercy," I said.  "Do not count upon any.  What
have you taken from here?"

She grasped the lapels of my coat.

"I will tell you all I can--all I dare," she panted eagerly, fearfully.
"I should know how to deal with your friend, but with you I am lost!
If you could only understand you would not be so cruel."  Her slight
accent added charm to the musical voice.  "I am not free, as your
English women are.  What I do I must do, for it is the will of my
master, and I am only a slave.  Ah, you are not a man if you can give
me to the police.  You have no heart if you can forget that I tried to
save you once."

I had feared that plea, for, in her own Oriental fashion, she certainly
had tried to save me from a deadly peril once--at the expense of my
friend.  But I had feared the plea, for I did not know how to meet it.
How could I give her up, perhaps to stand her trial for murder?  And
now I fell silent, and she saw why I was silent.

"I may deserve no mercy; I may be even as bad as you think; but what
have YOU to do with the police?  It is not your work to hound a woman
to death.  Could you ever look another woman in the eyes--one that you
loved, and know that she trusted you--if you had done such a thing?
Ah, I have no friend in all the world, or I should not be here.  Do not
be my enemy, my judge, and make me worse than I am; be my friend, and
save me--from HIM." The tremulous lips were close to mine, her breath
fanned my cheek.  "Have mercy on me."

At that moment I honestly would have given half of my worldly
possessions to have been spared the decision which I knew I must come
to.  After all, what proof had I that she was a willing accomplice of
Dr. Fu-Manchu?  Furthermore, she was an Oriental, and her code must
necessarily be different from mine.  Irreconcilable as the thing may be
with Western ideas, Nayland Smith had really told me that he believed
the girl to be a slave.  Then there remained that other reason why I
loathed the idea of becoming her captor.  It was almost tantamount to
betrayal!  Must I soil my hands with such work?

Thus--I suppose--her seductive beauty argued against my sense of right.
The jeweled fingers grasped my shoulders nervously, and her slim body
quivered against mine as she watched me, with all her soul in her eyes,
in an abandonment of pleading despair.  Then I remembered the fate of
the man in whose room we stood.

"You lured Cadby to his death," I said, and shook her off.

"No, no!" she cried wildly, clutching at me.  "No, I swear by the holy
name I did not!  I did not!  I watched him, spied upon him--yes!  But,
listen: it was because he would not be warned that he met his death.  I
could not save him!  Ah, I am not so bad as that.  I will tell you.  I
have taken his notebook and torn out the last pages and burnt them.
Look!  in the grate.  The book was too big to steal away.  I came twice
and could not find it.  There, will you let me go?"

"If you will tell me where and how to seize Dr. Fu-Manchu--yes."

Her hands dropped and she took a backward step.  A new terror was to be
read in her face.

"I dare not!  I dare not!"

"Then you would--if you dared?"

She was watching me intently.

"Not if YOU would go to find him," she said.

And, with all that I thought her to be, the stern servant of justice
that I would have had myself, I felt the hot blood leap to my cheek at
all which the words implied.  She grasped my arm.

"Could you hide me from him if I came to you, and told you all I know?"

"The authorities--"

"Ah!"  Her expression changed.  "They can put me on the rack if they
choose, but never one word would I speak--never one little word."

She threw up her head scornfully.  Then the proud glance softened again.

"But I will speak for you."

Closer she came, and closer, until she could whisper in my ear.

"Hide me from your police, from HIM, from everybody, and I will no
longer be his slave."

My heart was beating with painful rapidity.  I had not counted on this
warring with a woman; moreover, it was harder than I could have dreamt
of.  For some time I had been aware that by the charm of her
personality and the art of her pleading she had brought me down from my
judgment seat--had made it all but impossible for me to give her up to
justice.  Now, I was disarmed--but in a quandary.  What should I do?
What COULD I do?  I turned away from her and walked to the hearth, in
which some paper ash lay and yet emitted a faint smell.

Not more than ten seconds elapsed, I am confident, from the time that I
stepped across the room until I glanced back.  But she had gone!

As I leapt to the door the key turned gently from the outside.

"Ma 'alesh!" came her soft whisper; "but I am afraid to trust you--yet.
Be comforted, for there is one near who would have killed you had I
wished it.  Remember, I will come to you whenever you will take me and
hide me."

Light footsteps pattered down the stairs.  I heard a stifled cry from
Mrs. Dolan as the mysterious visitor ran past her.  The front door
opened and closed.



CHAPTER V


"Shen-Yan's is a dope-shop in one of the burrows off the old Ratcliff
Highway," said Inspector Weymouth.

"'Singapore Charlie's,' they call it.  It's a center for some of the
Chinese societies, I believe, but all sorts of opium-smokers use it.
There have never been any complaints that I know of.  I don't
understand this."

We stood in his room at New Scotland Yard, bending over a sheet of
foolscap upon which were arranged some burned fragments from poor
Cadby's grate, for so hurriedly had the girl done her work that
combustion had not been complete.

"What do we make of this?" said Smith.  "'. . . Hunchback . . . lascar
went up . . . unlike others . . . not return . . . till Shen-Yan'
(there is no doubt about the name, I think) 'turned me out . . . booming
sound . . . lascar in . . . mortuary I could ident . . . not for days,
or suspici . . . Tuesday night in a different make . . . snatch
. . . pigtail . . .'"

"The pigtail again!" rapped Weymouth.

"She evidently burned the torn-out pages all together," continued
Smith.  "They lay flat, and this was in the middle.  I see the hand of
retributive justice in that, Inspector.  Now we have a reference to a
hunchback, and what follows amounts to this: A lascar (amongst several
other persons) went up somewhere--presumably upstairs--at Shen-Yan's,
and did not come down again.  Cadby, who was there disguised, noted a
booming sound.  Later, he identified the lascar in some mortuary.  We
have no means of fixing the date of this visit to Shen-Yan's, but I
feel inclined to put down the 'lascar' as the dacoit who was murdered
by Fu-Manchu!  It is sheer supposition, however.  But that Cadby meant
to pay another visit to the place in a different 'make-up' or disguise,
is evident, and that the Tuesday night proposed was last night is a
reasonable deduction.  The reference to a pigtail is principally
interesting because of what was found on Cadby's body."

Inspector Weymouth nodded affirmatively, and Smith glanced at his watch.

"Exactly ten-twenty-three," he said.  "I will trouble you, Inspector,
for the freedom of your fancy wardrobe.  There is time to spend an hour
in the company of Shen-Yan's opium friends."

Weymouth raised his eyebrows.

"It might be risky.  What about an official visit?"

Nayland Smith laughed.

"Worse than useless!  By your own showing, the place is open to
inspection.  No; guile against guile!  We are dealing with a Chinaman,
with the incarnate essence of Eastern subtlety, with the most
stupendous genius that the modern Orient has produced."

"I don't believe in disguises," said Weymouth, with a certain
truculence.  "It's mostly played out, that game, and generally leads to
failure.  Still, if you're determined, sir, there's an end of it.
Foster will make your face up.  What disguise do you propose to adopt?"

"A sort of Dago seaman, I think; something like poor Cadby.  I can rely
on my knowledge of the brutes, if I am sure of my disguise."

"You are forgetting me, Smith," I said.

He turned to me quickly.

"Petrie," he replied, "it is MY business, unfortunately, but it is no
sort of hobby."

"You mean that you can no longer rely upon me?" I said angrily.

Smith grasped my hand, and met my rather frigid stare with a look of
real concern on his gaunt, bronzed face.

"My dear old chap," he answered, "that was really unkind.  You know
that I meant something totally different."

"It's all right, Smith;" I said, immediately ashamed of my choler, and
wrung his hand heartily.  "I can pretend to smoke opium as well as
another.  I shall be going, too, Inspector."

As a result of this little passage of words, some twenty minutes later
two dangerous-looking seafaring ruffians entered a waiting cab,
accompanied by Inspector Weymouth, and were driven off into the
wilderness of London's night.  In this theatrical business there was,
to my mind, something ridiculous--almost childish--and I could have
laughed heartily had it not been that grim tragedy lurked so near to
farce.

The mere recollection that somewhere at our journey's end Fu-Manchu
awaited us was sufficient to sober my reflections--Fu-Manchu, who, with
all the powers represented by Nayland Smith pitted against him, pursued
his dark schemes triumphantly, and lurked in hiding within this very
area which was so sedulously patrolled--Fu-Manchu, whom I had never
seen, but whose name stood for horrors indefinable!  Perhaps I was
destined to meet the terrible Chinese doctor to-night.

I ceased to pursue a train of thought which promised to lead to morbid
depths, and directed my attention to what Smith was saying.

"We will drop down from Wapping and reconnoiter, as you say the place
is close to the riverside.  Then you can put us ashore somewhere below.
Ryman can keep the launch close to the back of the premises, and your
fellows will be hanging about near the front, near enough to hear the
whistle."

"Yes," assented Weymouth; "I've arranged for that.  If you are
suspected, you shall give the alarm?"

"I don't know," said Smith thoughtfully.  "Even in that event I might
wait awhile."

"Don't wait too long," advised the Inspector.  "We shouldn't be much
wiser if your next appearance was on the end of a grapnel, somewhere
down Greenwich Reach, with half your fingers missing."

The cab pulled up outside the river police depot, and Smith and I
entered without delay, four shabby-looking fellows who had been seated
in the office springing up to salute the Inspector, who followed us in.

"Guthrie and Lisle," he said briskly, "get along and find a dark corner
which commands the door of Singapore Charlie's off the old Highway.
You look the dirtiest of the troupe, Guthrie; you might drop asleep on
the pavement, and Lisle can argue with you about getting home.  Don't
move till you hear the whistle inside or have my orders, and note
everybody that goes in and comes out.  You other two belong to this
division?"

The C.I.D. men having departed, the remaining pair saluted again.

"Well, you're on special duty to-night. You've been prompt, but don't
stick your chests out so much.  Do you know of a back way to
Shen-Yan's?"

The men looked at one another, and both shook their heads.

"There's an empty shop nearly opposite, sir," replied one of them.  "I
know a broken window at the back where we could climb in.  Then we
could get through to the front and watch from there."

"Good!" cried the Inspector.  "See you are not spotted, though; and if
you hear the whistle, don't mind doing a bit of damage, but be inside
Shen-Yan's like lightning.  Otherwise, wait for orders."

Inspector Ryman came in, glancing at the clock.

"Launch is waiting," he said.

"Right," replied Smith thoughtfully.  "I am half afraid, though, that
the recent alarms may have scared our quarry--your man, Mason, and then
Cadby.  Against which we have that, so far as he is likely to know,
there has been no clew pointing to this opium den.  Remember, he thinks
Cadby's notes are destroyed."

"The whole business is an utter mystery to me," confessed Ryman.  "I'm
told that there's some dangerous Chinese devil hiding somewhere in
London, and that you expect to find him at Shen-Yan's. Supposing he
uses that place, which is possible, how do you know he's there
to-night?"

"I don't," said Smith; "but it is the first clew we have had pointing
to one of his haunts, and time means precious lives where Dr. Fu-Manchu
is concerned."

"Who is he, sir, exactly, this Dr. Fu-Manchu?"

"I have only the vaguest idea, Inspector; but he is no ordinary
criminal.  He is the greatest genius which the powers of evil have put
on earth for centuries.  He has the backing of a political group whose
wealth is enormous, and his mission in Europe is to PAVE THE WAY!  Do
you follow me?  He is the advance-agent of a movement so epoch-making
that not one Britisher, and not one American, in fifty thousand has
ever dreamed of it."

Ryman stared, but made no reply, and we went out, passing down to the
breakwater and boarding the waiting launch.  With her crew of three,
the party numbered seven that swung out into the Pool, and, clearing
the pier, drew in again and hugged the murky shore.

The night had been clear enough hitherto, but now came scudding
rainbanks to curtain the crescent moon, and anon to unveil her again
and show the muddy swirls about us.  The view was not extensive from
the launch.  Sometimes a deepening of the near shadows would tell of a
moored barge, or lights high above our heads mark the deck of a large
vessel.  In the floods of moonlight gaunt shapes towered above; in the
ensuing darkness only the oily glitter of the tide occupied the
foreground of the night-piece.

The Surrey shore was a broken wall of blackness, patched with lights
about which moved hazy suggestions of human activity.  The bank we were
following offered a prospect even more gloomy--a dense, dark mass, amid
which, sometimes, mysterious half-tones told of a dock gate, or sudden
high lights leapt flaring to the eye.

Then, out of the mystery ahead, a green light grew and crept down upon
us.  A giant shape loomed up, and frowned crushingly upon the little
craft.  A blaze of light, the jangle of a bell, and it was past.  We
were dancing in the wash of one of the Scotch steamers, and the murk
had fallen again.

Discords of remote activity rose above the more intimate throbbing of
our screw, and we seemed a pigmy company floating past the workshops of
Brobdingnagian toilers.  The chill of the near water communicated
itself to me, and I felt the protection of my shabby garments
inadequate against it.

Far over on the Surrey shore a blue light--vaporous,
mysterious--flicked translucent tongues against the night's curtain.
It was a weird, elusive flame, leaping, wavering, magically changing
from blue to a yellowed violet, rising, falling.

"Only a gasworks," came Smith's voice, and I knew that he, too, had
been watching those elfin fires.  "But it always reminds me of a
Mexican teocalli, and the altar of sacrifice."

The simile was apt, but gruesome.  I thought of Dr. Fu-Manchu and the
severed fingers, and could not repress a shudder.

"On your left, past the wooden pier!  Not where the lamp is--beyond
that; next to the dark, square building--Shen-Yan's."

It was Inspector Ryman speaking.

"Drop us somewhere handy, then," replied Smith, "and lie close in, with
your ears wide open.  We may have to run for it, so don't go far away."

From the tone of his voice I knew that the night mystery of the Thames
had claimed at least one other victim.

"Dead slow," came Ryman's order.  "We'll put in to the Stone Stairs."



CHAPTER VI


A SEEMINGLY drunken voice was droning from a neighboring alleyway as
Smith lurched in hulking fashion to the door of a little shop above
which, crudely painted, were the words:


"SHEN-YAN, Barber."


I shuffled along behind him, and had time to note the box of studs,
German shaving tackle and rolls of twist which lay untidily in the
window ere Smith kicked the door open, clattered down three wooden
steps, and pulled himself up with a jerk, seizing my arm for support.

We stood in a bare and very dirty room, which could only claim kinship
with a civilized shaving-saloon by virtue of the grimy towel thrown
across the back of the solitary chair.  A Yiddish theatrical bill of
some kind, illustrated, adorned one of the walls, and another bill, in
what may have been Chinese, completed the decorations.  From behind a
curtain heavily brocaded with filth a little Chinaman appeared, dressed
in a loose smock, black trousers and thick-soled slippers, and,
advancing, shook his head vigorously.

"No shavee--no shavee," he chattered, simian fashion, squinting from
one to the other of us with his twinkling eyes.  "Too late!  Shuttee
shop!"

"Don't you come none of it wi' me!" roared Smith, in a voice of amazing
gruffness, and shook an artificially dirtied fist under the Chinaman's
nose.  "Get inside and gimme an' my mate a couple o' pipes.  Smokee
pipe, you yellow scum--savvy?"

My friend bent forward and glared into the other's eyes with a
vindictiveness that amazed me, unfamiliar as I was with this form of
gentle persuasion.

"Kop 'old o' that," he said, and thrust a coin into the Chinaman's
yellow paw.  "Keep me waitin' an' I'll pull the dam' shop down,
Charlie.  You can lay to it."

"No hab got pipee--" began the other.

Smith raised his fist, and Yan capitulated.

"Allee lightee," he said.  "Full up--no loom.  You come see."

He dived behind the dirty curtain, Smith and I following, and ran up a
dark stair.  The next moment I found myself in an atmosphere which was
literally poisonous.  It was all but unbreathable, being loaded with
opium fumes.  Never before had I experienced anything like it.  Every
breath was an effort.  A tin oil-lamp on a box in the middle of the
floor dimly illuminated the horrible place, about the walls of which
ten or twelve bunks were ranged and all of them occupied.  Most of the
occupants were lying motionless, but one or two were squatting in their
bunks noisily sucking at the little metal pipes.  These had not yet
attained to the opium-smoker's Nirvana.

"No loom--samee tella you," said Shen-Yan, complacently testing Smith's
shilling with his yellow, decayed teeth.

Smith walked to a corner and dropped cross-legged, on the floor,
pulling me down with him.

