THE RETURN OF DR. FU-MANCHU

By Sax Rohmer

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.   A MIDNIGHT
SUMMONS

CHAPTER II.   ELTHAM
VANISHES

CHAPTER III.   THE
WIRE JACKET

CHAPTER IV.   THE
CRY OF A NIGHTHAWK

CHAPTER V.   THE
NET

CHAPTER VI.   UNDER
THE ELMS

CHAPTER VII.   ENTER
MR. ABEL SLATTIN

CHAPTER VIII.   DR.
FU-MANCHU STRIKES

CHAPTER IX.   THE
CLIMBER

CHAPTER X.   THE
CLIMBER RETURNS

CHAPTER XI.   THE
WHITE PEACOCK

CHAPTER XII.   DARK
EYES LOOKED INTO MINE

CHAPTER XIII.
  THE SACRED ORDER


CHAPTER XIV.   THE COUGHING HORROR

CHAPTER XV.   BEWITCHMENT


CHAPTER XVI.   THE QUESTING HANDS


CHAPTER XVII.   ONE
DAY IN RANGOON

CHAPTER XVIII.   THE
SILVER BUDDHA

CHAPTER XIX.   DR.
FU-MANCHU’S LABORATORY

CHAPTER XX.
  THE CROSS BAR


CHAPTER XXI.   CRAGMIRE TOWER

CHAPTER XXII.   THE MULATTO


CHAPTER XXIII.   A CRY ON THE
MOOR

CHAPTER XXIV.   STORY
OF THE GABLES

CHAPTER XXV.   THE
BELLS

CHAPTER XXVI.   THE
FIERY HAND

CHAPTER XXVII.   THE
NIGHT OF THE RAID

CHAPTER XXVIII.
    THE SAMURAI’S SWORD

CHAPTER XXIX.   THE SIX GATES


CHAPTER XXX.   THE CALL OF THE
EAST

CHAPTER XXXI.   "MY
SHADOW LIES UPON YOU”

CHAPTER XXXII.
  THE TRAGEDY

CHAPTER
XXXIII.   THE MUMMY

CHAPTER I. A MIDNIGHT SUMMONS

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

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

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

“What—a woman or something?”

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He paused, taking a drink.

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

I nodded.

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

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

“You—er—were interested?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The telephone bell rang.

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

I went to the telephone.

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

“Yes; who is speaking?”

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

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

I hung up the receiver.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The girl stared more stupidly than ever.

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

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

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

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

Eltham walked up briskly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Was she a servant?”

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

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

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

“It’s awfully good of you, Eltham—”

He held up his hand.

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

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

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

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

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

What was afoot?

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was Nayland Smith!

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

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

“Where is Eltham?” I asked.

Smith started back as though I had struck him.

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

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

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

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

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

“Smith, you don’t mean—”

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

CHAPTER II. ELTHAM VANISHES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He walked on.

“God knows, Petrie; but I fear—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smith leaned dizzily against a tree.

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

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

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

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

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

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

With amazement written all over him, the other obeyed.

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

The other returned the letter.

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

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

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

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

Smith leaped in, pulling me after him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we were off again.

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

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

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

Smith leaped out, and I followed him.

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

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

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

CHAPTER III. THE WIRE JACKET

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You saw her?” he whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smith mounted.

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

He spoke close to my ear.

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

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

“Rely upon me!” I said grimly. “I...”

The words ceased—frozen on my tongue.

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

Smith drew a sibilant breath.

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

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

“Not that, not—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We shall have to—gag her—”

“Smith, I can’t do it!”

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

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

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

She started violently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Fu-Manchu was speaking!

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

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

Smith threw the door open.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where is Fu-Manchu?”

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

But Dr. Fu-Manchu was not there!

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

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

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

Smith literally ground his teeth.

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

“How so?”

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

We ran back to where we had left Karamaneh.

The room was empty!

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

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

CHAPTER IV. THE CRY OF A NIGHTHAWK

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

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

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

“Good night, Dr. Petrie,” he said.

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

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

“Smith!” I called.

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

I joined him.

“What is it?” I said, curiously.

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

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

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

“Where’s your patient?” rapped Smith.

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

I craned from the window. Smith grabbed my arm.

“Don’t lean out,” he said.

I drew back, glancing at him surprisedly.

“For Heaven’s sake, why not?”

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

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

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

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

Fu-Manchu!

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

Nayland Smith’s grip tightened on my arm.

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

“Look, look!”

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

“For God’s sake, Smith, what was it?”

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

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

Smith sprang impetuously to his feet.

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

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

“Out through the garden—the side entrance!”

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

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

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

He thrust a pistol into my hand and was off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The words aroused me.

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

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

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

CHAPTER V. THE NET

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

“Oh, God!” whispered Smith.

A faint puff of wind extinguished the match.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We laid our burden upon the surgery table.

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

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

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

“Thank you, sir.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Have you any milk?” he jerked abruptly.

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

“Milk!” I began.

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

I turned to descend to the kitchen, when—

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

I stopped at the stairhead and faced him.

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

He laughed dryly.

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

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

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

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

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

I handed him the pistol without a word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her lips trembled, but she made no reply.

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

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

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

She spoke then.

“Dr. Petrie—”

“Well?”

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

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

She clasped her hands with a sort of wild abandon.

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

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

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

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

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

“Ah! so!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Then why do you serve this inhuman monster?”

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

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

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

She pointed to the net in my hands.

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

“What bird?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

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

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

I was utterly mystified.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Smith!” I cried—“Smith!”

“Coming!”

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

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

“Good heavens!” I began—

One of his rare laughs interrupted me.

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

“Merely an islet, I suppose—”

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

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

“Exactly!” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He opened the wicker basket, sniffing at the contents.

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

“Certainly.”

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

“Nothing of the kind!”

Smith shrugged his shoulders.

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VI. UNDER THE ELMS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s under the trees, Smith!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then the truth became apparent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, yes!”

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

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

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

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

He glanced at me.

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

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

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

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

“Released what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

I stopped.

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

“Valerian,” I replied mechanically.

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

It was a black cat!

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

“But”—I was growing confused.

Smith stooped lower.

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

CHAPTER VII. ENTER MR. ABEL SLATTIN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You have a curio here?”

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

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

“Really?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How do you know?”

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

“Whatever for?”

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

“You don’t mean—”

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

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

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

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

“Chinatown!”

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

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

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

“What!”

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

“At his office?”

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

“Then we should have followed him!”

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

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

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

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

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

I stared, stupidly.

“No longer in danger!”

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

“Well?”

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

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

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

CHAPTER VIII. DR. FU-MANCHU STRIKES

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

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

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

“Is that Carter?” called Smith, sharply.

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

“Well?” rapped my companion.

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

“He has not left again?”

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

“A lady!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karamaneh was speaking.

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

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

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

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

I felt Smith start at the words.

“There will be a sufficient number of men?”

Karamaneh put the question in a strangely listless way.

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

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

“So now, give me my orders,” he said.