"Two pipe quick," he said.  "Plenty room.  Two piecee pipe--or plenty
heap trouble."

A dreary voice from one of the bunks came:

"Give 'im a pipe, Charlie, curse yer!  an' stop 'is palaver."

Yan performed a curious little shrug, rather of the back than of the
shoulders, and shuffled to the box which bore the smoky lamp.  Holding
a needle in the flame, he dipped it, when red-hot, into an old cocoa
tin, and withdrew it with a bead of opium adhering to the end.  Slowly
roasting this over the lamp, he dropped it into the bowl of the metal
pipe which he held ready, where it burned with a spirituous blue flame.

"Pass it over," said Smith huskily, and rose on his knees with the
assumed eagerness of a slave to the drug.

Yan handed him the pipe, which he promptly put to his lips, and
prepared another for me.

"Whatever you do, don't inhale any," came Smith's whispered injunction.

It was with a sense of nausea greater even than that occasioned by the
disgusting atmosphere of the den that I took the pipe and pretended to
smoke.  Taking my cue from my friend, I allowed my head gradually to
sink lower and lower, until, within a few minutes, I sprawled sideways
on the floor, Smith lying close beside me.

"The ship's sinkin'," droned a voice from one of the bunks.  "Look at
the rats."

Yan had noiselessly withdrawn, and I experienced a curious sense of
isolation from my fellows--from the whole of the Western world.  My
throat was parched with the fumes, my head ached.  The vicious
atmosphere seemed contaminating.  I was as one dropped--

Somewhere East of Suez, where the best is like the worst, And there
ain't no Ten Commandments and a man can raise a thirst.

Smith began to whisper softly.

"We have carried it through successfully so far," he said.  "I don't
know if you have observed it, but there is a stair just behind you,
half concealed by a ragged curtain.  We are near that, and well in the
dark.  I have seen nothing suspicious so far--or nothing much.  But if
there was anything going forward it would no doubt be delayed until we
new arrivals were well doped.  S-SH!"

He pressed my arm to emphasize the warning.  Through my half-closed
eyes I perceived a shadowy form near the curtain to which he had
referred.  I lay like a log, but my muscles were tensed nervously.

The shadow materialized as the figure moved forward into the room with
a curiously lithe movement.

The smoky lamp in the middle of the place afforded scant illumination,
serving only to indicate sprawling shapes--here an extended hand, brown
or yellow, there a sketchy, corpse-like face; whilst from all about
rose obscene sighings and murmurings in far-away voices--an uncanny,
animal chorus.  It was like a glimpse of the Inferno seen by some
Chinese Dante.  But so close to us stood the newcomer that I was able
to make out a ghastly parchment face, with small, oblique eyes, and a
misshapen head crowned with a coiled pigtail, surmounting a slight,
hunched body.  There was something unnatural, inhuman, about that
masklike face, and something repulsive in the bent shape and the long,
yellow hands clasped one upon the other.

Fu-Manchu, from Smith's account, in no way resembled this crouching
apparition with the death's-head countenance and lithe movements; but
an instinct of some kind told me that we were on the right scent--that
this was one of the doctor's servants.  How I came to that conclusion,
I cannot explain; but with no doubt in my mind that this was a member
of the formidable murder group, I saw the yellow man creep nearer,
nearer, silently, bent and peering.

He was watching us.

Of another circumstance I became aware, and a disquieting circumstance.
There were fewer murmurings and sighings from the surrounding bunks.
The presence of the crouching figure had created a sudden semi-silence
in the den, which could only mean that some of the supposed
opium-smokers had merely feigned coma and the approach of coma.

Nayland Smith lay like a dead man, and trusting to the darkness, I,
too, lay prone and still, but watched the evil face bending lower and
lower, until it came within a few inches of my own.  I completely
closed my eyes.

Delicate fingers touched my right eyelid.  Divining what was coming, I
rolled my eyes up, as the lid was adroitly lifted and lowered again.
The man moved away.

I had saved the situation!  And noting anew the hush about me--a hush
in which I fancied many pairs of ears listened--I was glad.  For just a
moment I realized fully how, with the place watched back and front, we
yet were cut off, were in the hands of Far Easterns, to some extent in
the power of members of that most inscrutably mysterious race, the
Chinese.

"Good," whispered Smith at my side.  "I don't think I could have done
it.  He took me on trust after that.  My God!  what an awful face.
Petrie, it's the hunchback of Cadby's notes.  Ah, I thought so.  Do you
see that?"

I turned my eyes round as far as was possible.  A man had scrambled
down from one of the bunks and was following the bent figure across the
room.

They passed around us quietly, the little yellow man leading, with his
curious, lithe gait, and the other, an impassive Chinaman, following.
The curtain was raised, and I heard footsteps receding on the stairs.

"Don't stir," whispered Smith.

An intense excitement was clearly upon him, and he communicated it to
me.  Who was the occupant of the room above?

Footsteps on the stair, and the Chinaman reappeared, recrossed the
floor, and went out.  The little, bent man went over to another bunk,
this time leading up the stair one who looked like a lascar.

"Did you see his right hand?" whispered Smith.  "A dacoit!  They come
here to report and to take orders.  Petrie, Dr. Fu-Manchu is up there."

"What shall we do?"--softly.

"Wait.  Then we must try to rush the stairs.  It would be futile to
bring in the police first.  He is sure to have some other exit.  I will
give the word while the little yellow devil is down here.  You are
nearer and will have to go first, but if the hunchback follows, I can
then deal with him."

Our whispered colloquy was interrupted by the return of the dacoit, who
recrossed the room as the Chinaman had done, and immediately took his
departure.  A third man, whom Smith identified as a Malay, ascended the
mysterious stairs, descended, and went out; and a fourth, whose
nationality it was impossible to determine, followed.  Then, as the
softly moving usher crossed to a bunk on the right of the outer door--

"Up you go, Petrie," cried Smith, for further delay was dangerous and
further dissimulation useless.

I leaped to my feet.  Snatching my revolver from the pocket of the
rough jacket I wore, I bounded to the stair and went blundering up in
complete darkness.  A chorus of brutish cries clamored from behind,
with a muffled scream rising above them all.  But Nayland Smith was
close behind as I raced along a covered gangway, in a purer air, and at
my heels when I crashed open a door at the end and almost fell into the
room beyond.

What I saw were merely a dirty table, with some odds and ends upon it
of which I was too excited to take note, an oil-lamp swung by a brass
chain above, and a man sitting behind the table.  But from the moment
that my gaze rested upon the one who sat there, I think if the place
had been an Aladdin's palace I should have had no eyes for any of its
wonders.

He wore a plain yellow robe, of a hue almost identical with that of his
smooth, hairless countenance.  His hands were large, long and bony, and
he held them knuckles upward, and rested his pointed chin upon their
thinness.  He had a great, high brow, crowned with sparse,
neutral-colored hair.

Of his face, as it looked out at me over the dirty table, I despair of
writing convincingly.  It was that of an archangel of evil, and it was
wholly dominated by the most uncanny eyes that ever reflected a human
soul, for they were narrow and long, very slightly oblique, and of a
brilliant green.  But their unique horror lay in a certain filminess
(it made me think of the membrana nictitans in a bird) which, obscuring
them as I threw wide the door, seemed to lift as I actually passed the
threshold, revealing the eyes in all their brilliant iridescence.

I know that I stopped dead, one foot within the room, for the malignant
force of the man was something surpassing my experience.  He was
surprised by this sudden intrusion--yes, but no trace of fear showed
upon that wonderful face, only a sort of pitying contempt.  And, as I
paused, he rose slowly to his feet, never removing his gaze from mine.

"IT'S FU-MANCHU!" cried Smith over my shoulder, in a voice that was
almost a scream.  "IT'S FU-MANCHU!  Cover him!  Shoot him dead if--"

The conclusion of that sentence I never heard.

Dr. Fu-Manchu reached down beside the table, and the floor slipped from
under me.

One last glimpse I had of the fixed green eyes, and with a scream I was
unable to repress I dropped, dropped, dropped, and plunged into icy
water, which closed over my head.

Vaguely I had seen a spurt of flame, had heard another cry following my
own, a booming sound (the trap), the flat note of a police whistle.
But when I rose to the surface impenetrable darkness enveloped me; I
was spitting filthy, oily liquid from my mouth, and fighting down the
black terror that had me by the throat--terror of the darkness about
me, of the unknown depths beneath me, of the pit into which I was cast
amid stifling stenches and the lapping of tidal water.

"Smith!" I cried. . . . "Help!  Help!"

My voice seemed to beat back upon me, yet I was about to cry out again,
when, mustering all my presence of mind and all my failing courage, I
recognized that I had better employment of my energies, and began to
swim straight ahead, desperately determined to face all the horrors of
this place--to die hard if die I must.

A drop of liquid fire fell through the darkness and hissed into the
water beside me!

I felt that, despite my resolution, I was going mad.

Another fiery drop--and another!

I touched a rotting wooden post and slimy timbers.  I had reached one
bound of my watery prison.  More fire fell from above, and the scream
of hysteria quivered, unuttered, in my throat.

Keeping myself afloat with increasing difficulty in my heavy garments,
I threw my head back and raised my eyes.

No more drops fell, and no more drops would fall; but it was merely a
question of time for the floor to collapse.  For it was beginning to
emit a dull, red glow.

The room above me was in flames!

It was drops of burning oil from the lamp, finding passage through the
cracks in the crazy flooring, which had fallen about me--for the death
trap had reclosed, I suppose, mechanically.

My saturated garments were dragging me down, and now I could hear the
flames hungrily eating into the ancient rottenness overhead.  Shortly
that cauldron would be loosed upon my head.  The glow of the flames
grew brighter . . . and showed me the half-rotten piles upholding the
building, showed me the tidal mark upon the slime-coated walls--showed
me that there was no escape!

By some subterranean duct the foul place was fed from the Thames.  By
that duct, with the outgoing tide, my body would pass, in the wake of
Mason, Cadby, and many another victim!

Rusty iron rungs were affixed to one of the walls communicating with a
trap--but the bottom three were missing!

Brighter and brighter grew the awesome light--the light of what should
be my funeral pyre--reddening the oily water and adding a new dread to
the whispering, clammy horror of the pit.  But something it showed
me . . . a projecting beam a few feet above the water . . . and directly
below the iron ladder!

"Merciful Heaven!" I breathed.  "Have I the strength?"

A desire for laughter claimed me with sudden, all but irresistible
force.  I knew what it portended and fought it down--grimly, sternly.

My garments weighed upon me like a suit of mail; with my chest aching
dully, my veins throbbing to bursting, I forced tired muscles to work,
and, every stroke an agony, approached the beam.  Nearer I swam
. . . nearer.  Its shadow fell black upon the water, which now had all
the seeming of a pool of blood.  Confused sounds--a remote uproar--came
to my ears.  I was nearly spent . . . I was in the shadow of the beam!  If
I could throw up one arm. . .

A shrill scream sounded far above me!

"Petrie!  Petrie!"  (That voice must be Smith's!)  "Don't touch the
beam!  For God's sake DON'T TOUCH THE BEAM!  Keep afloat another few
seconds and I can get to you!"

Another few seconds!  Was that possible?

I managed to turn, to raise my throbbing head; and I saw the strangest
sight which that night yet had offered.

Nayland Smith stood upon the lowest iron rung . . . supported by the
hideous, crook-backed Chinaman, who stood upon the rung above!

"I can't reach him!"

It was as Smith hissed the words despairingly that I looked up--and saw
the Chinaman snatch at his coiled pigtail and pull it off!  With it
came the wig to which it was attached; and the ghastly yellow mask,
deprived of its fastenings, fell from position!  "Here!  Here!  Be
quick!  Oh!  be quick!  You can lower this to him!  Be quick!  Be
quick!"

A cloud of hair came falling about the slim shoulders as the speaker
bent to pass this strange lifeline to Smith; and I think it was my
wonder at knowing her for the girl whom that day I had surprised in
Cadby's rooms which saved my life.

For I not only kept afloat, but kept my gaze upturned to that
beautiful, flushed face, and my eyes fixed upon hers--which were wild
with fear . . . for me!

Smith, by some contortion, got the false queue into my grasp, and I,
with the strength of desperation, by that means seized hold upon the
lowest rung.  With my friend's arm round me I realized that exhaustion
was even nearer than I had supposed.  My last distinct memory is of the
bursting of the floor above and the big burning joist hissing into the
pool beneath us.  Its fiery passage, striated with light, disclosed two
sword blades, riveted, edges up along the top of the beam which I had
striven to reach.

"The severed fingers--" I said; and swooned.

How Smith got me through the trap I do not know--nor how we made our
way through the smoke and flames of the narrow passage it opened upon.
My next recollection is of sitting up, with my friend's arm supporting
me and Inspector Ryman holding a glass to my lips.

A bright glare dazzled my eyes.  A crowd surged about us, and a clangor
and shouting drew momentarily nearer.

"It's the engines coming," explained Smith, seeing my bewilderment.
"Shen-Yan's is in flames.  It was your shot, as you fell through the
trap, broke the oil-lamp."

"Is everybody out?"

"So far as we know."

"Fu-Manchu?"

Smith shrugged his shoulders.

"No one has seen him.  There was some door at the back--"

"Do you think he may--"

"No," he said tensely.  "Not until I see him lying dead before me shall
I believe it."

Then memory resumed its sway.  I struggled to my feet.

"Smith, where is she?" I cried.  "Where is she?"

"I don't know," he answered.

"She's given us the slip, Doctor," said Inspector Weymouth, as a
fire-engine came swinging round the corner of the narrow lane.  "So has
Mr. Singapore Charlie--and, I'm afraid, somebody else.  We've got six
or eight all-sorts, some awake and some asleep, but I suppose we shall
have to let 'em go again.  Mr. Smith tells me that the girl was
disguised as a Chinaman.  I expect that's why she managed to slip away."

I recalled how I had been dragged from the pit by the false queue, how
the strange discovery which had brought death to poor Cadby had brought
life to me, and I seemed to remember, too, that Smith had dropped it as
he threw his arm about me on the ladder.  Her mask the girl might have
retained, but her wig, I felt certain, had been dropped into the water.

It was later that night, when the brigade still were playing upon the
blackened shell of what had been Shen-Yan's opium-shop, and Smith and I
were speeding away in a cab from the scene of God knows how many
crimes, that I had an idea.

"Smith," I said, "did you bring the pigtail with you that was found on
Cadby?"

"Yes.  I had hoped to meet the owner."

"Have you got it now?"

"No. I met the owner."

I thrust my hands deep into the pockets of the big pea-jacket lent to
me by Inspector Ryman, leaning back in my corner.

"We shall never really excel at this business," continued Nayland
Smith.  "We are far too sentimental.  I knew what it meant to us,
Petrie, what it meant to the world, but I hadn't the heart.  I owed her
your life--I had to square the account."



CHAPTER VII


NIGHT fell on Redmoat.  I glanced from the window at the nocturne in
silver and green which lay beneath me.  To the west of the shrubbery,
with its broken canopy of elms and beyond the copper beech which marked
the center of its mazes, a gap offered a glimpse of the Waverney where
it swept into a broad.  Faint bird-calls floated over the water.
These, with the whisper of leaves, alone claimed the ear.

Ideal rural peace, and the music of an English summer evening; but to
my eyes, every shadow holding fantastic terrors; to my ears, every
sound a signal of dread.  For the deathful hand of Fu-Manchu was
stretched over Redmoat, at any hour to loose strange, Oriental horrors
upon its inmates.

"Well," said Nayland Smith, joining me at the window, "we had dared to
hope him dead, but we know now that he lives!"

The Rev. J. D. Eltham coughed nervously, and I turned, leaning my elbow
upon the table, and studied the play of expression upon the refined,
sensitive face of the clergyman.

"You think I acted rightly in sending for you, Mr. Smith?"

Nayland Smith smoked furiously.

"Mr. Eltham," he replied, "you see in me a man groping in the dark.  I
am to-day no nearer to the conclusion of my mission than upon the day
when I left Mandalay.  You offer me a clew; I am here.  Your affair, I
believe, stands thus: A series of attempted burglaries, or something of
the kind, has alarmed your household.  Yesterday, returning from London
with your daughter, you were both drugged in some way and, occupying a
compartment to yourselves, you both slept.  Your daughter awoke, and
saw someone else in the carriage--a yellow-faced man who held a case of
instruments in his hands."

"Yes; I was, of course, unable to enter into particulars over the
telephone.  The man was standing by one of the windows.  Directly he
observed that my daughter was awake, he stepped towards her."

"What did he do with the case in his hands?"

"She did not notice--or did not mention having noticed.  In fact, as
was natural, she was so frightened that she recalls nothing more,
beyond the fact that she strove to arouse me, without succeeding, felt
hands grasp her shoulders--and swooned."

"But someone used the emergency cord, and stopped the train."

"Greba has no recollection of having done so."

"Hm!  Of course, no yellow-faced man was on the train.  When did you
awake?"

"I was aroused by the guard, but only when he had repeatedly shaken me."

"Upon reaching Great Yarmouth you immediately called up Scotland Yard?
You acted very wisely, sir.  How long were you in China?"

Mr. Eltham's start of surprise was almost comical.

"It is perhaps not strange that you should be aware of my residence in
China, Mr. Smith," he said; "but my not having mentioned it may seem
so.  The fact is"--his sensitive face flushed in palpable
embarrassment--"I left China under what I may term an episcopal cloud.
I have lived in retirement ever since.  Unwittingly--I solemnly declare
to you, Mr. Smith, unwittingly--I stirred up certain deep-seated
prejudices in my endeavors to do my duty--my duty.  I think you asked
me how long I was in China?  I was there from 1896 until 1900--four
years."

"I recall the circumstances, Mr. Eltham," said Smith, with an odd note
in his voice.  "I have been endeavoring to think where I had come
across the name, and a moment ago I remembered.  I am happy to have met
you, sir."

The clergyman blushed again like a girl, and slightly inclined his
head, with its scanty fair hair.

"Has Redmoat, as its name implies, a moat round it?  I was unable to
see in the dusk."

"It remains.  Redmoat--a corruption of Round Moat--was formerly a
priory, disestablished by the eighth Henry in 1536." His pedantic
manner was quaint at times. "But the moat is no longer flooded. In
fact, we grow cabbages in part of it. If you refer to the strategic
strength of the place"--he smiled, but his manner was embarrassed
again--"it is considerable. I have barbed wire fencing, and--other
arrangements. You see, it is a lonely spot," he added apologetically.
"And now, if you will excuse me, we will resume these gruesome
inquiries after the more pleasant affairs of dinner."

He left us.

"Who is our host?" I asked, as the door closed.

Smith smiled.

"You are wondering what caused the 'episcopal cloud?'" he suggested.
"Well, the deep-seated prejudices which our reverend friend stirred up
culminated in the Boxer Risings."

"Good heavens, Smith!" I said; for I could not reconcile the diffident
personality of the clergyman with the memories which those words
awakened.

"He evidently should be on our danger list," my friend continued
quickly; "but he has so completely effaced himself of recent years that
I think it probable that someone else has only just recalled his
existence to mind.  The Rev. J. D. Eltham, my dear Petrie, though he
may be a poor hand at saving souls, at any rate, has saved a score of
Christian women from death--and worse."

"J. D. Eltham--" I began.

"Is 'Parson Dan'!" rapped Smith, "the 'Fighting Missionary,' the man
who with a garrison of a dozen cripples and a German doctor held the
hospital at Nan-Yang against two hundred Boxers.  That's who the Rev.
J. D. Eltham is!  But what is he up to, now, I have yet to find out.
He is keeping something back--something which has made him an object of
interest to Young China!"

During dinner the matters responsible for our presence there did not
hold priority in the conversation.  In fact, this, for the most part,
consisted in light talk of books and theaters.

Greba Eltham, the clergyman's daughter, was a charming young hostess,
and she, with Vernon Denby, Mr. Eltham's nephew, completed the party.
No doubt the girl's presence, in part, at any rate, led us to refrain
from the subject uppermost in our minds.

These little pools of calm dotted along the torrential course of the
circumstances which were bearing my friend and me onward to unknown
issues form pleasant, sunny spots in my dark recollections.

So I shall always remember, with pleasure, that dinner-party at
Redmoat, in the old-world dining-room; it was so very peaceful, so
almost grotesquely calm.  For I, within my very bones, felt it to be
the calm before the storm.  When, later, we men passed to the library,
we seemed to leave that atmosphere behind us.

"Redmoat," said the Rev. J. D. Eltham, "has latterly become the theater
of strange doings."

He stood on the hearth-rug. A shaded lamp upon the big table and
candles in ancient sconces upon the mantelpiece afforded dim
illumination.  Mr. Eltham's nephew, Vernon Denby, lolled smoking on the
window-seat, and I sat near to him.  Nayland Smith paced restlessly up
and down the room.

"Some months ago, almost a year," continued the clergyman, "a
burglarious attempt was made upon the house.  There was an arrest, and
the man confessed that he had been tempted by my collection." He waved
his hand vaguely towards the several cabinets about the shadowed room.

"It was shortly afterwards that I allowed my hobby for--playing at
forts to run away with me."  He smiled an apology.  "I virtually
fortified Redmoat--against trespassers of any kind, I mean.  You have
seen that the house stands upon a kind of large mound.  This is
artificial, being the buried ruins of a Roman outwork; a portion of the
ancient castrum." Again he waved indicatively, this time toward the
window.

"When it was a priory it was completely isolated and defended by its
environing moat.  Today it is completely surrounded by barbed-wire
fencing.  Below this fence, on the east, is a narrow stream, a
tributary of the Waverney; on the north and west, the high road, but
nearly twenty feet below, the banks being perpendicular.  On the south
is the remaining part of the moat--now my kitchen garden; but from
there up to the level of the house is nearly twenty feet again, and the
barbed wire must also be counted with.

"The entrance, as you know, is by the way of a kind of cutting.  There
is a gate at the foot of the steps (they are some of the original steps
of the priory, Dr. Petrie), and another gate at the head."

He paused, and smiled around upon us boyishly.

"My secret defenses remain to be mentioned," he resumed; and, opening a
cupboard, he pointed to a row of batteries, with a number of electric
bells upon the wall behind.  "The more vulnerable spots are connected
at night with these bells," he said triumphantly.  "Any attempt to
scale the barbed wire or to force either gate would set two or more of
these ringing.  A stray cow raised one false alarm," he added, "and a
careless rook threw us into a perfect panic on another occasion."

He was so boyish--so nervously brisk and acutely sensitive--that it was
difficult to see in him the hero of the Nan-Yang hospital.  I could
only suppose that he had treated the Boxers' raid in the same spirit
wherein he met would-be trespassers within the precincts of Redmoat.
It had been an escapade, of which he was afterwards ashamed, as,
faintly, he was ashamed of his "fortifications."  "But," rapped Smith,
"it was not the visit of the burglar which prompted these elaborate
precautions."

Mr. Eltham coughed nervously.

"I am aware," he said, "that having invoked official aid, I must be
perfectly frank with you, Mr. Smith.  It was the burglar who was
responsible for my continuing the wire fence all round the grounds, but
the electrical contrivance followed, later, as a result of several
disturbed nights.  My servants grew uneasy about someone who came, they
said, after dusk.  No one could describe this nocturnal visitor, but
certainly we found traces.  I must admit that.

"Then--I received what I may term a warning.  My position is a peculiar
one--a peculiar one.  My daughter, too, saw this prowling person, over
by the Roman castrum, and described him as a yellow man.  It was the
incident in the train following closely upon this other, which led me
to speak to the police, little as I desired to--er--court publicity."

Nayland Smith walked to a window, and looked out across the sloping
lawn to where the shadows of the shrubbery lay.  A dog was howling
dismally somewhere.

"Your defenses are not impregnable, after all, then?" he jerked.  "On
our way up this evening Mr. Denby was telling us about the death of his
collie a few nights ago."

The clergyman's face clouded.

"That, certainly, was alarming," he confessed.

"I had been in London for a few days, and during my absence Vernon came
down, bringing the dog with him.  On the night of his arrival it ran,
barking, into the shrubbery yonder, and did not come out.  He went to
look for it with a lantern, and found it lying among the bushes, quite
dead.  The poor creature had been dreadfully beaten about the head."

"The gates were locked," Denby interrupted, "and no one could have got
out of the grounds without a ladder and someone to assist him.  But
there was no sign of a living thing about.  Edwards and I searched
every corner."

"How long has that other dog taken to howling?" inquired Smith.

"Only since Rex's death," said Denby quickly.

"It is my mastiff," explained the clergyman, "and he is confined in the
yard.  He is never allowed on this side of the house."

Nayland Smith wandered aimlessly about the library.

"I am sorry to have to press you, Mr. Eltham," he said, "but what was
the nature of the warning to which you referred, and from whom did it
come?"

Mr. Eltham hesitated for a long time.

"I have been so unfortunate," he said at last, "in my previous efforts,
that I feel assured of your hostile criticism when I tell you that I am
contemplating an immediate return to Ho-Nan!"

Smith jumped round upon him as though moved by a spring.

"Then you are going back to Nan-Yang?" he cried.  "Now I understand!
Why have you not told me before?  That is the key for which I have
vainly been seeking.  Your troubles date from the time of your decision
to return?"

"Yes, I must admit it," confessed the clergyman diffidently.

"And your warning came from China?"

"It did."

"From a Chinaman?"

"From the Mandarin, Yen-Sun-Yat."

"Yen-Sun-Yat!  My good sir!  He warned you to abandon your visit?  And
you reject his advice?  Listen to me."  Smith was intensely excited
now, his eyes bright, his lean figure curiously strung up, alert.  "The
Mandarin Yen-Sun-Yat is one of the seven!"

"I do not follow you, Mr. Smith."

"No, sir.  China to-day is not the China of '98.  It is a huge secret
machine, and Ho-Nan one of its most important wheels!  But if, as I
understand, this official is a friend of yours, believe me, he has
saved your life!  You would be a dead man now if it were not for your
friend in China!  My dear sir, you must accept his counsel."

Then, for the first time since I had made his acquaintance, "Parson
Dan" showed through the surface of the Rev. J. D. Eltham.

"No, sir!" replied the clergyman--and the change in his voice was
startling.  "I am called to Nan-Yang. Only One may deter my going."

The admixture of deep spiritual reverence with intense truculence in
his voice was dissimilar from anything I ever had heard.

"Then only One can protect you," cried Smith, "for, by Heaven, no MAN
will be able to do so!  Your presence in Ho-Nan can do no possible good
at present.  It must do harm.  Your experience in 1900 should be fresh
in your memory."

"Hard words, Mr. Smith."

"The class of missionary work which you favor, sir, is injurious to
international peace.  At the present moment, Ho-Nan is a barrel of
gunpowder; you would be the lighted match.  I do not willingly stand
between any man and what he chooses to consider his duty, but I insist
that you abandon your visit to the interior of China!"

"You insist, Mr. Smith?"

"As your guest, I regret the necessity for reminding you that I hold
authority to enforce it."

Denby fidgeted uneasily.  The tone of the conversation was growing
harsh and the atmosphere of the library portentous with brewing storms.

There was a short, silent interval.

"This is what I had feared and expected," said the clergyman.  "This
was my reason for not seeking official protection."

"The phantom Yellow Peril," said Nayland Smith, "to-day materializes
under the very eyes of the Western world."

"The 'Yellow Peril'!"

"You scoff, sir, and so do others.  We take the proffered right hand of
friendship nor inquire if the hidden left holds a knife!  The peace of
the world is at stake, Mr. Eltham.  Unknowingly, you tamper with
tremendous issues."

Mr. Eltham drew a deep breath, thrusting both hands in his pockets.

"You are painfully frank, Mr. Smith," he said; "but I like you for it.
I will reconsider my position and talk this matter over again with you
to-morrow."

Thus, then, the storm blew over.  Yet I had never experienced such an
overwhelming sense of imminent peril--of a sinister presence--as
oppressed me at that moment.  The very atmosphere of Redmoat was
impregnated with Eastern devilry; it loaded the air like some evil
perfume.  And then, through the silence, cut a throbbing scream--the
scream of a woman in direst fear.

"My God, it's Greba!" whispered Mr. Eltham.



CHAPTER VIII


IN what order we dashed down to the drawing-room I cannot recall.  But
none was before me when I leaped over the threshold and saw Miss Eltham
prone by the French windows.

These were closed and bolted, and she lay with hands outstretched in
the alcove which they formed.  I bent over her.  Nayland Smith was at
my elbow.

"Get my bag" I said.  "She has swooned.  It is nothing serious."

Her father, pale and wide-eyed, hovered about me, muttering
incoherently; but I managed to reassure him; and his gratitude when, I
having administered a simple restorative, the girl sighed shudderingly
and opened her eyes, was quite pathetic.

I would permit no questioning at that time, and on her father's arm she
retired to her own rooms.

It was some fifteen minutes later that her message was brought to me.
I followed the maid to a quaint little octagonal apartment, and Greba
Eltham stood before me, the candlelight caressing the soft curves of
her face and gleaming in the meshes of her rich brown hair.

When she had answered my first question she hesitated in pretty
confusion.

"We are anxious to know what alarmed you, Miss Eltham."

She bit her lip and glanced with apprehension towards the window.

"I am almost afraid to tell father," she began rapidly.  "He will think
me imaginative, but you have been so kind.  It was two green eyes!  Oh!
Dr. Petrie, they looked up at me from the steps leading to the lawn.
And they shone like the eyes of a cat."

The words thrilled me strangely.

"Are you sure it was not a cat, Miss Eltham?"

"The eyes were too large, Dr. Petrie.  There was something dreadful,
most dreadful, in their appearance.  I feel foolish and silly for
having fainted, twice in two days!  But the suspense is telling upon
me, I suppose.  Father thinks"--she was becoming charmingly
confidential, as a woman often will with a tactful physician--"that
shut up here we are safe from--whatever threatens us." I noted, with
concern, a repetition of the nervous shudder.  "But since our return
someone else has been in Redmoat!"

"Whatever do you mean, Miss Eltham?"

"Oh!  I don't quite know what I do mean, Dr. Petrie.  What does it ALL
mean?  Vernon has been explaining to me that some awful Chinaman is
seeking the life of Mr. Nayland Smith.  But if the same man wants to
kill my father, why has he not done so?"

"I am afraid you puzzle me."

"Of course, I must do so.  But--the man in the train.  He could have
killed us both quite easily!  And--last night someone was in father's
room."

"In his room!"

"I could not sleep, and I heard something moving.  My room is the next
one.  I knocked on the wall and woke father.  There was nothing; so I
said it was the howling of the dog that had frightened me."

"How could anyone get into his room?"

"I cannot imagine.  But I am not sure it was a man."

"Miss Eltham, you alarm me.  What do you suspect?"

"You must think me hysterical and silly, but whilst father and I have
been away from Redmoat perhaps the usual precautions have been
neglected.  Is there any creature, any large creature, which could
climb up the wall to the window?  Do you know of anything with a long,
thin body?"

For a moment I offered no reply, studying the girl's pretty face, her
eager, blue-gray eyes widely opened and fixed upon mine.  She was not
of the neurotic type, with her clear complexion and sun-kissed neck;
her arms, healthily toned by exposure to the country airs, were rounded
and firm, and she had the agile shape of a young Diana with none of the
anaemic languor which breeds morbid dreams.  She was frightened; yes,
who would not have been?  But the mere idea of this thing which she
believed to be in Redmoat, without the apparition of the green eyes,
must have prostrated a victim of "nerves."

"Have you seen such a creature, Miss Eltham?"

She hesitated again, glancing down and pressing her finger-tips
together.

"As father awoke and called out to know why I knocked, I glanced from
my window.  The moonlight threw half the lawn into shadow, and just
disappearing in this shadow was something--something of a brown color,
marked with sections!"

"What size and shape?"

"It moved so quickly I could form no idea of its shape; but I saw quite
six feet of it flash across the grass!"

"Did you hear anything?"

"A swishing sound in the shrubbery, then nothing more."

She met my eyes expectantly.  Her confidence in my powers of
understanding and sympathy was gratifying, though I knew that I but
occupied the position of a father-confessor.

"Have you any idea," I said, "how it came about that you awoke in the
train yesterday whilst your father did not?"

"We had coffee at a refreshment-room; it must have been drugged in some
way.  I scarcely tasted mine, the flavor was so awful; but father is an
old traveler and drank the whole of his cupful!"

Mr. Eltham's voice called from below.

"Dr. Petrie," said the girl quickly, "what do you think they want to do
to him?"

"Ah!" I replied, "I wish I knew that."