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

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

“But—” began Slattin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But—”

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

Those grim words were prophetic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This in turn merged into a sort of hysterical sobbing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dead, Petrie!—already?”

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

Smith nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The detective silently administered to Burke a stiff restorative.

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

He clapped his hand upon Burke’s shoulder.

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

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

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

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

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

“That what would come to this?”’

“His dealings with the Chinaman!”

“He had dealings with Chinamen?”

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

“What! Singapore Charlie!”

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

“There was a fire—”

“But Singapore Charlie escaped, sir.”

“And he is one of the gang?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Forestall me, in fact?”

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

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

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

“Go on!” snapped Smith—“I know her.”

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

“For a price, of course?”

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

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

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

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

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

“But he wears no hat!”

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

“There was no one else in the hall?”

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

Nayland Smith fixed a piercing gaze upon Burke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There came a loud knocking and ringing.

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

“But if it is the inspector?—”

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

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

CHAPTER IX. THE CLIMBER

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

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

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

Smith nodded.

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

Inspector Weymouth looked down at the body of Abel Slattin.

“How was it done?” he asked softly.

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

“By Karamaneh!” rapped Smith.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Interrupted!”

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

“But we have found no snake!”

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

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

Smith resumed his restless pacings up and down.

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

“What has given you this idea?”

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

“Break in!”

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

“Did the officer see this person?”

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

“The attempt did not succeed?”

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

We were both silent for some moments; then:

“What do you propose to do?” I asked.

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

CHAPTER X. THE CLIMBER RETURNS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smith collapsed on the floor at my feet.

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

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

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

“Merciful God!” I groaned.

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

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

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

CHAPTER XI. THE WHITE PEACOCK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well?” I cried.

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

“Is it certain that they went there?”

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

“Surely some arrests were made?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XII. DARK EYES LOOKED INTO MINE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was Nayland Smith!

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

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

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

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

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

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

I set to work eagerly.

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

“Karamaneh?”...

“Ssh!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What now?” I whispered.

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

“How long have you been here?”

“Since last night.”

“Is Fu-Manchu—”

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

“Another!”

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

“Is Burke—”

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

“But Weymouth—”

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

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

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

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

“It’s a long drop!”

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

“What should you do?”

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

CHAPTER XIII. THE SACRED ORDER

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

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

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

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

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

It was Dr. Fu-Manchu’s marmoset.

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

Smith bent to my ear.

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

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

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

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

“How long was I insensible?”

“About half an hour.”

“Then the cabman will be waiting.”

“Have you a whistle with you?”

I felt in my coat pocket.

“Yes,” I reported.

“Good! Then we will take a chance.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean, Smith?”

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

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

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

“Not that way! O God, not that way!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suddenly the guttural voice began:

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

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

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

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

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

He continued:

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

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

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

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

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

“Stop!” I cried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I give it.”

“I, also,” said Smith, hoarsely.

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

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

CHAPTER XIV. THE COUGHING HORROR

I leaped up in bed with a great start.

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

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

“Help! Petrie! Help!...”

It was Nayland Smith in the room above me!

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

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

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

There came a sound of faint and muffled coughing.

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

I depressed the switch, flooding the room with light, and as I leaped
forward to the bed a word picture of what I had seen formed in my mind;
and I found that I was thinking of a gray feather boa.

“Smith!” I cried (my voice seemed to pitch itself, unwilled, in a very
high key), “Smith, old man!”

He made no reply, and a sudden, sorrowful fear clutched at my
heart-strings. He was lying half out of bed flat upon his back, his head
at a dreadful angle with his body. As I bent over him and seized him by
the shoulders, I could see the whites of his eyes. His arms hung limply,
and his fingers touched the carpet.

“My God!” I whispered—“what has happened?”

I heaved him back onto the pillow, and looked anxiously into his face.
Habitually gaunt, the flesh so refined away by the consuming nervous
energy of the man as to reveal the cheekbones in sharp prominence, he now
looked truly ghastly. His skin was so sunbaked as to have changed
constitutionally; nothing could ever eradicate that tan. But to-night a
fearful grayness was mingled with the brown, his lips were purple... and
there were marks of strangulation upon the lean throat—ever
darkening weals made by clutching fingers.

He began to breathe stentoriously and convulsively, inhalation being
accompanied by a significant gurgling in the throat. But now my calm was
restored in face of a situation which called for professional attention.

I aided my friend’s labored respirations by the usual means, setting to
work vigorously; so that presently he began to clutch at his inflamed
throat which that murderous pressure had threatened to close.

I could hear sounds of movement about the house, showing that not I alone
had been awakened by those hoarse screams.

“It’s all right, old man,” I said, bending over him; “brace up!”

He opened his eyes—they looked bleared and bloodshot—and gave
me a quick glance of recognition.

“It’s all right, Smith!” I said—“no! don’t sit up; lie there for a
moment.”

I ran across to the dressing-table, whereon I perceived his flask to lie,
and mixed him a weak stimulant with which I returned to the bed.

As I bent over him again, my housekeeper appeared in the doorway, pale and
wide-eyed.

“There is no occasion for alarm,” I said over my shoulder; “Mr. Smith’s
nerves are overwrought and he was awakened by some disturbing dream. You
can return to bed, Mrs. Newsome.”

Nayland Smith seemed to experience much difficulty in swallowing the
contents of the tumbler which I held to his lips; and, from the way in
which he fingered the swollen glands, I could see that his throat, which I
had vigorously massaged, was occasioning him great pain. But the danger
was past, and already that glassy look was disappearing from his eyes, nor
did they protrude so unnaturally.

“God, Petrie!” he whispered, “that was a near shave! I haven’t the
strength of a kitten!”

“The weakness will pass off,” I replied; “there will be no collapse, now.
A little more fresh air...”

I stood up, glancing at the windows, then back at Smith, who forced a wry
smile in answer to my look.

“Couldn’t be done, Petrie,” he said, huskily.

His words referred to the state of the windows. Although the night was
oppressively hot, these were only opened some four inches at top and
bottom. Further opening was impossible because of iron brackets screwed
firmly into the casements which prevented the windows being raised or
lowered further.

It was a precaution adopted after long experience of the servants of Dr.
Fu-Manchu.

Now, as I stood looking from the half-strangled man upon the bed to those
screwed-up windows, the fact came home to my mind that this precaution had
proved futile. I thought of the thing which I had likened to a feather
boa; and I looked at the swollen weals made by clutching fingers upon the
throat of Nayland Smith.

The bed stood fully four feet from the nearest window.

I suppose the question was written in my face; for, as I turned again to
Smith, who, having struggled upright, was still fingering his injured
throat ruefully:

“God only knows, Petrie!” he said; “no human arm could have reached me...”

For us, the night was ended so far as sleep was concerned. Arrayed in his
dressing-gown, Smith sat in the white cane chair in my study with a glass
of brandy-and-water beside him, and (despite my official prohibition) with
the cracked briar which had sent up its incense in many strange and dark
places of the East and which yet survived to perfume these prosy rooms in
suburban London, steaming between his teeth. I stood with my elbow resting
upon the mantelpiece looking down at him where he sat.