"Will you think over what I have told you?  For I do assure you there
is something here in Redmoat--something that comes and goes in spite of
father's 'fortifications'?  Caesar knows there is.  Listen to him.  He
drags at his chain so that I wonder he does not break it."

As we passed downstairs the howling of the mastiff sounded eerily
through the house, as did the clank-clank of the tightening chain as he
threw the weight of his big body upon it.

I sat in Smith's room that night for some time, he pacing the floor
smoking and talking.

"Eltham has influential Chinese friends," he said; "but they dare not
have him in Nan-Yang at present.  He knows the country as he knows
Norfolk; he would see things!

"His precautions here have baffled the enemy, I think.  The attempt in
the train points to an anxiety to waste no opportunity.  But whilst
Eltham was absent (he was getting his outfit in London, by the way)
they have been fixing some second string to their fiddle here.  In case
no opportunity offered before he returned, they provided for getting at
him here!"

"But how, Smith?"

"That's the mystery.  But the dead dog in the shrubbery is significant."

"Do you think some emissary of Fu-Manchu is actually inside the moat?"

"It's impossible, Petrie.  You are thinking of secret passages, and so
forth.  There are none.  Eltham has measured up every foot of the
place.  There isn't a rathole left unaccounted for; and as for a tunnel
under the moat, the house stands on a solid mass of Roman masonry, a
former camp of Hadrian's time.  I have seen a very old plan of the
Round Moat Priory as it was called.  There is no entrance and no exit
save by the steps.  So how was the dog killed?"

I knocked out my pipe on a bar of the grate.

"We are in the thick of it here," I said.

"We are always in the thick of it," replied Smith.  "Our danger is no
greater in Norfolk than in London.  But what do they want to do?  That
man in the train with the case of instruments--WHAT instruments?  Then
the apparition of the green eyes to-night. Can they have been the eyes
of Fu-Manchu?  Is some peculiarly unique outrage contemplated--something
calling for the presence of the master?"

"He may have to prevent Eltham's leaving England without killing him."

"Quite so.  He probably has instructions to be merciful.  But God help
the victim of Chinese mercy!"

I went to my own room then.  But I did not even undress, refilling my
pipe and seating myself at the open window.  Having looked upon the
awful Chinese doctor, the memory of his face, with its filmed green
eyes, could never leave me.  The idea that he might be near at that
moment was a poor narcotic.

The howling and baying of the mastiff was almost continuous.

When all else in Redmoat was still the dog's mournful note yet rose on
the night with something menacing in it.  I sat looking out across the
sloping turf to where the shrubbery showed as a black island in a green
sea.  The moon swam in a cloudless sky, and the air was warm and
fragrant with country scents.

It was in the shrubbery that Denby's collie had met his mysterious
death--that the thing seen by Miss Eltham had disappeared.  What
uncanny secret did it hold?

Caesar became silent.

As the stopping of a clock will sometimes awaken a sleeper, the abrupt
cessation of that distant howling, to which I had grown accustomed, now
recalled me from a world of gloomy imaginings.

I glanced at my watch in the moonlight.  It was twelve minutes past
midnight.

As I replaced it the dog suddenly burst out afresh, but now in a tone
of sheer anger.  He was alternately howling and snarling in a way that
sounded new to me.  The crashes, as he leapt to the end of his chain,
shook the building in which he was confined.  It was as I stood up to
lean from the window and commanded a view of the corner of the house
that he broke loose.

With a hoarse bay he took that decisive leap, and I heard his heavy
body fall against the wooden wall.  There followed a strange, guttural
cry . . . and the growling of the dog died away at the rear of the house.
He was out!  But that guttural note had not come from the throat of a
dog.  Of what was he in pursuit?

At which point his mysterious quarry entered the shrubbery I do not
know.  I only know that I saw absolutely nothing, until Caesar's lithe
shape was streaked across the lawn, and the great creature went
crashing into the undergrowth.

Then a faint sound above and to my right told me that I was not the
only spectator of the scene.  I leaned farther from the window.

"Is that you, Miss Eltham?" I asked.

"Oh, Dr. Petrie!" she said.  "I am so glad you are awake.  Can we do
nothing to help?  Caesar will be killed."

"Did you see what he went after?"

"No," she called back, and drew her breath sharply.

For a strange figure went racing across the grass.  It was that of a
man in a blue dressing-gown, who held a lantern high before him, and a
revolver in his right hand.  Coincident with my recognition of Mr.
Eltham he leaped, plunging into the shrubbery in the wake of the dog.

But the night held yet another surprise; for Nayland Smith's voice came:

"Come back!  Come back, Eltham!"

I ran out into the passage and downstairs.  The front door was open.  A
terrible conflict waged in the shrubbery, between the mastiff and
something else.  Passing round to the lawn, I met Smith fully dressed.
He just had dropped from a first-floor window.

"The man is mad!" he snapped.  "Heaven knows what lurks there!  He
should not have gone alone!"

Together we ran towards the dancing light of Eltham's lantern.  The
sounds of conflict ceased suddenly.  Stumbling over stumps and lashed
by low-sweeping branches, we struggled forward to where the clergyman
knelt amongst the bushes.  He glanced up with tears in his eyes, as was
revealed by the dim light.

"Look!" he cried.

The body of the dog lay at his feet.

It was pitiable to think that the fearless brute should have met his
death in such a fashion, and when I bent and examined him I was glad to
find traces of life.

"Drag him out.  He is not dead," I said.

"And hurry," rapped Smith, peering about him right and left.

So we three hurried from that haunted place, dragging the dog with us.
We were not molested.  No sound disturbed the now perfect stillness.

By the lawn edge we came upon Denby, half dressed; and almost
immediately Edwards the gardener also appeared.  The white faces of the
house servants showed at one window, and Miss Eltham called to me from
her room:

"Is he dead?"

"No," I replied; "only stunned."

We carried the dog round to the yard, and I examined his head.  It had
been struck by some heavy blunt instrument, but the skull was not
broken.  It is hard to kill a mastiff.

"Will you attend to him, Doctor?" asked Eltham.  "We must see that the
villain does not escape."

His face was grim and set.  This was a different man from the diffident
clergyman we knew:  this was "Parson Dan" again.

I accepted the care of the canine patient, and Eltham with the others
went off for more lights to search the shrubbery.  As I was washing a
bad wound between the mastiff's ears, Miss Eltham joined me.  It was
the sound of her voice, I think, rather than my more scientific
ministration, which recalled Caesar to life.  For, as she entered, his
tail wagged feebly, and a moment later he struggled to his feet--one of
which was injured.

Having provided for his immediate needs, I left him in charge of his
young mistress and joined the search party.  They had entered the
shrubbery from four points and drawn blank.

"There is absolutely nothing there, and no one can possibly have left
the grounds," said Eltham amazedly.

We stood on the lawn looking at one another, Nayland Smith, angry but
thoughtful, tugging at the lobe of his left ear, as was his habit in
moments of perplexity.



CHAPTER IX


WITH the first coming of light, Eltham, Smith and I tested the
electrical contrivances from every point.  They were in perfect order.
It became more and more incomprehensible how anyone could have entered
and quitted Redmoat during the night.  The barbed-wire fencing was
intact, and bore no signs of having been tampered with.

Smith and I undertook an exhaustive examination of the shrubbery.

At the spot where we had found the dog, some five paces to the west of
the copper beech, the grass and weeds were trampled and the surrounding
laurels and rhododendrons bore evidence of a struggle, but no human
footprint could be found.

"The ground is dry," said Smith.  "We cannot expect much."

"In my opinion," I said, "someone tried to get at Caesar; his presence
is dangerous.  And in his rage he broke loose."

"I think so, too," agreed Smith.  "But why did this person make for
here?  And how, having mastered the dog, get out of Redmoat?  I am open
to admit the possibility of someone's getting in during the day whilst
the gates are open, and hiding until dusk.  But how in the name of all
that's wonderful does he GET OUT?  He must possess the attributes of a
bird."

I thought of Greba Eltham's statements, reminding my friend of her
description of the thing which she had seen passing into this strangely
haunted shrubbery.

"That line of speculation soon takes us out of our depth, Petrie," he
said.  "Let us stick to what we can understand, and that may help us to
a clearer idea of what, at present, is incomprehensible.  My view of
the case to date stands thus:

"(1) Eltham, having rashly decided to return to the interior of China,
is warned by an official whose friendship he has won in some way to
stay in England.

"(2) I know this official for one of the Yellow group represented in
England by Dr. Fu-Manchu.

"(3) Several attempts, of which we know but little, to get at Eltham
are frustrated, presumably by his curious 'defenses.' An attempt in a
train fails owing to Miss Eltham's distaste for refreshment-room
coffee.  An attempt here fails owing to her insomnia.

"(4) During Eltham's absence from Redmoat certain preparations are made
for his return.  These lead to:

"(a) The death of Denby's collie;

"(b) The things heard and seen by Miss Eltham;

"(c) The things heard and seen by us all last night.

"So that the clearing up of my fourth point--id est, the discovery of
the nature of these preparations--becomes our immediate concern.  The
prime object of these preparations, Petrie, was to enable someone to
gain access to Eltham's room.  The other events are incidental.  The
dogs HAD to be got rid of, for instance; and there is no doubt that
Miss Eltham's wakefulness saved her father a second time."

"But from what?  For Heaven's sake, from what?"

Smith glanced about into the light-patched shadows.

"From a visit by someone--perhaps by Fu-Manchu himself," he said in a
hushed voice.  "The object of that visit I hope we may never learn; for
that would mean that it had been achieved."

"Smith," I said, "I do not altogether understand you; but do you think
he has some incredible creature hidden here somewhere?  It would be
like him."

"I begin to suspect the most formidable creature in the known world to
be hidden here.  I believe Fu-Manchu is somewhere inside Redmoat!"

Our conversation was interrupted at this point by Denby, who came to
report that he had examined the moat, the roadside, and the bank of the
stream, but found no footprints or clew of any kind.

"No one left the grounds of Redmoat last night, I think," he said.  And
his voice had awe in it.

That day dragged slowly on.  A party of us scoured the neighborhood for
traces of strangers, examining every foot of the Roman ruin hard by;
but vainly.

"May not your presence here induce Fu-Manchu to abandon his plans?" I
asked Smith.

"I think not," he replied.  "You see, unless we can prevail upon him,
Eltham sails in a fortnight.  So the Doctor has no time to waste.
Furthermore, I have an idea that his arrangements are of such a
character that they MUST go forward.  He might turn aside, of course,
to assassinate me, if opportunity arose!  But we know, from experience,
that he permits nothing to interfere with his schemes."

There are few states, I suppose, which exact so severe a toll from
one's nervous system as the ANTICIPATION of calamity.

All anticipation is keener, be it of joy or pain, than the reality
whereof it is a mental forecast; but that inactive waiting at Redmoat,
for the blow which we knew full well to be pending exceeded in its
nerve taxation, anything I hitherto had experienced.

I felt as one bound upon an Aztec altar, with the priest's obsidian
knife raised above my breast!

Secret and malign forces throbbed about us; forces against which we had
no armor.  Dreadful as it was, I count it a mercy that the climax was
reached so quickly.  And it came suddenly enough; for there in that
quiet Norfolk home we found ourselves at hand grips with one of the
mysterious horrors which characterized the operations of Dr. Fu-Manchu.
It was upon us before we realized it.  There is no incidental music to
the dramas of real life.

As we sat on the little terrace in the creeping twilight, I remember
thinking how the peace of the scene gave the lie to my fears that we
bordered upon tragic things.  Then Caesar, who had been a docile
patient all day, began howling again; and I saw Greba Eltham shudder.

I caught Smith's eye, and was about to propose our retirement indoors,
when the party was broken up in more turbulent fashion.  I suppose it
was the presence of the girl which prompted Denby to the rash act, a
desire personally to distinguish himself.  But, as I recalled
afterwards, his gaze had rarely left the shrubbery since dusk, save to
seek her face, and now he leaped wildly to his feet, overturning his
chair, and dashed across the grass to the trees.

"Did you see it?" he yelled.  "Did you see it?"

He evidently carried a revolver.  For from the edge of the shrubbery a
shot sounded, and in the flash we saw Denby with the weapon raised.

"Greba, go in and fasten the windows," cried Eltham.  "Mr. Smith, will
you enter the bushes from the west.  Dr. Petrie, east.  Edwards,
Edwards--" And he was off across the lawn with the nervous activity of
a cat.

As I made off in an opposite direction I heard the gardener's voice
from the lower gate, and I saw Eltham's plan.  It was to surround the
shrubbery.

Two more shots and two flashes from the dense heart of greenwood.  Then
a loud cry--I thought, from Denby--and a second, muffled one.

Following--silence, only broken by the howling of the mastiff.

I sprinted through the rose garden, leaped heedlessly over a bed of
geranium and heliotrope, and plunged in among the bushes and under the
elms.  Away on the left I heard Edwards shouting, and Eltham's
answering voice.

"Denby!" I cried, and yet louder:  "Denby!"

But the silence fell again.

Dusk was upon Redmoat now, but from sitting in the twilight my eyes had
grown accustomed to gloom, and I could see fairly well what lay before
me.  Not daring to think what might lurk above, below, around me, I
pressed on into the midst of the thicket.

"Vernon!" came Eltham's voice from one side.

"Bear more to the right, Edwards," I heard Nayland Smith cry directly
ahead of me.

With an eerie and indescribable sensation of impending disaster upon
me, I thrust my way through to a gray patch which marked a break in the
elmen roof.  At the foot of the copper beech I almost fell over Eltham.
Then Smith plunged into view.  Lastly, Edwards the gardener rounded a
big rhododendron and completed the party.

We stood quite still for a moment.

A faint breeze whispered through the beech leaves.

"Where is he?"

I cannot remember who put it into words; I was too dazed with amazement
to notice.  Then Eltham began shouting:

"Vernon!  Vernon!  VERNON!"

His voice pitched higher upon each repetition.  There was something
horrible about that vain calling, under the whispering beech, with
shrubs banked about us cloaking God alone could know what.

From the back of the house came Caesar's faint reply.

"Quick!  Lights!" rapped Smith.  "Every lamp you have!"

Off we went, dodging laurels and privets, and poured out on to the
lawn, a disordered company.  Eltham's face was deathly pale, and his
jaw set hard.  He met my eye.

"God forgive me!" he said.  "I could do murder to-night!"

He was a man composed of strange perplexities.

It seemed an age before the lights were found.  But at last we returned
to the bushes, really after a very brief delay; and ten minutes
sufficed us to explore the entire shrubbery, for it was not extensive.
We found his revolver, but there was no one there--nothing.

When we all stood again on the lawn, I thought that I had never seen
Smith so haggard.

"What in Heaven's name can we do?" he muttered.  "What does it mean?"

He expected no answer; for there was none to offer one.

"Search!  Everywhere," said Eltham hoarsely.

He ran off into the rose garden, and began beating about among the
flowers like a madman, muttering:  "Vernon!  Vernon!"  For close upon
an hour we all searched.  We searched every square yard, I think,
within the wire fencing, and found no trace.  Miss Eltham slipped out
in the confusion, and joined with the rest of us in that frantic hunt.
Some of the servants assisted too.

It was a group terrified and awestricken which came together again on
the terrace.  One and then another would give up, until only Eltham and
Smith were missing.  Then they came back together from examining the
steps to the lower gate.

Eltham dropped on to a rustic seat, and sank his head in his hands.

Nayland Smith paced up and down like a newly caged animal, snapping his
teeth together and tugging at his ear.

Possessed by some sudden idea, or pressed to action by his tumultuous
thoughts, he snatched up a lantern and strode silently off across the
grass and to the shrubbery once more.  I followed him.  I think his
idea was that he might surprise anyone who lurked there.  He surprised
himself, and all of us.

For right at the margin he tripped and fell flat.  I ran to him.

He had fallen over the body of Denby, which lay there!

Denby had not been there a few moments before, and how he came to be
there now we dared not conjecture.  Mr. Eltham joined us, uttered one
short, dry sob, and dropped upon his knees.  Then we were carrying
Denby back to the house, with the mastiff howling a marche funebre.

We laid him on the grass where it sloped down from the terrace.
Nayland Smith's haggard face was terrible.  But the stark horror of the
thing inspired him to that, which conceived earlier, had saved Denby.
Twisting suddenly to Eltham, he roared in a voice audible beyond the
river:

"Heavens!  we are fools!  LOOSE THE DOG!"

"But the dog--" I began.

Smith clapped his hand over my mouth.

"I know he's crippled," he whispered.  "But if anything human lurks
there, the dog will lead us to it.  If a MAN is there, he will fly!
Why did we not think of it before.  Fools, fools!"  He raised his voice
again.  "Keep him on leash, Edwards.  He will lead us."

The scheme succeeded.

Edwards barely had started on his errand when bells began ringing
inside the house.

"Wait!" snapped Eltham, and rushed indoors.

A moment later he was out again, his eyes gleaming madly.  "Above the
moat," he panted.  And we were off en masse round the edge of the trees.

It was dark above the moat; but not so dark as to prevent our seeing a
narrow ladder of thin bamboo joints and silken cord hanging by two
hooks from the top of the twelve-foot wire fence.  There was no sound.

"He's out!" screamed Eltham.  "Down the steps!"

We all ran our best and swiftest.  But Eltham outran us.  Like a fury
he tore at bolts and bars, and like a fury sprang out into the road.
Straight and white it showed to the acclivity by the Roman ruin.  But
no living thing moved upon it.  The distant baying of the dog was borne
to our ears.

"Curse it!  he's crippled," hissed Smith.  "Without him, as well pursue
a shadow!"


A few hours later the shrubbery yielded up its secret, a simple one
enough: A big cask sunk in a pit, with a laurel shrub cunningly affixed
to its movable lid, which was further disguised with tufts of grass.  A
slender bamboo-jointed rod lay near the fence.  It had a hook on the
top, and was evidently used for attaching the ladder.

"It was the end of this ladder which Miss Eltham saw," said Smith, "as
he trailed it behind him into the shrubbery when she interrupted him in
her father's room.  He and whomever he had with him doubtless slipped in
during the daytime--whilst Eltham was absent in London--bringing the
prepared cask and all necessary implements with them.  They concealed
themselves somewhere--probably in the shrubbery--and during the night
made the cache.  The excavated earth would be disposed of on the
flower-beds; the dummy bush they probably had ready.  You see, the
problem of getting IN was never a big one.  But owing to the 'defenses'
it was impossible (whilst Eltham was in residence at any rate) to get
OUT after dark.  For Fu-Manchu's purposes, then, a working-base INSIDE
Redmoat was essential.  His servant--for he needed assistance--must
have been in hiding somewhere outside; Heaven knows where!  During the
day they could come or go by the gates, as we have already noted."

"You think it was the Doctor himself?"

"It seems possible.  Who else has eyes like the eyes Miss Eltham saw
from the window last night?"

Then remains to tell the nature of the outrage whereby Fu-Manchu had
planned to prevent Eltham's leaving England for China.  This we learned
from Denby.  For Denby was not dead.

It was easy to divine that he had stumbled upon the fiendish visitor at
the very entrance to his burrow; had been stunned (judging from the
evidence, with a sand-bag), and dragged down into the cache--to which
he must have lain in such dangerous proximity as to render detection of
the dummy bush possible in removing him.  The quickest expedient, then,
had been to draw him beneath.  When the search of the shrubbery was
concluded, his body had been borne to the edge of the bushes and laid
where we found it.

Why his life had been spared, I cannot conjecture, but provision had
been made against his recovering consciousness and revealing the secret
of the shrubbery.  The ruse of releasing the mastiff alone had
terminated the visit of the unbidden guest within Redmoat.

Denby made a very slow recovery; and, even when convalescent,
consciously added not one fact to those we already had collated; his
memory had completely deserted him!

This, in my opinion, as in those of the several specialists consulted,
was due, not to the blow on the head, but to the presence, slightly
below and to the right of the first cervical curve of the spine, of a
minute puncture--undoubtedly caused by a hypodermic syringe.  Then,
unconsciously, poor Denby furnished the last link in the chain; for
undoubtedly, by means of this operation, Fu-Manchu had designed to
efface from Eltham's mind his plans of return to Ho-Nan.

The nature of the fluid which could produce such mental symptoms was a
mystery--a mystery which defied Western science: one of the many
strange secrets of Dr. Fu-Manchu.



CHAPTER X


SINCE Nayland Smith's return from Burma I had rarely taken up a paper
without coming upon evidences of that seething which had cast up Dr.
Fu-Manchu. Whether, hitherto, such items had escaped my attention or
had seemed to demand no particular notice, or whether they now became
increasingly numerous, I was unable to determine.

One evening, some little time after our sojourn in Norfolk, in glancing
through a number of papers which I had brought in with me, I chanced
upon no fewer than four items of news bearing more or less directly
upon the grim business which engaged my friend and I.

No white man, I honestly believe, appreciates the unemotional cruelty
of the Chinese.  Throughout the time that Dr. Fu-Manchu remained in
England, the press preserved a uniform silence upon the subject of his
existence.  This was due to Nayland Smith.  But, as a result, I feel
assured that my account of the Chinaman's deeds will, in many quarters,
meet with an incredulous reception.

I had been at work, earlier in the evening, upon the opening chapters
of this chronicle, and I had realized how difficult it would be for my
reader, amid secure and cozy surroundings, to credit any human being
with a callous villainy great enough to conceive and to put into
execution such a death pest as that directed against Sir Crichton Davey.

One would expect God's worst man to shrink from employing--against
however vile an enemy--such an instrument as the Zayat Kiss.  So
thinking, my eye was caught by the following:--


EXPRESS CORRESPONDENT

NEW YORK.

"Secret service men of the United States Government are searching the
South Sea Islands for a certain Hawaiian from the island of Maui, who,
it is believed, has been selling poisonous scorpions to Chinese in
Honolulu anxious to get rid of their children.

"Infanticide, by scorpion and otherwise, among the Chinese, has
increased so terribly that the authorities have started a searching
inquiry, which has led to the hunt for the scorpion dealer of Maui.

"Practically all the babies that die mysteriously are unwanted girls,
and in nearly every case the parents promptly ascribe the death to the
bite of a scorpion, and are ready to produce some more or less
poisonous insect in support of the statement.

"The authorities have no doubt that infanticide by scorpion bite is a
growing practice, and orders have been given to hunt down the scorpion
dealer at any cost."


Is it any matter for wonder that such a people had produced a
Fu-Manchu?  I pasted the cutting into a scrap-book, determined that, if
I lived to publish my account of those days, I would quote it therein
as casting a sidelight upon Chinese character.

A Reuter message to The Globe and a paragraph in The Star also
furnished work for my scissors.  Here were evidences of the deep-seated
unrest, the secret turmoil, which manifested itself so far from its
center as peaceful England in the person of the sinister Doctor.


"HONG KONG, Friday.

"Li Hon Hung, the Chinaman who fired at the Governor yesterday, was
charged before the magistrate with shooting at him with intent to kill,
which is equivalent to attempted murder.  The prisoner, who was not
defended, pleaded guilty.  The Assistant Crown Solicitor, who
prosecuted, asked for a remand until Monday, which was granted.

"Snapshots taken by the spectators of the outrage yesterday disclosed
the presence of an accomplice, also armed with a revolver.  It is
reported that this man, who was arrested last night, was in possession
of incriminating documentary evidence."


Later.

"Examination of the documents found on Li Hon Hung's accomplice has
disclosed the fact that both men were well financed by the Canton Triad
Society, the directors of which had enjoined the assassination of Sir
F. M. or Mr. C. S., the Colonial Secretary.  In a report prepared by
the accomplice for dispatch to Canton, also found on his person, he
expressed regret that the attempt had failed."--Reuter.

"It is officially reported in St. Petersburg that a force of Chinese
soldiers and villagers surrounded the house of a Russian subject named
Said Effendi, near Khotan, in Chinese Turkestan.

"They fired at the house and set it in flames.  There were in the house
about 100 Russians, many of whom were killed.

"The Russian Government has instructed its Minister at Peking to make
the most vigorous representations on the subject."--Reuter.


Finally, in a Personal Column, I found the following:--

"HO-NAN. Have abandoned visit.--ELTHAM."


I had just pasted it into my book when Nayland Smith came in and threw
himself into an arm-chair, facing me across the table.  I showed him
the cutting.

"I am glad, for Eltham's sake--and for the girl's," was his comment.
"But it marks another victory for Fu-Manchu!  Just Heaven!  Why is
retribution delayed!"

Smith's darkly tanned face had grown leaner than ever since he had
begun his fight with the most uncanny opponent, I suppose, against whom
a man ever had pitted himself. He stood up and began restlessly to pace
the room, furiously stuffing tobacco into his briar.

"I have seen Sir Lionel Barton," he said abruptly; "and, to put the
whole thing in a nutshell, he has laughed at me!  During the months
that I have been wondering where he had gone to he has been somewhere
in Egypt.  He certainly bears a charmed life, for on the evidence of
his letter to The Times he has seen things in Tibet which Fu-Manchu
would have the West blind to; in fact, I think he has found a new
keyhole to the gate of the Indian Empire!"

Long ago we had placed the name of Sir Lionel Barton upon the list of
those whose lives stood between Fu-Manchu and the attainment of his
end.  Orientalist and explorer, the fearless traveler who first had
penetrated to Lhassa, who thrice, as a pilgrim, had entered forbidden
Mecca, he now had turned his attention again to Tibet--thereby signing
his own death-warrant.

"That he has reached England alive is a hopeful sign?" I suggested.

Smith shook his head, and lighted the blackened briar.

"England at present is the web," he replied.  "The spider will be
waiting.  Petrie, I sometimes despair.  Sir Lionel is an impossible man
to shepherd.  You ought to see his house at Finchley.  A low, squat
place completely hemmed in by trees.  Damp as a swamp; smells like a
jungle.  Everything topsy-turvy. He only arrived to-day, and he is
working and eating (and sleeping I expect), in a study that looks like
an earthquake at Sotheby's auction-rooms. The rest of the house is half
a menagerie and half a circus.  He has a Bedouin groom, a Chinese
body-servant, and Heaven only knows what other strange people!"

"Chinese!"

"Yes, I saw him; a squinting Cantonese he calls Kwee.  I don't like
him.  Also, there is a secretary known as Strozza, who has an
unpleasant face.  He is a fine linguist, I understand, and is engaged
upon the Spanish notes for Barton's forthcoming book on the Mayapan
temples.  By the way, all Sir Lionel's baggage disappeared from the
landing-stage--including his Tibetan notes."

"Significant!"

"Of course.  But he argues that he has crossed Tibet from the Kuen-Lun
to the Himalayas without being assassinated, and therefore that it is
unlikely he will meet with that fate in London.  I left him dictating
the book from memory, at the rate of about two hundred words a minute."

"He is wasting no time."

"Wasting time!  In addition to the Yucatan book and the work on Tibet,
he has to read a paper at the Institute next week about some tomb he
has unearthed in Egypt.  As I came away, a van drove up from the docks
and a couple of fellows delivered a sarcophagus as big as a boat.  It
is unique, according to Sir Lionel, and will go to the British Museum
after he has examined it.  The man crams six months' work into six
weeks; then he is off again."

"What do you propose to do?"

"What CAN I do?  I know that Fu-Manchu will make an attempt upon him.
I cannot doubt it.  Ugh!  that house gave me the shudders.  No
sunlight, I'll swear, Petrie, can ever penetrate to the rooms, and when
I arrived this afternoon clouds of gnats floated like motes wherever a
stray beam filtered through the trees of the avenue.  There's a steamy
smell about the place that is almost malarious, and the whole of the
west front is covered with a sort of monkey-creeper, which he has
imported at some time or other.  It has a close, exotic perfume that is
quite in the picture.  I tell you, the place was made for murder."

"Have you taken any precautions?"

"I called at Scotland Yard and sent a man down to watch the house,
but--"

He shrugged his shoulders helplessly.

"What is Sir Lionel like?"

"A madman, Petrie.  A tall, massive man, wearing a dirty dressing-gown
of neutral color; a man with untidy gray hair and a bristling mustache,
keen blue eyes, and a brown skin; who wears a short beard or rarely
shaves--I don't know which.  I left him striding about among the
thousand and one curiosities of that incredible room, picking his way
through his antique furniture, works of reference, manuscripts,
mummies, spears, pottery and what not--sometimes kicking a book from
his course, or stumbling over a stuffed crocodile or a Mexican
mask--alternately dictating and conversing.  Phew!"

For some time we were silent.

"Smith" I said, "we are making no headway in this business.  With all
the forces arrayed against him, Fu-Manchu still eludes us, still
pursues his devilish, inscrutable way."

Nayland Smith nodded.

"And we don't know all," he said.  "We mark such and such a man as one
alive to the Yellow Peril, and we warn him--if we have time.  Perhaps
he escapes; perhaps he does not.  But what do we know, Petrie, of those
others who may die every week by his murderous agency?  We cannot know
EVERYONE who has read the riddle of China.  I never see a report of
someone found drowned, of an apparent suicide, of a sudden, though
seemingly natural death, without wondering.  I tell you, Fu-Manchu is
omnipresent; his tentacles embrace everything.  I said that Sir Lionel
must bear a charmed life.  The fact that WE are alive is a miracle."

He glanced at his watch.

"Nearly eleven," he said.  "But sleep seems a waste of time--apart from
its dangers."

We heard a bell ring.  A few moments later followed a knock at the room
door.

"Come in!" I cried.

A girl entered with a telegram addressed to Smith.  His jaw looked very
square in the lamplight, and his eyes shone like steel as he took it
from her and opened the envelope.  He glanced at the form, stood up and
passed it to me, reaching for his hat, which lay upon my writing-table.

"God help us, Petrie!" he said.

This was the message:


"Sir Lionel Barton murdered.  Meet me at his house at once.--WEYMOUTH,
INSPECTOR."



CHAPTER XI


ALTHOUGH we avoided all unnecessary delay, it was close upon midnight
when our cab swung round into a darkly shadowed avenue, at the farther
end of which, as seen through a tunnel, the moonlight glittered upon
the windows of Rowan House, Sir Lionel Barton's home.

Stepping out before the porch of the long, squat building, I saw that
it was banked in, as Smith had said, by trees and shrubs.  The facade
showed mantled in the strange exotic creeper which he had mentioned,
and the air was pungent with an odor of decaying vegetation, with which
mingled the heavy perfume of the little nocturnal red flowers which
bloomed luxuriantly upon the creeper.

The place looked a veritable wilderness, and when we were admitted to
the hall by Inspector Weymouth I saw that the interior was in keeping
with the exterior, for the hall was constructed from the model of some
apartment in an Assyrian temple, and the squat columns, the low seats,
the hangings, all were eloquent of neglect, being thickly dust-coated.
The musty smell, too, was almost as pronounced here as outside, beneath
the trees.

To a library, whose contents overflowed in many literary torrents upon
the floor, the detective conducted us.

"Good heavens!" I cried, "what's that?"

Something leaped from the top of the bookcase, ambled silently across
the littered carpet, and passed from the library like a golden streak.
I stood looking after it with startled eyes.  Inspector Weymouth
laughed dryly.

"It's a young puma, or a civet-cat, or something, Doctor," he said.
"This house is full of surprises--and mysteries."

His voice was not quite steady, I thought, and he carefully closed the
door ere proceeding further.

"Where is he?" asked Nayland Smith harshly.  "How was it done?"

Weymouth sat down and lighted a cigar which I offered him.

"I thought you would like to hear what led up to it--so far as we
know--before seeing him?"

Smith nodded.

"Well," continued the Inspector, "the man you arranged to send down
from the Yard got here all right and took up a post in the road
outside, where he could command a good view of the gates.  He saw and
heard nothing, until going on for half-past ten, when a young lady
turned up and went in."

"A young lady?"

"Miss Edmonds, Sir Lionel's shorthand typist.  She had found, after
getting home, that her bag, with her purse in, was missing, and she
came back to see if she had left it here.  She gave the alarm.  My man
heard the row from the road and came in.  Then he ran out and rang us
up.  I immediately wired for you."

"He heard the row, you say.  What row?"

"Miss Edmonds went into violent hysterics!"

Smith was pacing the room now in tense excitement.

"Describe what he saw when he came in."

"He saw a negro footman--there isn't an Englishman in the house--trying
to pacify the girl out in the hall yonder, and a Malay and another
colored man beating their foreheads and howling.  There was no sense to
be got out of any of them, so he started to investigate for himself.
He had taken the bearings of the place earlier in the evening, and from
the light in a window on the ground floor had located the study; so he
set out to look for the door.  When he found it, it was locked from the
inside."