“By God! Petrie,” he said, yet again, with his fingers straying gently
over the surface of his throat, “that was a narrow shave—a damned
narrow shave!”

“Narrower than perhaps you appreciate, old man,” I replied. “You were a
most unusual shade of blue when I found you...”

“I managed,” said Smith evenly, “to tear those clutching fingers away for
a moment and to give a cry for help. It was only for a moment, though.
Petrie! they were fingers of steel—of steel!”

“The bed,” I began...

“I know that,” rapped Smith. “I shouldn’t have been sleeping in it, had it
been within reach of the window; but, knowing that the doctor avoids noisy
methods, I had thought myself fairly safe so long as I made it impossible
for any one actually to enter the room...”

“I have always insisted, Smith,” I cried, “that there was danger! What of
poisoned darts? What of the damnable reptiles and insects which form part
of the armory of Fu-Manchu?”

“Familiarity breeds contempt, I suppose,” he replied. “But as it happened
none of those agents was employed. The very menace that I sought to avoid
reached me somehow. It would almost seem that Dr. Fu-Manchu deliberately
accepted the challenge of those screwed-up windows! Hang it all, Petrie!
one cannot sleep in a room hermetically sealed, in weather like this! It’s
positively Burmese; and although I can stand tropical heat, curiously
enough the heat of London gets me down almost immediately.”

“The humidity; that’s easily understood. But you’ll have to put up with it
in the future. After nightfall our windows must be closed entirely,
Smith.”

Nayland Smith knocked out his pipe upon the side of the fireplace. The
bowl sizzled furiously, but without delay he stuffed broad-cut mixture
into the hot pipe, dropping a liberal quantity upon the carpet during the
process. He raised his eyes to me, and his face was very grim.

“Petrie,” he said, striking a match on the heel of his slipper, “the
resources of Dr. Fu-Manchu are by no means exhausted. Before we quit this
room it is up to us to come to a decision upon a certain point.” He got
his pipe well alight. “What kind of thing, what unnatural, distorted
creature, laid hands upon my throat to-night? I owe my life, primarily, to
you, old man, but, secondarily, to the fact that I was awakened, just
before the attack—by the creature’s coughing—by its vile,
high-pitched coughing...”

I glanced around at the books upon my shelves. Often enough, following
some outrage by the brilliant Chinese doctor whose genius was directed to
the discovery of new and unique death agents, we had obtained a clue in
those works of a scientific nature which bulk largely in the library of a
medical man. There are creatures, there are drugs, which, ordinarily
innocuous, may be so employed as to become inimical to human life; and in
the distorting of nature, in the disturbing of balances and the diverting
of beneficent forces into strange and dangerous channels, Dr. Fu-Manchu
excelled. I had known him to enlarge, by artificial culture, a minute
species of fungus so as to render it a powerful agent capable of attacking
man; his knowledge of venomous insects has probably never been paralleled
in the history of the world; whilst, in the sphere of pure toxicology, he
had, and has, no rival; the Borgias were children by comparison. But, look
where I would, think how I might, no adequate explanation of this latest
outrage seemed possible along normal lines.

“There’s the clue,” said Nayland Smith, pointing to a little ash-tray upon
the table near by. “Follow it if you can.”

But I could not.

“As I have explained,” continued my friend, “I was awakened by a sound of
coughing; then came a death grip on my throat, and instinctively my hands
shot out in search of my attacker. I could not reach him; my hands came in
contact with nothing palpable. Therefore I clutched at the fingers which
were dug into my windpipe, and found them to be small—as the marks
show—and hairy. I managed to give that first cry for help, then with
all my strength I tried to unfasten the grip that was throttling the life
out of me. At last I contrived to move one of the hands, and I called out
again, though not so loudly. Then both the hands were back again; I was
weakening; but I clawed like a madman at the thin, hairy arms of the
strangling thing, and with a blood-red mist dancing before my eyes, I
seemed to be whirling madly round and round until all became a blank.
Evidently I used my nails pretty freely—and there’s the trophy.”

For the twentieth time, I should think, I carried the ash-tray in my hand
and laid it immediately under the table-lamp in order to examine its
contents. In the little brass bowl lay a blood-stained fragment of grayish
hair attached to a tatter of skin. This fragment of epidermis had an odd
bluish tinge, and the attached hair was much darker at the roots than
elsewhere. Saving its singular color, it might have been torn from the
forearm of a very hirsute human; but although my thoughts wandered
unfettered, north, south, east and west; although, knowing the resources
of Fu-Manchu, I considered all the recognized Mongolian types, and, in
quest of hirsute mankind, even roamed far north among the blubbering
Esquimo; although I glanced at Australasia, at Central Africa, and passed
in mental review the dark places of the Congo, nowhere in the known world,
nowhere in the history of the human species, could I come upon a type of
man answering to the description suggested by our strange clue.

Nayland Smith was watching me curiously as I bent over the little brass
ash-tray.

“You are puzzled,” he rapped in his short way.

“So am I—utterly puzzled. Fu-Manchu’s gallery of monstrosities
clearly has become reinforced; for even if we identified the type, we
should not be in sight of our explanation.”

“You mean,” I began...

“Fully four feet from the window, Petrie, and that window but a few inches
open! Look”—he bent forward, resting his chest against the table,
and stretched out his hand toward me. “You have a rule there; just
measure.”

Setting down the ash-tray, I opened out the rule and measured the distance
from the further edge of the table to the tips of Smith’s fingers.

“Twenty-eight inches—and I have a long reach!” snapped Smith,
withdrawing his arm and striking a match to relight his pipe. “There’s one
thing, Petrie, often proposed before, which now we must do without delay.
The ivy must be stripped from the walls at the back. It’s a pity, but we
can not afford to sacrifice our lives to our sense of the aesthetic. What
do you make of the sound like the cracking of a whip?”

“I make nothing of it, Smith,” I replied, wearily. “It might have been a
thick branch of ivy breaking beneath the weight of a climber.”

“Did it sound like it?”

“I must confess that the explanation does not convince me, but I have no
better one.”

Smith, permitting his pipe to go out, sat staring straight before him, and
tugging at the lobe of his left ear.

“The old bewilderment is seizing me,” I continued. “At first, when I
realized that Dr. Fu-Manchu was back in England, when I realized that an
elaborate murder-machine was set up somewhere in London, it seemed unreal,
fantastical. Then I met—Karamaneh! She, whom we thought to be his
victim, showed herself again to be his slave. Now, with Weymouth and
Scotland Yard at work, the old secret evil is established again in our
midst, unaccountably—our lives are menaced—sleep is a danger—every
shadow threatens death... oh! it is awful.”

Smith remained silent; he did not seem to have heard my words. I knew
these moods and had learnt that it was useless to seek to interrupt them.
With his brows drawn down, and his deep-set eyes staring into space, he
sat there gripping his cold pipe so tightly that my own jaw muscles ached
sympathetically. No man was better equipped than this gaunt British
Commissioner to stand between society and the menace of the Yellow Doctor;
I respected his meditations, for, unlike my own, they were informed by an
intimate knowledge of the dark and secret things of the East, of that
mysterious East out of which Fu-Manchu came, of that jungle of noxious
things whose miasma had been wafted Westward with the implacable Chinaman.

I walked quietly from the room, occupied with my own bitter reflections.

CHAPTER XV. BEWITCHMENT

“You say you have two items of news for me?” said Nayland Smith, looking
across the breakfast table to where Inspector Weymouth sat sipping coffee.

“There are two points—yes,” replied the Scotland Yard man, whilst
Smith paused, egg-spoon in hand, and fixed his keen eyes upon the speaker.
“The first is this: the headquarters of the Yellow group is no longer in
the East End.”

“How can you be sure of that?”

“For two reasons. In the first place, that district must now be too hot to
hold Dr. Fu-Manchu; in the second place, we have just completed a
house-to-house inquiry which has scarcely overlooked a rathole or a rat.
That place where you say Fu-Manchu was visited by some Chinese mandarin;
where you, Mr. Smith,” and—glancing in my direction—“you,
Doctor, were confined for a time—”

“Yes?” snapped Smith, attacking his egg.

“Well,” continued the inspector, “it is all deserted, now. There is not
the slightest doubt that the Chinaman has fled to some other abode. I am
certain of it. My second piece of news will interest you very much, I am
sure. You were taken to the establishment of the Chinaman, Shen-Yan, by a
certain ex-officer of New York Police—Burke...”

“Good God!” cried Smith, looking up with a start; “I thought they had
him!”

“So did I,” replied Weymouth grimly; “but they haven’t! He got away in the
confusion following the raid, and has been hiding ever since with a
cousin, a nurseryman out Upminster way...”

“Hiding?” snapped Smith.

“Exactly—hiding. He has been afraid to stir ever since, and has
scarcely shown his nose outside the door. He says he is watched night and
day.”

“Then how...”

“He realized that something must be done,” continued the inspector, “and
made a break this morning. He is so convinced of this constant
surveillance that he came away secretly, hidden under the boxes of a
market-wagon. He landed at Covent Garden in the early hours of this
morning and came straight away to the Yard.”

“What is he afraid of exactly?”

Inspector Weymouth put down his coffee cup and bent forward slightly.

“He knows something,” he said in a low voice, “and they are aware that he
knows it!”

“And what is this he knows?”

Nayland Smith stared eagerly at the detective.

“Every man has his price,” replied Weymouth with a smile, “and Burke seems
to think that you are a more likely market than the police authorities.”

“I see,” snapped Smith. “He wants to see me?”

“He wants you to go and see him,” was the reply. “I think he anticipates
that you may make a capture of the person or persons spying upon him.”

“Did he give you any particulars?”

“Several. He spoke of a sort of gipsy girl with whom he had a short
conversation one day, over the fence which divides his cousin’s flower
plantations from the lane adjoining.”

“Gipsy girl!” I whispered, glancing rapidly at Smith.

“I think you are right, Doctor,” said Weymouth with his slow smile; “it
was Karamaneh. She asked him the way to somewhere or other and got him to
write it upon a loose page of his notebook, so that she should not forget
it.”

“You hear that, Petrie?” rapped Smith.

“I hear it,” I replied, “but I don’t see any special significance in the
fact.”

“I do!” rapped Smith; “I didn’t sit up the greater part of last night
thrashing my weary brains for nothing! But I am going to the British
Museum to-day, to confirm a certain suspicion.” He turned to Weymouth.
“Did Burke go back?” he demanded abruptly.

“He returned hidden under the empty boxes,” was the reply. “Oh! you never
saw a man in such a funk in all your life!”

“He may have good reasons,” I said.

“He has good reasons!” replied Nayland Smith grimly; “if that man really
possesses information inimical to the safety of Fu-Manchu, he can only
escape doom by means of a miracle similar to that which has hitherto
protected you and me.”

“Burke insists,” said Weymouth at this point, “that something comes almost
every night after dusk, slinking about the house—it’s an old
farmhouse, I understand; and on two or three occasions he has been
awakened (fortunately for him he is a light sleeper) by sounds of coughing
immediately outside his window. He is a man who sleeps with a pistol under
his pillow, and more than once, on running to the window, he has had a
vague glimpse of some creature leaping down from the tiles of the roof,
which slopes up to his room, into the flower beds below...”

“Creature!” said Smith, his gray eyes ablaze now—“you said
creature!”

“I used the word deliberately,” replied Weymouth, “because Burke seems to
have the idea that it goes on all fours.”

There was a short and rather strained silence. Then:

“In descending a sloping roof,” I suggested, “a human being would probably
employ his hands as well as his feet.”

“Quite so,” agreed the inspector. “I am merely reporting the impression of
Burke.”

“Has he heard no other sound?” rapped Smith; “one like the cracking of dry
branches, for instance?”

“He made no mention of it,” replied Weymouth, staring.

“And what is the plan?”

“One of his cousin’s vans,” said Weymouth, with his slight smile, “has
remained behind at Covent Garden and will return late this afternoon. I
propose that you and I, Mr. Smith, imitate Burke and ride down to
Upminster under the empty boxes!”

Nayland Smith stood up, leaving his breakfast half finished, and began to
wander up and down the room, reflectively tugging at his ear. Then he
began to fumble in the pockets of his dressing-gown and finally produced
the inevitable pipe, dilapidated pouch, and box of safety matches. He
began to load the much-charred agent of reflection.

“Do I understand that Burke is actually too afraid to go out openly even
in daylight?” he asked suddenly.

“He has not hitherto left his cousin’s plantations at all,” replied
Weymouth. “He seems to think that openly to communicate with the
authorities, or with you, would be to seal his death warrant.”

“He’s right,” snapped Smith.

“Therefore he came and returned secretly,” continued the inspector; “and
if we are to do any good, obviously we must adopt similar precautions. The
market wagon, loaded in such a way as to leave ample space in the interior
for us, will be drawn up outside the office of Messrs. Pike and Pike, in
Covent Garden, until about five o’clock this afternoon. At, say, half past
four, I propose that we meet there and embark upon the journey.”

The speaker glanced in my direction interrogatively.

“Include me in the program,” I said. “Will there be room in the wagon?”

“Certainly,” was the reply; “it is most commodious, but I cannot guarantee
its comfort.”

Nayland Smith promenaded the room, unceasingly, and presently he walked
out altogether, only to return ere the inspector and I had had time to
exchange more than a glance of surprise, carrying a brass ash-tray. He
placed this on a corner of the breakfast table before Weymouth.

“Ever seen anything like that?” he inquired.

The inspector examined the gruesome relic with obvious curiosity, turning
it over with the tip of his little finger and manifesting considerable
repugnance—in touching it at all. Smith and I watched him in
silence, and, finally, placing the tray again upon the table, he looked up
in a puzzled way.