"Well?"

"He went out and round to the window.  There's no blind, and from the
shrubbery you can see into the lumber-room known as the study.  He
looked in, as apparently Miss Edmonds had done before him.  What he saw
accounted for her hysterics."

Both Smith and I were hanging upon his words.

"All amongst the rubbish on the floor a big Egyptian mummy case was
lying on its side, and face downwards, with his arms thrown across it,
lay Sir Lionel Barton."

"My God!  Yes.  Go on."

"There was only a shaded reading-lamp alight, and it stood on a chair,
shining right down on him; it made a patch of light on the floor, you
understand."  The Inspector indicated its extent with his hands.
"Well, as the man smashed the glass and got the window open, and was
just climbing in, he saw something else, so he says."

He paused.

"What did he see?" demanded Smith shortly.

"A sort of GREEN MIST, sir.  He says it seemed to be alive.  It moved
over the floor, about a foot from the ground, going away from him and
towards a curtain at the other end of the study."

Nayland Smith fixed his eyes upon the speaker.

"Where did he first see this green mist?"

"He says, Mr. Smith, that he thinks it came from the mummy case."

"Yes; go on."

"It is to his credit that he climbed into the room after seeing a thing
like that.  He did.  He turned the body over, and Sir Lionel looked
horrible.  He was quite dead.  Then Croxted--that's the man's
name--went over to this curtain.  There was a glass door--shut.  He
opened it, and it gave on a conservatory--a place stacked from the
tiled floor to the glass roof with more rubbish.  It was dark inside,
but enough light came from the study--it's really a drawing-room, by
the way--as he'd turned all the lamps on, to give him another glimpse
of this green, crawling mist.  There are three steps to go down.  On
the steps lay a dead Chinaman."

"A dead Chinaman!"

"A dead CHINAMAN."

"Doctor seen them?" rapped Smith.

"Yes; a local man.  He was out of his depth, I could see.  Contradicted
himself three times.  But there's no need for another opinion--until we
get the coroner's."

"And Croxted?"

"Croxted was taken ill, Mr. Smith, and had to be sent home in a cab."

"What ails him?"

Detective-Inspector Weymouth raised his eyebrows and carefully knocked
the ash from his cigar.

"He held out until I came, gave me the story, and then fainted right
away.  He said that something in the conservatory seemed to get him by
the throat."

"Did he mean that literally?"

"I couldn't say.  We had to send the girl home, too, of course."

Nayland Smith was pulling thoughtfully at the lobe of his left ear.

"Got any theory?" he jerked.

Weymouth shrugged his shoulders.

"Not one that includes the green mist," he said.  "Shall we go in now?"

We crossed the Assyrian hall, where the members of that strange
household were gathered in a panic-stricken group.  They numbered four.
Two of them were negroes, and two Easterns of some kind.  I missed the
Chinaman, Kwee, of whom Smith had spoken, and the Italian secretary;
and from the way in which my friend peered about the shadows of the
hall I divined that he, too, wondered at their absence.  We entered Sir
Lionel's study--an apartment which I despair of describing.

Nayland Smith's words, "an earthquake at Sotheby's auction-rooms,"
leaped to my mind at once; for the place was simply stacked with
curious litter--loot of Africa, Mexico and Persia.  In a clearing by
the hearth a gas stove stood upon a packing-case, and about it lay a
number of utensils for camp cookery.  The odor of rotting vegetation,
mingled with the insistent perfume of the strange night-blooming
flowers, was borne in through the open window.

In the center of the floor, beside an overturned sarcophagus, lay a
figure in a neutral-colored dressing-gown, face downwards, and arms
thrust forward and over the side of the ancient Egyptian mummy case.

My friend advanced and knelt beside the dead man.

"Good God!"

Smith sprang upright and turned with an extraordinary expression to
Inspector Weymouth.

"You do not know Sir Lionel Barton by sight?" he rapped.

"No," began Weymouth, "but--"

"This is not Sir Lionel.  This is Strozza, the secretary."

"What!" shouted Weymouth.

"Where is the other--the Chinaman--quick!" cried Smith.

"I have had him left where he was found--on the conservatory steps,"
said the Inspector.

Smith ran across the room to where, beyond the open door, a glimpse
might be obtained of stacked-up curiosities.  Holding back the curtain
to allow more light to penetrate, he bent forward over a crumpled-up
figure which lay upon the steps below.

"It is!" he cried aloud.  "It is Sir Lionel's servant, Kwee."

Weymouth and I looked at one another across the body of the Italian;
then our eyes turned together to where my friend, grim-faced, stood
over the dead Chinaman.  A breeze whispered through the leaves; a great
wave of exotic perfume swept from the open window towards the curtained
doorway.

It was a breath of the East--that stretched out a yellow hand to the
West.  It was symbolic of the subtle, intangible power manifested in
Dr. Fu-Manchu, as Nayland Smith--lean, agile, bronzed with the suns of
Burma, was symbolic of the clean British efficiency which sought to
combat the insidious enemy.

"One thing is evident," said Smith:  "no one in the house, Strozza
excepted, knew that Sir Lionel was absent."

"How do you arrive at that?" asked Weymouth.

"The servants, in the hall, are bewailing him as dead.  If they had
seen him go out they would know that it must be someone else who lies
here."

"What about the Chinaman?"

"Since there is no other means of entrance to the conservatory save
through the study, Kwee must have hidden himself there at some time
when his master was absent from the room."

"Croxted found the communicating door closed.  What killed the
Chinaman?"

"Both Miss Edmonds and Croxted found the study door locked from the
inside.  What killed Strozza?" retorted Smith.

"You will have noted," continued the Inspector, "that the secretary is
wearing Sir Lionel's dressing-gown. It was seeing him in that, as she
looked in at the window, which led Miss Edmonds to mistake him for her
employer--and consequently to put us on the wrong scent."

"He wore it in order that anybody looking in at the window would be
sure to make that mistake," rapped Smith.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because he came here for a felonious purpose.  See."  Smith stooped
and took up several tools from the litter on the floor.  "There lies
the lid.  He came to open the sarcophagus.  It contained the mummy of
some notable person who flourished under Meneptah II; and Sir Lionel
told me that a number of valuable ornaments and jewels probably were
secreted amongst the wrappings.  He proposed to open the thing and to
submit the entire contents to examination to-night. He evidently
changed his mind--fortunately for himself."

I ran my fingers through my hair in perplexity.

"Then what has become of the mummy?"

Nayland Smith laughed dryly.

"It has vanished in the form of a green vapor apparently," he said.
"Look at Strozza's face."

He turned the body over, and, used as I was to such spectacles, the
contorted features of the Italian filled me with horror, so--suggestive
were they of a death more than ordinarily violent.  I pulled aside the
dressing-gown and searched the body for marks, but failed to find any.
Nayland Smith crossed the room, and, assisted by the detective, carried
Kwee, the Chinaman, into the study and laid him fully in the light.
His puckered yellow face presented a sight even more awful than the
other, and his blue lips were drawn back, exposing both upper and lower
teeth.  There were no marks of violence, but his limbs, like Strozza's,
had been tortured during his mortal struggles into unnatural postures.

The breeze was growing higher, and pungent odor-waves from the damp
shrubbery, bearing, too, the oppressive sweetness of the creeping
plant, swept constantly through the open window.  Inspector Weymouth
carefully relighted his cigar.

"I'm with you this far, Mr. Smith," he said.  "Strozza, knowing Sir
Lionel to be absent, locked himself in here to rifle the mummy case,
for Croxted, entering by way of the window, found the key on the
inside.  Strozza didn't know that the Chinaman was hidden in the
conservatory--"

"And Kwee did not dare to show himself, because he too was there for
some mysterious reason of his own," interrupted Smith.

"Having got the lid off, something,--somebody--"

"Suppose we say the mummy?"

Weymouth laughed uneasily.

"Well, sir, something that vanished from a locked room without opening
the door or the window killed Strozza."

"And something which, having killed Strozza, next killed the Chinaman,
apparently without troubling to open the door behind which he lay
concealed," Smith continued.  "For once in a way, Inspector, Dr.
Fu-Manchu has employed an ally which even his giant will was incapable
entirely to subjugate.  What blind force--what terrific agent of
death--had he confined in that sarcophagus!"

"You think this is the work of Fu-Manchu?" I said.  "If you are
correct, his power indeed is more than human."

Something in my voice, I suppose, brought Smith right about.  He
surveyed me curiously.

"Can you doubt it?  The presence of a concealed Chinaman surely is
sufficient.  Kwee, I feel assured, was one of the murder group, though
probably he had only recently entered that mysterious service.  He is
unarmed, or I should feel disposed to think that his part was to
assassinate Sir Lionel whilst, unsuspecting the presence of a hidden
enemy, he was at work here.  Strozza's opening the sarcophagus clearly
spoiled the scheme."

"And led to the death--"

"Of a servant of Fu-Manchu. Yes.  I am at a loss to account for that."

"Do you think that the sarcophagus entered into the scheme, Smith?"

My friend looked at me in evident perplexity.

"You mean that its arrival at the time when a creature of the
Doctor--Kwee--was concealed here, may have been a coincidence?"

I nodded; and Smith bent over the sarcophagus, curiously examining the
garish paintings with which it was decorated inside and out.  It lay
sideways upon the floor, and seizing it by its edge, he turned it over.

"Heavy," he muttered; "but Strozza must have capsized it as he fell.
He would not have laid it on its side to remove the lid.  Hallo!"

He bent farther forward, catching at a piece of twine, and out of the
mummy case pulled a rubber stopper or "cork."

"This was stuck in a hole level with the floor of the thing," he said.
"Ugh!  it has a disgusting smell."

I took it from his hands, and was about to examine it, when a loud
voice sounded outside in the hall.  The door was thrown open, and a big
man, who, despite the warmth of the weather, wore a fur-lined overcoat,
rushed impetuously into the room.

"Sir Lionel!" cried Smith eagerly.  "I warned you!  And see, you have
had a very narrow escape."

Sir Lionel Barton glanced at what lay upon the floor, then from Smith
to myself, and from me to Inspector Weymouth.  He dropped into one of
the few chairs unstacked with books.

"Mr. Smith," he said, with emotion, "what does this mean?  Tell
me--quickly."

In brief terms Smith detailed the happenings of the night--or so much
as he knew of them.  Sir Lionel Barton listened, sitting quite still
the while--an unusual repose in a man of such evidently tremendous
nervous activity.

"He came for the jewels," he said slowly, when Smith was finished; and
his eyes turned to the body of the dead Italian.  "I was wrong to
submit him to the temptation.  God knows what Kwee was doing in hiding.
Perhaps he had come to murder me, as you surmise, Mr. Smith, though I
find it hard to believe.  But--I don't think this is the handiwork of
your Chinese doctor." He fixed his gaze upon the sarcophagus.

Smith stared at him in surprise.  "What do you mean, Sir Lionel?"

The famous traveler continued to look towards the sarcophagus with
something in his blue eyes that might have been dread.

"I received a wire from Professor Rembold to-night," he continued.
"You were correct in supposing that no one but Strozza knew of my
absence.  I dressed hurriedly and met the professor at the Traveler's.
He knew that I was to read a paper next week upon"--again he looked
toward the mummy case--"the tomb of Mekara; and he knew that the
sarcophagus had been brought, untouched, to England.  He begged me not
to open it."

Nayland Smith was studying the speaker's face.

"What reason did he give for so extraordinary a request?" he asked.

Sir Lionel Barton hesitated.

"One," he replied at last, "which amused me--at the time.  I must
inform you that Mekara--whose tomb my agent had discovered during my
absence in Tibet, and to enter which I broke my return journey to
Alexandria--was a high priest and first prophet of Amen--under the
Pharaoh of the Exodus; in short, one of the magicians who contested in
magic arts with Moses.  I thought the discovery unique, until Professor
Rembold furnished me with some curious particulars respecting the death
of M. Page le Roi, the French Egyptologist--particulars new to me."

We listened in growing surprise, scarcely knowing to what this tended.

"M. le Roi," continued Barton, "discovered, but kept secret, the tomb
of Amenti--another of this particular brotherhood.  It appears that he
opened the mummy case on the spot--these priests were of royal line,
and are buried in the valley of Biban-le-Moluk. His Fellah and Arab
servants deserted him for some reason--on seeing the mummy case--and he
was found dead, apparently strangled, beside it.  The matter was hushed
up by the Egyptian Government.  Rembold could not explain why.  But he
begged of me not to open the sarcophagus of Mekara."

A silence fell.

The strange facts regarding the sudden death of Page le Roi, which I
now heard for the first time, had impressed me unpleasantly, coming
from a man of Sir Lionel Barton's experience and reputation.

"How long had it lain in the docks?" jerked Smith.

"For two days, I believe.  I am not a superstitious man, Mr. Smith, but
neither is Professor Rembold, and now that I know the facts respecting
Page le Roi, I can find it in my heart to thank God that I did not
see . . . whatever came out of that sarcophagus."

Nayland Smith stared him hard in the face.  "I am glad you did not, Sir
Lionel," he said; "for whatever the priest Mekara has to do with the
matter, by means of his sarcophagus, Dr. Fu-Manchu has made his first
attempt upon your life.  He has failed, but I hope you will accompany
me from here to a hotel.  He will not fail twice."



CHAPTER XII


IT was the night following that of the double tragedy at Rowan House.
Nayland Smith, with Inspector Weymouth, was engaged in some mysterious
inquiry at the docks, and I had remained at home to resume my strange
chronicle.  And--why should I not confess it?--my memories had
frightened me.

I was arranging my notes respecting the case of Sir Lionel Barton.
They were hopelessly incomplete.  For instance, I had jotted down the
following queries:--(1) Did any true parallel exist between the death
of M. Page le Roi and the death of Kwee, the Chinaman, and of Strozza?
(2) What had become of the mummy of Mekara?  (3) How had the murderer
escaped from a locked room?  (4) What was the purpose of the rubber
stopper?  (5) Why was Kwee hiding in the conservatory?  (6) Was the
green mist a mere subjective hallucination--a figment of Croxted's
imagination--or had he actually seen it?

Until these questions were satisfactorily answered, further progress
was impossible.  Nayland Smith frankly admitted that he was out of his
depth.  "It looks, on the face of it, more like a case for the
Psychical Research people than for a plain Civil Servant, lately of
Mandalay," he had said only that morning.

"Sir Lionel Barton really believes that supernatural agencies were
brought into operation by the opening of the high priest's coffin.  For
my part, even if I believed the same, I should still maintain that Dr.
Fu-Manchu controlled those manifestations.  But reason it out for
yourself and see if we arrive at any common center.  Don't work so much
upon the datum of the green mist, but keep to the FACTS which are
established."

I commenced to knock out my pipe in the ash-tray; then paused, pipe in
hand.  The house was quite still, for my landlady and all the small
household were out.

Above the noise of the passing tramcar I thought I had heard the hall
door open.  In the ensuing silence I sat and listened.

Not a sound.  Stay!  I slipped my hand into the table drawer, took out
my revolver, and stood up.

There WAS a sound.  Someone or something was creeping upstairs in the
dark!

Familiar with the ghastly media employed by the Chinaman, I was seized
with an impulse to leap to the door, shut and lock it.  But the
rustling sound proceeded, now, from immediately outside my partially
opened door.  I had not the time to close it; knowing somewhat of the
horrors at the command of Fu-Manchu, I had not the courage to open it.
My heart leaping wildly, and my eyes upon that bar of darkness with its
gruesome potentialities, I waited--waited for whatever was to come.
Perhaps twelve seconds passed in silence.

"Who's there?" I cried.  "Answer, or I fire!"

"Ah!  no," came a soft voice, thrillingly musical.  "Put it down--that
pistol.  Quick!  I must speak to you."

The door was pushed open, and there entered a slim figure wrapped in a
hooded cloak.  My hand fell, and I stood, stricken to silence, looking
into the beautiful dark eyes of Dr. Fu-Manchu's messenger--if her own
statement could be credited, slave.  On two occasions this girl, whose
association with the Doctor was one of the most profound mysteries of
the case, had risked--I cannot say what; unnameable punishment,
perhaps--to save me from death; in both cases from a terrible death.
For what was she come now?

Her lips slightly parted, she stood, holding her cloak about her, and
watching me with great passionate eyes.

"How--" I began.

But she shook her head impatiently.

"HE has a duplicate key of the house door," was her amazing statement.
"I have never betrayed a secret of my master before, but you must
arrange to replace the lock."