“It’s something like the skin of a water rat,” he said.

Nayland Smith stared at him fixedly.

“A water rat? Now that you come to mention it, I perceive a certain
resemblance—yes. But”—he had been wearing a silk scarf about
his throat and now he unwrapped it—“did you ever see a water rat
that could make marks like these?”

Weymouth started to his feet with some muttered exclamation.

“What is this?” he cried. “When did it happen, and how?”

In his own terse fashion, Nayland Smith related the happenings of the
night. At the conclusion of the story:

“By heaven!” whispered Weymouth, “the thing on the roof—the coughing
thing that goes on all fours, seen by Burke...”

“My own idea exactly!” cried Smith...

“Fu-Manchu,” I said excitedly, “has brought some new, some dreadful
creature, from Burma...”

“No, Petrie,” snapped Smith, turning upon me suddenly. “Not from Burma—from
Abyssinia.”

That day was destined to be an eventful one; a day never to be forgotten
by any of us concerned in those happenings which I have to record. Early
in the morning Nayland Smith set off for the British Museum to pursue his
mysterious investigations, and having performed my brief professional
round (for, as Nayland Smith had remarked on one occasion, this was a
beastly healthy district), I found, having made the necessary
arrangements, that, with over three hours to spare, I had nothing to
occupy my time until the appointment in Covent Garden Market. My lonely
lunch completed, a restless fit seized me, and I felt unable to remain
longer in the house. Inspired by this restlessness, I attired myself for
the adventure of the evening, not neglecting to place a pistol in my
pocket, and, walking to the neighboring Tube station, I booked to Charing
Cross, and presently found myself rambling aimlessly along the crowded
streets. Led on by what link of memory I know not, I presently drifted
into New Oxford Street, and looked up with a start—to learn that I
stood before the shop of a second-hand book-seller where once two years
before I had met Karamaneh.

The thoughts conjured up at that moment were almost too bitter to be
borne, and without so much as glancing at the books displayed for sale, I
crossed the roadway, entered Museum Street, and, rather in order to
distract my mind than because I contemplated any purchase, began to
examine the Oriental Pottery, Egyptian statuettes, Indian armor, and other
curios, displayed in the window of an antique dealer.

But, strive as I would to concentrate my mind upon the objects in the
window, my memories persistently haunted me, and haunted me to the
exclusion even of the actualities. The crowds thronging the Pavement, the
traffic in New Oxford Street, swept past unheeded; my eyes saw nothing of
pot nor statuette, but only met, in a misty imaginative world, the glance
of two other eyes—the dark and beautiful eyes of Karamaneh. In the
exquisite tinting of a Chinese vase dimly perceptible in the background of
the shop, I perceived only the blushing cheeks of Karamaneh; her face rose
up, a taunting phantom, from out of the darkness between a hideous, gilded
idol and an Indian sandalwood screen.

I strove to dispel this obsessing thought, resolutely fixing my attention
upon a tall Etruscan vase in the corner of the window, near to the shop
door. Was I losing my senses indeed? A doubt of my own sanity momentarily
possessed me. For, struggle as I would to dispel the illusion—there,
looking out at me over that ancient piece of pottery, was the bewitching
face of the slave-girl!

Probably I was glaring madly, and possibly I attracted the notice of the
passers-by; but of this I cannot be certain, for all my attention was
centered upon that phantasmal face, with the cloudy hair, slightly parted
red lips, and the brilliant dark eyes which looked into mine out of the
shadows of the shop.

It was bewildering—it was uncanny; for, delusion or verity, the
glamour prevailed. I exerted a great mental effort, stepped to the door,
turned the handle, and entered the shop with as great a show of composure
as I could muster.

A curtain draped in a little door at the back of one counter swayed
slightly, with no greater violence than may have been occasioned by the
draught. But I fixed my eyes upon this swaying curtain almost fiercely...
as an impassive half-caste of some kind who appeared to be a strange cross
between a Graeco-Hebrew and a Japanese, entered and quite unemotionally
faced me, with a slight bow.

So wholly unexpected was this apparition that I started back.

“Can I show you anything, sir?” inquired the new arrival, with a second
slight inclination of the head.

I looked at him for a moment in silence. Then:

“I thought I saw a lady of my acquaintance here a moment ago,” I said.
“Was I mistaken?”

“Quite mistaken, sir,” replied the shopman, raising his black eyebrows
ever so slightly; “a mistake possibly due to a reflection in the window.
Will you take a look around now that you are here?”

“Thank you,” I replied, staring him hard in the face; “at some other
time.”

I turned and quitted the shop abruptly. Either I was mad, or Karamaneh was
concealed somewhere therein.

However, realizing my helplessness in the matter, I contented myself with
making a mental note of the name which appeared above the establishment—J.
Salaman—and walked on, my mind in a chaotic condition and my heart
beating with unusual rapidity.

CHAPTER XVI. THE QUESTING HANDS

Within my view, from the corner of the room where I sat in deepest shadow,
through the partly opened window (it was screwed, like our own) were rows
of glass-houses gleaming in the moonlight, and, beyond them, orderly ranks
of flower-beds extending into a blue haze of distance. By reason of the
moon’s position, no light entered the room, but my eyes, from long
watching, were grown familiar with the darkness, and I could see Burke
quite clearly as he lay in the bed between my post and the window. I
seemed to be back again in those days of the troubled past when first
Nayland Smith and I had come to grips with the servants of Dr. Fu-Manchu.
A more peaceful scene than this flower-planted corner of Essex it would be
difficult to imagine; but, either because of my knowledge that its peace
was chimerical, or because of that outflung consciousness of danger which,
actually, or in my imagination, preceded the coming of the Chinaman’s
agents, to my seeming the silence throbbed electrically and the night was
laden with stilly omens.

Already cramped by my journey in the market-cart, I found it difficult to
remain very long in any one position. What information had Burke to sell?
He had refused, for some reason, to discuss the matter that evening, and
now, enacting the part allotted him by Nayland Smith, he feigned sleep
consistently, although at intervals he would whisper to me his doubts and
fears.

All the chances were in our favor to-night; for whilst I could not doubt
that Dr. Fu-Manchu was set upon the removal of the ex-officer of New York
police, neither could I doubt that our presence in the farm was unknown to
the agents of the Chinaman. According to Burke, constant attempts had been
made to achieve Fu-Manchu’s purpose, and had only been frustrated by his
(Burke’s) wakefulness.

There was every probability that another attempt would be made to-night.

Any one who has been forced by circumstance to undertake such a vigil as
this will be familiar with the marked changes (corresponding with phases
of the earth’s movement) which take place in the atmosphere, at midnight,
at two o’clock, and again at four o’clock. During those fours hours falls
a period wherein all life is at its lowest ebb, and every Physician is
aware that there is a greater likelihood of a patient’s passing between
midnight and four A. M., than at any other period during the cycle of the
hours.

To-night I became specially aware of this lowering of vitality, and now,
with the night at that darkest phase which precedes the dawn, an
indescribable dread, such as I had known before in my dealings with the
Chinaman, assailed me, when I was least prepared to combat it. The
stillness was intense. Then:

“Here it is!” whispered Burke from the bed.

The chill at the very center of my being, which but corresponded with the
chill of all surrounding nature at that hour, became intensified, keener,
at the whispered words.

I rose stealthily out of my chair, and from my nest of shadows watched—watched
intently, the bright oblong of the window...

Without the slightest heralding sound—a black silhouette crept up
against the pane... the silhouette of a small, malformed head, a dog-like
head, deep-set in square shoulders. Malignant eyes peered intently in.
Higher it arose—that wicked head—against the window, then
crouched down on the sill and became less sharply defined as the creature
stooped to the opening below. There was a faint sound of sniffing.

Judging from the stark horror which I experienced, myself, I doubted, now,
if Burke could sustain the role allotted him. In beneath the slightly
raised window came a hand, perceptible to me despite the darkness of the
room. It seemed to project from the black silhouette outside the pane, to
be thrust forward—and forward—and forward... that small hand
with the outstretched fingers.

The unknown possesses unique terrors; and since I was unable to conceive
what manner of thing this could be, which, extending its incredibly long
arms, now sought the throat of the man upon the bed, I tasted of that sort
of terror which ordinarily one knows only in dreams.

“Quick, sir—quick!” screamed Burke, starting up from the pillow.

The questing hands had reached his throat!

Choking down an urgent dread that I had of touching the thing which
reached through the window to kill the sleeper, I sprang across the room
and grasped the rigid, hairy forearms.

Heavens! Never have I felt such muscles, such tendons, as those beneath
the hirsute skin! They seemed to be of steel wire, and with a sudden
frightful sense of impotence, I realized that I was as powerless as a
child to relax that strangle-hold. Burke was making the most frightful
sounds and quite obviously was being asphyxiated before my eyes!

“Smith!” I cried, “Smith! Help! help! for God’s sake!”

Despite the confusion of my mind I became aware of sounds outside and
below me. Twice the thing at the window coughed; there was an incessant,
lash-like cracking, then some shouted words which I was unable to make
out; and finally the staccato report of a pistol.

Snarling like that of a wild beast came from the creature with the hairy
arms, together with renewed coughing. But the steel grip relaxed not one
iota.

I realized two things: the first, that in my terror at the suddenness of
the attack I had omitted to act as pre-arranged: the second, that I had
discredited the strength of the visitant, whilst Smith had foreseen it.

Desisting in my vain endeavor to pit my strength against that of the
nameless thing, I sprang back across the room and took up the weapon which
had been left in my charge earlier in the night, but which I had been
unable to believe it would be necessary to employ. This was a sharp and
heavy axe, which Nayland Smith, when I had met him in Covent Garden, had
brought with him, to the great amazement of Weymouth and myself.

As I leaped back to the window and uplifted this primitive weapon, a
second shot sounded from below, and more fierce snarling, coughing, and
guttural mutterings assailed my ears from beyond the pane.

Lifting the heavy blade, I brought it down with all my strength upon the
nearer of those hairy arms where it crossed the window-ledge, severing
muscle, tendon and bone as easily as a knife might cut cheese....

A shriek—a shriek neither human nor animal, but gruesomely
compounded of both—followed... and merged into a choking cough. Like
a flash the other shaggy arm was withdrawn, and some vaguely-seen body
went rolling down the sloping red tiles and crashed on to the ground
beneath.

With a second piercing shriek, louder than that recently uttered by Burke,
wailing through the night from somewhere below, I turned desperately to
the man on the bed, who now was become significantly silent. A candle,
with matches, stood upon a table hard by, and, my fingers far from steady,
I set about obtaining a light. This accomplished, I stood the candle upon
the little chest-of-drawers and returned to Burke’s side.

“Merciful God!” I cried.

Of all the pictures which remain in my memory, some of them dark enough, I
can find none more horrible than that which now confronted me in the dim
candle-light. Burke lay crosswise on the bed, his head thrown back and
sagging; one rigid hand he held in the air, and with the other grasped the
hairy forearm which I had severed with the ax; for, in a death-grip, the
dead fingers were still fastened, vise-like, at his throat.

His face was nearly black, and his eyes projected from their sockets
horribly. Mastering my repugnance, I seized the hideous piece of bleeding
anatomy and strove to release it. It defied all my efforts; in death it
was as implacable as in life. I took a knife from my pocket, and, tendon
by tendon, cut away that uncanny grip from Burke’s throat...

But my labor was in vain. Burke was dead!

I think I failed to realize this for some time. My clothes were sticking
clammily to my body; I was bathed in perspiration, and, shaking furiously,
I clutched at the edge of the window, avoiding the bloody patch upon the
ledge, and looked out over the roofs to where, in the more distant
plantations, I could hear excited voices. What had been the meaning of
that scream which I had heard but to which in my frantic state of mind I
had paid comparatively little attention?

There was a great stirring all about me.

“Smith!” I cried from the window; “Smith, for mercy’s sake where are you?”

Footsteps came racing up the stairs. Behind me the door burst open and
Nayland Smith stumbled into the room.

“God!” he said, and started back in the doorway.

“Have you got it, Smith?” I demanded hoarsely. “In sanity’s name what is
it—what is it?”

“Come downstairs,” replied Smith quietly, “and see for yourself.” He
turned his head aside from the bed.

Very unsteadily I followed him down the stairs and through the rambling
old house out into the stone-paved courtyard. There were figures moving at
the end of a long alleyway between the glass houses, and one, carrying a
lantern, stooped over something which lay upon the ground.

“That’s Burke’s cousin with the lantern,” whispered Smith in my ear;
“don’t tell him yet.”

I nodded, and we hurried up to join the group. I found myself looking down
at one of those thick-set Burmans whom I always associated with
Fu-Manchu’s activities. He lay quite flat, face downward; but the back of
his head was a shapeless blood-dotted mass, and a heavy stock-whip, the
butt end ghastly because of the blood and hair which clung to it, lay
beside him. I started back appalled as Smith caught my arm.

“It turned on its keeper!” he hissed in my ear. “I wounded it twice from
below, and you severed one arm; in its insensate fury, its unreasoning
malignity, it returned—and there lies its second victim...”

“Then...”

“It’s gone, Petrie! It has the strength of four men even now. Look!”

He stooped, and from the clenched left hand of the dead Burman, extracted
a piece of paper and opened it.

“Hold the lantern a moment,” he said.

In the yellow light he glanced at the scrap of paper.

“As I expected—a leaf of Burke’s notebook; it worked by scent.” He
turned to me with an odd expression in his gray eyes. “I wonder what piece
of my personal property Fu-Manchu has pilfered,” he said, “in order to
enable it to sleuth me?”

He met the gaze of the man holding the lantern.

“Perhaps you had better return to the house,” he said, looking him
squarely in the eyes.