She came forward and rested her slim hands confidingly upon my
shoulders.  "I have come again to ask you to take me away from him,"
she said simply.

And she lifted her face to me.

Her words struck a chord in my heart which sang with strange music,
with music so barbaric that, frankly, I blushed to find it harmony.
Have I said that she was beautiful?  It can convey no faint conception
of her.  With her pure, fair skin, eyes like the velvet darkness of the
East, and red lips so tremulously near to mine, she was the most
seductively lovely creature I ever had looked upon.  In that electric
moment my heart went out in sympathy to every man who had bartered
honor, country, all for a woman's kiss.

"I will see that you are placed under proper protection," I said
firmly, but my voice was not quite my own.  "It is quite absurd to talk
of slavery here in England.  You are a free agent, or you could not be
here now.  Dr. Fu-Manchu cannot control your actions."

"Ah!" she cried, casting back her head scornfully, and releasing a
cloud of hair, through whose softness gleamed a jeweled head-dress.
"No?  He cannot?  Do you know what it means to have been a slave?
Here, in your free England, do you know what it means--the razzia, the
desert journey, the whips of the drivers, the house of the dealer, the
shame.  Bah!"

How beautiful she was in her indignation!

"Slavery is put down, you imagine, perhaps?  You do not believe that
to-day--TO-DAY--twenty-five English sovereigns will buy a Galla girl,
who is brown, and"--whisper--"two hundred and fifty a Circassian, who
is white.  No, there is no slavery!  So!  Then what am I?"

She threw open her cloak, and it is a literal fact that I rubbed my
eyes, half believing that I dreamed.  For beneath, she was arrayed in
gossamer silk which more than indicated the perfect lines of her slim
shape; wore a jeweled girdle and barbaric ornaments; was a figure fit
for the walled gardens of Stamboul--a figure amazing, incomprehensible,
in the prosaic setting of my rooms.

"To-night I had no time to make myself an English miss," she said,
wrapping her cloak quickly about her.  "You see me as I am."  Her
garments exhaled a faint perfume, and it reminded me of another meeting
I had had with her.  I looked into the challenging eyes.

"Your request is but a pretense," I said.  "Why do you keep the secrets
of that man, when they mean death to so many?"

"Death!  I have seen my own sister die of fever in the desert--seen her
thrown like carrion into a hole in the sand.  I have seen men flogged
until they prayed for death as a boon.  I have known the lash myself.
Death!  What does it matter?"

She shocked me inexpressibly.  Enveloped in her cloak again, and with
only her slight accent to betray her, it was dreadful to hear such
words from a girl who, save for her singular type of beauty, might have
been a cultured European.

"Prove, then, that you really wish to leave this man's service.  Tell
me what killed Strozza and the Chinaman," I said.

She shrugged her shoulders.

"I do not know that.  But if you will carry me off"--she clutched me
nervously--"so that I am helpless, lock me up so that I cannot escape,
beat me, if you like, I will tell you all I do know.  While he is my
master I will never betray him.  Tear me from him--by force, do you
understand, BY FORCE, and my lips will be sealed no longer.  Ah!  but
you do not understand, with your 'proper authorities'--your police.
Police!  Ah, I have said enough."

A clock across the common began to strike.  The girl started and laid
her hands upon my shoulders again.  There were tears glittering among
the curved black lashes.

"You do not understand," she whispered.  "Oh, will you never understand
and release me from him!  I must go.  Already I have remained too long.
Listen.  Go out without delay.  Remain out--at a hotel, where you will,
but do not stay here."

"And Nayland Smith?"

"What is he to me, this Nayland Smith?  Ah, why will you not unseal my
lips?  You are in danger--you hear me, in danger!  Go away from here
to-night."

She dropped her hands and ran from the room.  In the open doorway she
turned, stamping her foot passionately.

"You have hands and arms," she cried, "and yet you let me go.  Be
warned, then; fly from here--" She broke off with something that
sounded like a sob.

I made no move to stay her--this beautiful accomplice of the
arch-murderer, Fu-Manchu. I heard her light footsteps pattering down
the stairs, I heard her open and close the door--the door of which Dr.
Fu-Manchu held the key.  Still I stood where she had parted from me,
and was so standing when a key grated in the lock and Nayland Smith
came running up.

"Did you see her?" I began.

But his face showed that he had not done so, and rapidly I told him of
my strange visitor, of her words, of her warning.

"How can she have passed through London in that costume?" I cried in
bewilderment.  "Where can she have come from?"

Smith shrugged his shoulders and began to stuff broad-cut mixture into
the familiar cracked briar.

"She might have traveled in a car or in a cab," he said; "and
undoubtedly she came direct from the house of Dr. Fu-Manchu.  You
should have detained her, Petrie.  It is the third time we have had
that woman in our power, the third time we have let her go free."

"Smith," I replied, "I couldn't. She came of her own free will to give
me a warning.  She disarms me."

"Because you can see she is in love with you?" he suggested, and burst
into one of his rare laughs when the angry flush rose to my cheek.
"She is, Petrie why pretend to be blind to it?  You don't know the
Oriental mind as I do; but I quite understand the girl's position.  She
fears the English authorities, but would submit to capture by you!  If
you would only seize her by the hair, drag her to some cellar, hurl her
down and stand over her with a whip, she would tell you everything she
knows, and salve her strange Eastern conscience with the reflection
that speech was forced from her.  I am not joking; it is so, I assure
you.  And she would adore you for your savagery, deeming you forceful
and strong!"

"Smith," I said, "be serious.  You know what her warning meant before."

"I can guess what it means now," he rapped.  "Hallo!"

Someone was furiously ringing the bell.

"No one at home?" said my friend.  "I will go.  I think I know what it
is."

A few minutes later he returned, carrying a large square package.

"From Weymouth," he explained, "by district messenger.  I left him
behind at the docks, and he arranged to forward any evidence which
subsequently he found.  This will be fragments of the mummy."

"What!  You think the mummy was abstracted?"

"Yes, at the docks.  I am sure of it; and somebody else was in the
sarcophagus when it reached Rowan House.  A sarcophagus, I find, is
practically airtight, so that the use of the rubber stopper becomes
evident--ventilation.  How this person killed Strozza I have yet to
learn."

"Also, how he escaped from a locked room.  And what about the green
mist?"

Nayland Smith spread his hands in a characteristic gesture.

"The green mist, Petrie, can be explained in several ways.  Remember,
we have only one man's word that it existed.  It is at best a confusing
datum to which we must not attach a factitious importance."

He threw the wrappings on the floor and tugged at a twine loop in the
lid of the square box, which now stood upon the table.  Suddenly the
lid came away, bringing with it a lead lining, such as is usual in
tea-chests. This lining was partially attached to one side of the box,
so that the action of removing the lid at once raised and tilted it.

Then happened a singular thing.

Out over the table billowed a sort of yellowish-green cloud--an oily
vapor--and an inspiration, it was nothing less, born of a memory and of
some words of my beautiful visitor, came to me.

"RUN, SMITH!" I screamed.  "The door! the door, for your life!
Fu-Manchu sent that box!"  I threw my arms round him.  As he bent
forward the moving vapor rose almost to his nostrils.  I dragged him
back and all but pitched him out on to the landing.  We entered my
bedroom, and there, as I turned on the light, I saw that Smith's tanned
face was unusually drawn, and touched with pallor.

"It is a poisonous gas!" I said hoarsely; "in many respects identical
with chlorine, but having unique properties which prove it to be
something else--God and Fu-Manchu, alone know what!  It is the fumes of
chlorine that kill the men in the bleaching powder works.  We have been
blind--I particularly.  Don't you see?  There was no one in the
sarcophagus, Smith, but there was enough of that fearful stuff to have
suffocated a regiment!"

Smith clenched his fists convulsively.

"My God!" he said, "how can I hope to deal with the author of such a
scheme?  I see the whole plan.  He did not reckon on the mummy case
being overturned, and Kwee's part was to remove the plug with the aid
of the string--after Sir Lionel had been suffocated.  The gas, I take
it, is heavier than air."

"Chlorine gas has a specific gravity of 2.470," I said; "two and a half
times heavier than air.  You can pour it from jar to jar like a
liquid--if you are wearing a chemist's mask.  In these respects this
stuff appears to be similar; the points of difference would not
interest you.  The sarcophagus would have emptied through the vent, and
the gas have dispersed, with no clew remaining--except the smell."

"I did smell it, Petrie, on the stopper, but, of course, was unfamiliar
with it.  You may remember that you were prevented from doing so by the
arrival of Sir Lionel?  The scent of those infernal flowers must
partially have drowned it, too.  Poor, misguided Strozza inhaled the
stuff, capsized the case in his fall, and all the gas--"

"Went pouring under the conservatory door, and down the steps, where
Kwee was crouching.  Croxted's breaking the window created sufficient
draught to disperse what little remained.  It will have settled on the
floor now.  I will go and open both windows."

Nayland raised his haggard face.

"He evidently made more than was necessary to dispatch Sir Lionel
Barton," he said; "and contemptuously--you note the attitude,
Petrie?--contemptuously devoted the surplus to me.  His contempt is
justified.  I am a child striving to cope with a mental giant.  It is
by no wit of mine that Dr. Fu-Manchu scores a double failure."



CHAPTER XIII


I WILL tell you, now of a strange dream which I dreamed, and of the
stranger things to which I awakened.  Since, out of a blank--a
void--this vision burst in upon my mind, I cannot do better than relate
it, without preamble.  It was thus:

I dreamed that I lay writhing on the floor in agony indescribable.  My
veins were filled with liquid fire, and but that stygian darkness was
about me, I told myself that I must have seen the smoke arising from my
burning body.

This, I thought, was death.

Then, a cooling shower descended upon me, soaked through skin and
tissue to the tortured arteries and quenched the fire within.  Panting,
but free from pain, I lay--exhausted.

Strength gradually returning to me, I tried to rise; but the carpet
felt so singularly soft that it offered me no foothold.  I waded and
plunged like a swimmer treading water; and all about me rose
impenetrable walls of darkness, darkness all but palpable.  I wondered
why I could not see the windows.  The horrible idea flashed to my mind
that I was become blind!

Somehow I got upon my feet, and stood swaying dizzily.  I became aware
of a heavy perfume, and knew it for some kind of incense.

Then--a dim light was born, at an immeasurable distance away.  It grew
steadily in brilliance.  It spread like a bluish-red stain--like a
liquid.  It lapped up the darkness and spread throughout the room.

But this was not my room!  Nor was it any room known to me.

It was an apartment of such size that its dimensions filled me with a
kind of awe such as I never had known:  the awe of walled vastness.
Its immense extent produced a sensation of sound.  Its hugeness had a
distinct NOTE.

Tapestries covered the four walls.  There was no door visible.  These
tapestries were magnificently figured with golden dragons; and as the
serpentine bodies gleamed and shimmered in the increasing radiance,
each dragon, I thought, intertwined its glittering coils more closely
with those of another.  The carpet was of such richness that I stood
knee-deep in its pile.  And this, too, was fashioned all over with
golden dragons; and they seemed to glide about amid the shadows of the
design--stealthily.

At the farther end of the hall--for hall it was--a huge table with
dragons' legs stood solitary amid the luxuriance of the carpet.  It
bore scintillating globes, and tubes that held living organisms, and
books of a size and in such bindings as I never had imagined, with
instruments of a type unknown to Western science--a heterogeneous
litter quite indescribable, which overflowed on to the floor, forming
an amazing oasis in a dragon-haunted desert of carpet.  A lamp hung
above this table, suspended by golden chains from the ceiling--which
was so lofty that, following the chains upward, my gaze lost itself in
the purple shadows above.

In a chair piled high with dragon-covered cushions a man sat behind
this table.  The light from the swinging lamp fell fully upon one side
of his face, as he leaned forward amid the jumble of weird objects, and
left the other side in purplish shadow.  From a plain brass bowl upon
the corner of the huge table smoke writhed aloft and at times partially
obscured that dreadful face.

From the instant that my eyes were drawn to the table and to the man
who sat there, neither the incredible extent of the room, nor the
nightmare fashion of its mural decorations, could reclaim my attention.
I had eyes only for him.

For it was Dr. Fu-Manchu!

Something of the delirium which had seemed to fill my veins with fire,
to people the walls with dragons, and to plunge me knee-deep in the
carpet, left me.  Those dreadful, filmed green eyes acted somewhat like
a cold douche.  I knew, without removing my gaze from the still face,
that the walls no longer lived, but were merely draped in exquisite
Chinese dragon tapestry.  The rich carpet beneath my feet ceased to be
as a jungle and became a normal carpet--extraordinarily rich, but
merely a carpet.  But the sense of vastness nevertheless remained, with
the uncomfortable knowledge that the things upon the table and
overflowing about it were all, or nearly all, of a fashion strange to
me.

Then, and almost instantaneously, the comparative sanity which I had
temporarily experienced began to slip from me again; for the smoke
faintly penciled through the air--from the burning perfume on the
table--grew in volume, thickened, and wafted towards me in a cloud of
gray horror.  It enveloped me, clammily.  Dimly, through its oily
wreaths, I saw the immobile yellow face of Fu-Manchu. And my stupefied
brain acclaimed him a sorcerer, against whom unwittingly we had pitted
our poor human wits.  The green eyes showed filmy through the fog.  An
intense pain shot through my lower limbs, and, catching my breath, I
looked down.  As I did so, the points of the red slippers which I
dreamed that I wore increased in length, curled sinuously upward,
twined about my throat and choked the breath from my body!

Came an interval, and then a dawning like consciousness; but it was a
false consciousness, since it brought with it the idea that my head lay
softly pillowed and that a woman's hand caressed my throbbing forehead.
Confusedly, as though in the remote past, I recalled a kiss--and the
recollection thrilled me strangely.  Dreamily content I lay, and a
voice stole to my ears:

"They are killing him!  they are killing him!  Oh!  do you not
understand?" In my dazed condition, I thought that it was I who had
died, and that this musical girl-voice was communicating to me the fact
of my own dissolution.

But I was conscious of no interest in the matter.

For hours and hours, I thought, that soothing hand caressed me.  I
never once raised my heavy lids, until there came a resounding crash
that seemed to set my very bones vibrating--a metallic, jangling crash,
as the fall of heavy chains.  I thought that, then, I half opened my
eyes, and that in the dimness I had a fleeting glimpse of a figure clad
in gossamer silk, with arms covered with barbaric bangles and slim
ankles surrounded by gold bands.  The girl was gone, even as I told
myself that she was an houri, and that I, though a Christian, had been
consigned by some error to the paradise of Mohammed.

Then--a complete blank.


My head throbbed madly; my brain seemed to be clogged--inert; and
though my first, feeble movement was followed by the rattle of a chain,
some moments more elapsed ere I realized that the chain was fastened to
a steel collar--that the steel collar was clasped about my neck.

I moaned weakly.

"Smith!" I muttered, "Where are you?  Smith!"

On to my knees I struggled, and the pain on the top of my skull grew
all but insupportable.  It was coming back to me now; how Nayland Smith
and I had started for the hotel to warn Graham Guthrie; how, as we
passed up the steps from the Embankment and into Essex Street, we saw
the big motor standing before the door of one of the offices.  I could
recall coming up level with the car--a modern limousine; but my mind
retained no impression of our having passed it--only a vague memory of
a rush of footsteps--a blow.  Then, my vision of the hall of dragons,
and now this real awakening to a worse reality.

Groping in the darkness, my hands touched a body that lay close beside
me.  My fingers sought and found the throat, sought and found the steel
collar about it.

"Smith," I groaned; and I shook the still form.  "Smith, old man--speak
to me!  Smith!"

Could he be dead?  Was this the end of his gallant fight with Dr.
Fu-Manchu and the murder group?  If so, what did the future hold for
me--what had I to face?

He stirred beneath my trembling hands.

"Thank God!"  I muttered, and I cannot deny that my joy was tainted
with selfishness.  For, waking in that impenetrable darkness, and yet
obsessed with the dream I had dreamed, I had known what fear meant, at
the realization that alone, chained, I must face the dreadful Chinese
doctor in the flesh.  Smith began incoherent mutterings.

"Sand-bagged! . . . Look out, Petrie! . . . He has us at last! . . .
Oh, Heavens!" . . . He struggled on to his knees, clutching at my hand.

"All right, old man," I said.  "We are both alive!  So let's be
thankful."