The other’s face blanched.

“You don’t mean, sir—you don’t mean...”

“Brace up!” said Smith, laying his hand upon his shoulder. “Remember—he
chose to play with fire!”

One wild look the man cast from Smith to me, then went off, staggering,
toward the farm.

“Smith,” I began...

He turned to me with an impatient gesture.

“Weymouth has driven into Upminster,” he snapped; “and the whole district
will be scoured before morning. They probably motored here, but the sounds
of the shots will have enabled whoever was with the car to make good his
escape. And exhausted from loss of blood, its capture is only a matter of
time, Petrie.”

CHAPTER XVII. ONE DAY IN RANGOON

Nayland Smith returned from the telephone. Nearly twenty-four hours had
elapsed since the awful death of Burke.

“No news, Petrie,” he said, shortly. “It must have crept into some
inaccessible hole to die.”

I glanced up from my notes. Smith settled into the white cane armchair,
and began to surround himself with clouds of aromatic smoke. I took up a
half-sheet of foolscap covered with penciled writing in my friend’s
cramped characters, and transcribed the following, in order to complete my
account of the latest Fu-Manchu outrage:

“The Amharun, a Semitic tribe allied to the Falashas, who have been
settled for many generations in the southern province of Shoa (Abyssinia)
have been regarded as unclean and outcast, apparently since the days of
Menelek—son of Suleyman and the Queen of Sheba—from whom they
claim descent. Apart from their custom of eating meat cut from living
beasts, they are accursed because of their alleged association with the
Cynocephalus hamadryas (Sacred Baboon). I, myself, was taken to a hut on
the banks of the Hawash and shown a creature... whose predominant trait
was an unreasoning malignity toward... and a ferocious tenderness for the
society of its furry brethren. Its powers of scent were fully equal to
those of a bloodhound, whilst its abnormally long forearms possessed
incredible strength... a Cynocephalyte such as this, contracts phthisis
even in the more northern provinces of Abyssinia...”

“You have not explained to me, Smith,” I said, having completed this note,
“how you got in touch with Fu-Manchu; how you learnt that he was not dead,
as we had supposed, but living—active.”

Nayland Smith stood up and fixed his steely eyes upon me with an
indefinable expression in them. Then:

“No,” he replied; “I haven’t. Do you wish to know?”

“Certainly,” I said with surprise; “is there any reason why I should not?”

“There is no real reason,” said Smith; “or”—staring at me very hard—“I
hope there is no real reason.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well”—he grabbed up his pipe from the table and began furiously to
load it—“I blundered upon the truth one day in Rangoon. I was
walking out of a house which I occupied there for a time, and as I swung
around the corner into the main street, I ran into—literally ran
into...”

Again he hesitated oddly; then closed up his pouch and tossed it into the
cane chair. He struck a match.

“I ran into Karamaneh,” he continued abruptly, and began to puff away at
his pipe, filling the air with clouds of tobacco smoke.

I caught my breath. This was the reason why he had kept me so long in
ignorance of the story. He knew of my hopeless, uncrushable sentiments
toward the gloriously beautiful but utterly hypocritical and evil Eastern
girl who was perhaps the most dangerous of all Dr. Fu-Manchu’s servants;
for the power of her loveliness was magical, as I knew to my cost.

“What did you do?” I asked quietly, my fingers drumming upon the table.

“Naturally enough,” continued Smith, “with a cry of recognition I held out
both my hands to her, gladly. I welcomed her as a dear friend regained; I
thought of the joy with which you would learn that I had found the missing
one; I thought how you would be in Rangoon just as quickly as the fastest
steamer could get you there...”

“Well?”

“Karamaneh started back and treated me to a glance of absolute animosity.
No recognition was there, and no friendliness—only a sort of
scornful anger.”

He shrugged his shoulders and began to walk up and down the room.

“I do not know what you would have done in the circumstances, Petrie, but
I—”

“Yes?”

“I dealt with the situation rather promptly, I think. I simply picked her
up without another word, right there in the public street, and raced back
into the house, with her kicking and fighting like a little demon! She did
not shriek or do anything of that kind, but fought silently like a vicious
wild animal. Oh! I had some scars, I assure you; but I carried her up into
my office, which fortunately was empty at the time, plumped her down in a
chair, and stood looking at her.”

“Go on,” I said rather hollowly; “what next?”

“She glared at me with those wonderful eyes, an expression of implacable
hatred in them! Remembering all that we had done for her; remembering our
former friendship; above all, remembering you—this look of hers
almost made me shiver. She was dressed very smartly in European fashion,
and the whole thing had been so sudden that as I stood looking at her I
half expected to wake up presently and find it all a day-dream. But it was
real—as real as her enmity. I felt the need for reflection, and
having vainly endeavored to draw her into conversation, and elicited no
other answer than this glare of hatred—I left her there, going out
and locking the door behind me.”

“Very high-handed?”

“A commissioner has certain privileges, Petrie, and any action I might
choose to take was not likely to be questioned. There was only one window
to the office, and it was fully twenty feet above the level; it overlooked
a narrow street off the main thoroughfare (I think I have explained that
the house stood on a corner) so I did not fear her escaping. I had an
important engagement which I had been on my way to fulfil when the
encounter took place, and now, with a word to my native servant—who
chanced to be downstairs—I hurried off.”

Smith’s pipe had gone out as usual, and he proceeded to relight it,
whilst, with my eyes lowered, I continued to drum upon the table.

“This boy took her some tea later in the afternoon,” he continued, “and
apparently found her in a more placid frame of mind. I returned
immediately after dusk, and he reported that when last he had looked in,
about half an hour earlier, she had been seated in an armchair reading a
newspaper (I may mention that everything of value in the office was
securely locked up!) I was determined upon a certain course by this time,
and I went slowly upstairs, unlocked the door, and walked into the
darkened office. I turned up the light... the place was empty!”

“Empty!”

“The window was open, and the bird flown! Oh! it was not so simple a
flight—as you would realize if you knew the place. The street, which
the window overlooked, was bounded by a blank wall, on the opposite side,
for thirty or forty yards along; and as we had been having heavy rains, it
was full of glutinous mud. Furthermore, the boy whom I had left in charge
had been sitting in the doorway immediately below the office window
watching for my return ever since his last visit to the room above...”

“She must have bribed him,” I said bitterly—“or corrupted him with
her infernal blandishments.”

“I’ll swear she did not,” rapped Smith decisively. “I know my man, and
I’ll swear she did not. There were no marks in the mud of the road to show
that a ladder had been placed there; moreover, nothing of the kind could
have been attempted whilst the boy was sitting in the doorway; that was
evident. In short, she did not descend into the roadway and did not come
out by the door...”

“Was there a gallery outside the window?”

“No; it was impossible to climb to right or left of the window or up on to
the roof. I convinced myself of that.”

“But, my dear man!” I cried, “you are eliminating every natural mode of
egress! Nothing remains but flight.”