A moment's silence, a groan, then:

"Petrie, I have dragged you into this.  God forgive me--"

"Dry up, Smith," I said slowly.  "I'm not a child.  There is no
question of being dragged into the matter.  I'm here; and if I can be
of any use, I'm glad I am here!"

He grasped my hand.

"There were two Chinese, in European clothes--lord, how my head
throbs!--in that office door.  They sand-bagged us, Petrie--think of
it!--in broad daylight, within hail of the Strand!  We were rushed into
the car--and it was all over, before--" His voice grew faint.  "God!
they gave me an awful knock!"

"Why have we been spared, Smith?  Do you think he is saving us for--"

"Don't, Petrie!  If you had been in China, if you had seen what I have
seen--"

Footsteps sounded on the flagged passage.  A blade of light crept
across the floor towards us.  My brain was growing clearer.  The place
had a damp, earthen smell.  It was slimy--some noisome cellar.  A door
was thrown open and a man entered, carrying a lantern.  Its light
showed my surmise to be accurate, showed the slime-coated walls of a
dungeon some fifteen feet square--shone upon the long yellow robe of
the man who stood watching us, upon the malignant, intellectual
countenance.

It was Dr. Fu-Manchu.

At last they were face to face--the head of the great Yellow Movement,
and the man who fought on behalf of the entire white race.  How can I
paint the individual who now stood before us--perhaps the greatest
genius of modern times?

Of him it had been fitly said that he had a brow like Shakespeare and a
face like Satan.  Something serpentine, hypnotic, was in his very
presence.  Smith drew one sharp breath, and was silent.  Together,
chained to the wall, two mediaeval captives, living mockeries of our
boasted modern security, we crouched before Dr. Fu-Manchu.

He came forward with an indescribable gait, cat-like yet awkward,
carrying his high shoulders almost hunched.  He placed the lantern in a
niche in the wall, never turning away the reptilian gaze of those eyes
which must haunt my dreams forever.  They possessed a viridescence
which hitherto I had supposed possible only in the eye of the cat--and
the film intermittently clouded their brightness--but I can speak of
them no more.

I had never supposed, prior to meeting Dr. Fu-Manchu, that so intense a
force of malignancy could radiate--from any human being.  He spoke.
His English was perfect, though at times his words were oddly chosen;
his delivery alternately was guttural and sibilant.

"Mr. Smith and Dr. Petrie, your interference with my plans has gone too
far.  I have seriously turned my attention to you."

He displayed his teeth, small and evenly separated, but discolored in a
way that was familiar to me.  I studied his eyes with a new
professional interest, which even the extremity of our danger could not
wholly banish.  Their greenness seemed to be of the iris; the pupil was
oddly contracted--a pin-point.

Smith leaned his back against the wall with assumed indifference.

"You have presumed," continued Fu-Manchu, "to meddle with a
world-change. Poor spiders--caught in the wheels of the inevitable!
You have linked my name with the futility of the Young China
Movement--the name of Fu-Manchu!  Mr. Smith, you are an incompetent
meddler--I despise you!  Dr. Petrie, you are a fool--I am sorry for
you!"

He rested one bony hand on his hip, narrowing the long eyes as he
looked down on us.  The purposeful cruelty of the man was inherent; it
was entirely untheatrical.  Still Smith remained silent.

"So I am determined to remove you from the scene of your blunders!"
added Fu-Manchu.

"Opium will very shortly do the same for you!" I rapped at him savagely.

Without emotion he turned the narrowed eyes upon me.

"That is a matter of opinion, Doctor," he said.  "You may have lacked
the opportunities which have been mine for studying that subject--and
in any event I shall not be privileged to enjoy your advice in the
future."

"You will not long outlive me," I replied.  "And our deaths will not
profit you, incidentally; because--" Smith's foot touched mine.

"Because?" inquired Fu-Manchu softly. "Ah! Mr. Smith is so prudent! He
is thinking that I have FILES!" He pronounced the word in a way that
made me shudder. "Mr. Smith has seen a WIRE JACKET! Have you ever seen
a wire jacket? As a surgeon its functions would interest you!"

I stifled a cry that rose to my lips; for, with a shrill whistling
sound, a small shape came bounding into the dimly lit vault, then shot
upward.  A marmoset landed on the shoulder of Dr. Fu-Manchu and peered
grotesquely into the dreadful yellow face.  The Doctor raised his bony
hand and fondled the little creature, crooning to it.

"One of my pets, Mr. Smith," he said, suddenly opening his eyes fully
so that they blazed like green lamps.  "I have others, equally useful.
My scorpions--have you met my scorpions?  No?  My pythons and
hamadryads?  Then there are my fungi and my tiny allies, the bacilli.
I have a collection in my laboratory quite unique.  Have you ever
visited Molokai, the leper island, Doctor?  No?  But Mr. Nayland Smith
will be familiar with the asylum at Rangoon!  And we must not forget my
black spiders, with their diamond eyes--my spiders, that sit in the
dark and watch--then leap!"

He raised his lean hands, so that the sleeve of the robe fell back to
the elbow, and the ape dropped, chattering, to the floor and ran from
the cellar.

"O God of Cathay!" he cried, "by what death shall these die--these
miserable ones who would bind thine Empire, which is boundless!"

Like some priest of Tezcat he stood, his eyes upraised to the roof, his
lean body quivering--a sight to shock the most unimpressionable mind.

"He is mad!" I whispered to Smith.  "God help us, the man is a
dangerous homicidal maniac!"

Nayland Smith's tanned face was very drawn, but he shook his head
grimly.

"Dangerous, yes, I agree," he muttered; "his existence is a danger to
the entire white race which, now, we are powerless to avert."

Dr. Fu-Manchu recovered himself, took up the lantern and, turning
abruptly, walked to the door, with his awkward, yet feline gait.  At
the threshold be looked back.

"You would have warned Mr. Graham Guthrie?" he said, in a soft voice.
"To-night, at half-past twelve, Mr. Graham Guthrie dies!"

Smith sat silent and motionless, his eyes fixed upon the speaker.

"You were in Rangoon in 1908?" continued Dr. Fu-Manchu--"you remember
the Call?"

From somewhere above us--I could not determine the exact
direction--came a low, wailing cry, an uncanny thing of falling
cadences, which, in that dismal vault, with the sinister yellow-robed
figure at the door, seemed to pour ice into my veins.  Its effect upon
Smith was truly extraordinary.  His face showed grayly in the faint
light, and I heard him draw a hissing breath through clenched teeth.

"It calls for you!" said Fu-Manchu. "At half-past twelve it calls for
Graham Guthrie!"

The door closed and darkness mantled us again.

"Smith," I said, "what was that?"  The horrors about us were playing
havoc with my nerves.

"It was the Call of Siva!" replied Smith hoarsely.

"What is it?  Who uttered it?  What does it mean?"

"I don't know what it is, Petrie, nor who utters it.  But it means
death!"



CHAPTER XIV


THERE may be some who could have lain, chained to that noisome cell,
and felt no fear--no dread of what the blackness might hold.  I confess
that I am not one of these.  I knew that Nayland Smith and I stood in
the path of the most stupendous genius who in the world's history had
devoted his intellect to crime.  I knew that the enormous wealth of the
political group backing Dr. Fu-Manchu rendered him a menace to Europe
and to America greater than that of the plague.  He was a scientist
trained at a great university--an explorer of nature's secrets, who had
gone farther into the unknown, I suppose, than any living man.  His
mission was to remove all obstacles--human obstacles--from the path of
that secret movement which was progressing in the Far East.  Smith and
I were two such obstacles; and of all the horrible devices at his
command, I wondered, and my tortured brain refused to leave the
subject, by which of them were we doomed to be dispatched?

Even at that very moment some venomous centipede might be wriggling
towards me over the slime of the stones, some poisonous spider be
preparing to drop from the roof!  Fu-Manchu might have released a
serpent in the cellar, or the air be alive with microbes of a loathsome
disease!

"Smith," I said, scarcely recognizing my own voice, "I can't bear this
suspense.  He intends to kill us, that is certain, but--"

"Don't worry," came the reply; "he intends to learn our plans first."

"You mean--?"

"You heard him speak of his files and of his wire jacket?"

"Oh, my God!" I groaned; "can this be England?"

Smith laughed dryly, and I heard him fumbling with the steel collar
about his neck.

"I have one great hope," he said, "since you share my captivity, but we
must neglect no minor chance.  Try with your pocket-knife if you can
force the lock.  I am trying to break this one."

Truth to tell, the idea had not entered my half-dazed mind, but I
immediately acted upon my friend's suggestion, setting to work with the
small blade of my knife.  I was so engaged, and, having snapped one
blade, was about to open another, when a sound arrested me.  It came
from beneath my feet.

"Smith," I whispered, "listen!"

The scraping and clicking which told of Smith's efforts ceased.
Motionless, we sat in that humid darkness and listened.

Something was moving beneath the stones of the cellar.  I held my
breath; every nerve in my body was strung up.

A line of light showed a few feet from where we lay.  It
widened--became an oblong.  A trap was lifted, and within a yard of me,
there rose a dimly seen head.  Horror I had expected--and death, or
worse.  Instead, I saw a lovely face, crowned with a disordered mass of
curling hair; I saw a white arm upholding the stone slab, a shapely arm
clasped about the elbow by a broad gold bangle.

The girl climbed into the cellar and placed the lantern on the stone
floor.  In the dim light she was unreal--a figure from an opium vision,
with her clinging silk draperies and garish jewelry, with her feet
encased in little red slippers.  In short, this was the houri of my
vision, materialized.  It was difficult to believe that we were in
modern, up-to-date England; easy to dream that we were the captives of
a caliph, in a dungeon in old Bagdad.

"My prayers are answered," said Smith softly.  "She has come to save
YOU."

"S-sh!" warned the girl, and her wonderful eyes opened widely,
fearfully.  "A sound and he will kill us all."

She bent over me; a key jarred in the lock which had broken my
penknife--and the collar was off.  As I rose to my feet the girl turned
and released Smith.  She raised the lantern above the trap, and signed
to us to descend the wooden steps which its light revealed.

"Your knife," she whispered to me.  "Leave it on the floor.  He will
think you forced the locks.  Down!  Quickly!"

Nayland Smith, stepping gingerly, disappeared into the darkness.  I
rapidly followed.  Last of all came our mysterious friend, a gold band
about one of her ankles gleaming in the rays of the lantern which she
carried.  We stood in a low-arched passage.

"Tie your handkerchiefs over your eyes and do exactly as I tell you,"
she ordered.

Neither of us hesitated to obey her.  Blind-folded, I allowed her to
lead me, and Smith rested his hand upon my shoulder.  In that order we
proceeded, and came to stone steps, which we ascended.

"Keep to the wall on the left," came a whisper.  "There is danger on
the right."

With my free hand I felt for and found the wall, and we pressed
forward.  The atmosphere of the place through which we were passing was
steamy, and loaded with an odor like that of exotic plant life.  But a
faint animal scent crept to my nostrils, too, and there was a subdued
stir about me, infinitely suggestive--mysterious.

Now my feet sank in a soft carpet, and a curtain brushed my shoulder.
A gong sounded.  We stopped.

The din of distant drumming came to my ears.

"Where in Heaven's name are we?" hissed Smith in my ear; "that is a
tom-tom!"

"S-sh!  S-sh!"

The little hand grasping mine quivered nervously.  We were near a door
or a window, for a breath of perfume was wafted through the air; and it
reminded me of my other meetings with the beautiful woman who was now
leading us from the house of Fu-Manchu; who, with her own lips, had
told me that she was his slave.  Through the horrible phantasmagoria
she flitted--a seductive vision, her piquant loveliness standing out
richly in its black setting of murder and devilry.  Not once, but a
thousand times, I had tried to reason out the nature of the tie which
bound her to the sinister Doctor.

Silence fell.

"Quick!  This way!"

Down a thickly carpeted stair we went.  Our guide opened a door, and
led us along a passage.  Another door was opened; and we were in the
open air.  But the girl never tarried, pulling me along a graveled
path, with a fresh breeze blowing in my face, and along until,
unmistakably, I stood upon the river bank.  Now, planking creaked to
our tread; and looking downward beneath the handkerchief, I saw the
gleam of water beneath my feet.

"Be careful!"  I was warned, and found myself stepping into a narrow
boat--a punt.

Nayland Smith followed, and the girl pushed the punt off and poled out
into the stream.

"Don't speak!" she directed.

My brain was fevered; I scarce knew if I dreamed and was waking, or if
the reality ended with my imprisonment in the clammy cellar and this
silent escape, blindfolded, upon the river with a girl for our guide
who might have stepped out of the pages of "The Arabian Nights" were
fantasy--the mockery of sleep.

Indeed, I began seriously to doubt if this stream whereon we floated,
whose waters plashed and tinkled about us, were the Thames, the Tigris,
or the Styx.

The punt touched a bank.

"You will hear a clock strike in a few minutes," said the girl, with
her soft, charming accent, "but I rely upon your honor not to remove
the handkerchiefs until then.  You owe me this."

"We do!" said Smith fervently.

I heard him scrambling to the bank, and a moment later a soft hand was
placed in mine, and I, too, was guided on to terra firma.  Arrived on
the bank, I still held the girl's hand, drawing her towards me.

"You must not go back," I whispered.  "We will take care of you.  You
must not return to that place."

"Let me go!" she said.  "When, once, I asked you to take me from him,
you spoke of police protection; that was your answer, police
protection!  You would let them lock me up--imprison me--and make me
betray him!  For what?  For what?"  She wrenched herself free.  "How
little you understand me.  Never mind.  Perhaps one day you will know!
Until the clock strikes!"

She was gone.  I heard the creak of the punt, the drip of the water
from the pole.  Fainter it grew, and fainter.

"What is her secret?" muttered Smith, beside me.  "Why does she cling
to that monster?"

The distant sound died away entirely.  A clock began to strike; it
struck the half-hour. In an instant my handkerchief was off, and so was
Smith's. We stood upon a towing-path. Away to the left the moon shone
upon the towers and battlements of an ancient fortress.

It was Windsor Castle.

"Half-past ten," cried Smith.  "Two hours to save Graham Guthrie!"

We had exactly fourteen minutes in which to catch the last train to
Waterloo; and we caught it.  But I sank into a corner of the
compartment in a state bordering upon collapse.  Neither of us, I
think, could have managed another twenty yards.  With a lesser stake
than a human life at issue, I doubt if we should have attempted that
dash to Windsor station.

"Due at Waterloo at eleven-fifty-one," panted Smith.  "That gives us
thirty-nine minutes to get to the other side of the river and reach his
hotel."

"Where in Heaven's name is that house situated?  Did we come up or down
stream?"

"I couldn't determine.  But at any rate, it stands close to the
riverside.  It should be merely a question of time to identify it.  I
shall set Scotland Yard to work immediately; but I am hoping for
nothing.  Our escape will warn him."

I said no more for a time, sitting wiping the perspiration from my
forehead and watching my friend load his cracked briar with the
broadcut Latakia mixture.

"Smith," I said at last, "what was that horrible wailing we heard, and
what did Fu-Manchu mean when he referred to Rangoon?  I noticed how it
affected you."

My friend nodded and lighted his pipe.

"There was a ghastly business there in 1908 or early in 1909," he
replied:  "an utterly mysterious epidemic.  And this beastly wailing
was associated with it."

"In what way?  And what do you mean by an epidemic?"

"It began, I believe, at the Palace Mansions Hotel, in the cantonments.
A young American, whose name I cannot recall, was staying there on
business connected with some new iron buildings.  One night he went to
his room, locked the door, and jumped out of the window into the
courtyard.  Broke his neck, of course."

"Suicide?"

"Apparently.  But there were singular features in the case.  For
instance, his revolver lay beside him, fully loaded!"

"In the courtyard?"

"In the courtyard!"

"Was it murder by any chance?"

Smith shrugged his shoulders.

"His door was found locked from the inside; had to be broken in."

"But the wailing business?"

"That began later, or was only noticed later.  A French doctor, named
Lafitte, died in exactly the same way."

"At the same place?"

"At the same hotel; but he occupied a different room.  Here is the
extraordinary part of the affair:  a friend shared the room with him,
and actually saw him go!"

"Saw him leap from the window?"

"Yes.  The friend--an Englishman--was aroused by the uncanny wailing.
I was in Rangoon at the time, so that I know more of the case of
Lafitte than of that of the American.  I spoke to the man about it
personally.  He was an elec

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