“I am aware, Petrie, that nothing remains but flight; in other words I
have never to this day understood how she quitted the room. I only know
that she did.”

“And then?”

“I saw in this incredible escape the cunning hand of Dr. Fu-Manchu—saw
it at once. Peace was ended; and I set to work along certain channels
without delay. In this manner I got on the track at last, and learned,
beyond the possibility of doubt, that the Chinese doctor lived—nay!
was actually on his way to Europe again!”

There followed a short silence. Then:

“I suppose it’s a mystery that will be cleared up some day,” concluded
Smith; “but to date the riddle remains intact.” He glanced at the clock.
“I have an appointment with Weymouth; therefore, leaving you to the task
of solving this problem which thus far has defied my own efforts, I will
get along.”

He read a query in my glance.

“Oh! I shall not be late,” he added; “I think I may venture out alone on
this occasion without personal danger.”

Nayland Smith went upstairs to dress, leaving me seated at my writing
table, deep in thought. My notes upon the renewed activity of Dr.
Fu-Manchu were stacked at my left hand, and, opening a new writing block,
I commenced to add to them particulars of this surprising event in Rangoon
which properly marked the opening of the Chinaman’s second campaign. Smith
looked in at the door on his way out, but seeing me thus engaged, did not
disturb me.

I think I have made it sufficiently evident in these records that my
practice was not an extensive one, and my hour for receiving patients
arrived and passed with only two professional interruptions.

My task concluded, I glanced at the clock, and determined to devote the
remainder of the evening to a little private investigation of my own. From
Nayland Smith I had preserved the matter a secret, largely because I
feared his ridicule; but I had by no means forgotten that I had seen, or
had strongly imagined that I had seen, Karamaneh—that beautiful
anomaly, who (in modern London) asserted herself to be a slave—in
the shop of an antique dealer not a hundred yards from the British Museum!

A theory was forming in my brain, which I was burningly anxious to put to
the test. I remembered how, two years before, I had met Karamaneh near to
this same spot; and I had heard Inspector Weymouth assert positively that
Fu-Manchu’s headquarters were no longer in the East End, as of yore. There
seemed to me to be a distinct probability that a suitable center had been
established for his reception in this place, so much less likely to be
suspected by the authorities. Perhaps I attached too great a value to what
may have been a delusion; perhaps my theory rested upon no more solid
foundation than the belief that I had seen Karamaneh in the shop of the
curio dealer. If her appearance there should prove to have been
phantasmal, the structure of my theory would be shattered at its base.
To-night I should test my premises, and upon the result of my
investigations determine my future action.

CHAPTER XVIII. THE SILVER BUDDHA

Museum Street certainly did not seem a likely spot for Dr. Fu-Manchu to
establish himself, yet, unless my imagination had strangely deceived me,
from the window of the antique dealer who traded under the name of J.
Salaman, those wonderful eyes of Karamaneh like the velvet midnight of the
Orient, had looked out at me.

As I paced slowly along the pavement toward that lighted window, my heart
was beating far from normally, and I cursed the folly which, in spite of
all, refused to die, but lingered on, poisoning my life. Comparative quiet
reigned in Museum Street, at no time a busy thoroughfare, and, excepting
another shop at the Museum end, commercial activities had ceased there.
The door of a block of residential chambers almost immediately opposite to
the shop which was my objective, threw out a beam of light across the
pavement, but not more than two or three people were visible upon either
side of the street.

I turned the knob of the door and entered the shop.

The same dark and immobile individual whom I had seen before, and whose
nationality defied conjecture, came out from the curtained doorway at the
back to greet me.

“Good evening, sir,” he said monotonously, with a slight inclination of
the head; “is there anything which you desire to inspect?”

“I merely wish to take a look around,” I replied. “I have no particular
item in view.”

The shop man inclined his head again, swept a yellow hand comprehensively
about, as if to include the entire stock, and seated himself on a chair
behind the counter.

I lighted a cigarette with such an air of nonchalance as I could summon to
the operation, and began casually to inspect the varied objects of
interest loading the shelves and tables about me. I am bound to confess
that I retain no one definite impression of this tour. Vases I handled,
statuettes, Egyptian scarabs, bead necklaces, illuminated missals,
portfolios of old prints, jade ornaments, bronzes, fragments of rare lace,
early printed books, Assyrian tablets, daggers, Roman rings, and a hundred
other curiosities, leisurely, and I trust with apparent interest, yet
without forming the slightest impression respecting any one of them.

Probably I employed myself in this way for half an hour or more, and
whilst my hands busied themselves among the stock of J. Salaman, my mind
was occupied entirely elsewhere. Furtively I was studying the shopman
himself, a human presentment of a Chinese idol; I was listening and
watching; especially I was watching the curtained doorway at the back of
the shop.

“We close at about this time, sir,” the man interrupted me, speaking in
the emotionless, monotonous voice which I had noted before.

I replaced upon the glass counter a little Sekhet boat, carved in wood and
highly colored, and glanced up with a start. Truly my methods were
amateurish; I had learnt nothing; I was unlikely to learn anything. I
wondered how Nayland Smith would have conducted such an inquiry, and I
racked my brains for some means of penetrating into the recesses of the
establishment. Indeed, I had been seeking such a plan for the past half an
hour, but my mind had proved incapable of suggesting one.

Why I did not admit failure I cannot imagine, but, instead, I began to tax
my brains anew for some means of gaining further time; and, as I looked
about the place, the shopman very patiently awaiting my departure, I
observed an open case at the back of the counter. The three lower shelves
were empty, but upon the fourth shelf squatted a silver Buddha.

“I should like to examine the silver image yonder,” I said; “what price
are you asking for it?”

“It is not for sale, sir,” replied the man, with a greater show of
animation than he had yet exhibited.

“Not for sale!” I said, my eyes ever seeking the curtained doorway; “how’s
that?”

“It is sold.”

“Well, even so, there can be no objection to my examining it?”

“It is not for sale, sir.”

Such a rebuff from a tradesman would have been more than sufficient to
call for a sharp retort at any other time, but now it excited the
strangest suspicions. The street outside looked comparatively deserted,
and prompted, primarily, by an emotion which I did not pause to analyze, I
adopted a singular measure; without doubt I relied upon the unusual powers
vested in Nayland Smith to absolve me in the event of error. I made as if
to go out into the street, then turned, leaped past the shopman, ran
behind the counter, and grasped at the silver Buddha!

That I was likely to be arrested for attempted larceny I cared not; the
idea that Karamaneh was concealed somewhere in the building ruled
absolutely, and a theory respecting this silver image had taken possession
of my mind. Exactly what I expected to happen at that moment I cannot say,
but what actually happened was far more startling than anything I could
have imagined.

At the instant that I grasped the figure I realized that it was attached
to the woodwork; in the next I knew that it was a handle ... as I tried to
pull it toward me I became aware that this handle was the handle of a
door. For that door swung open before me, and I found myself at the foot
of a flight of heavily carpeted stairs.

Anxious as I had been to proceed a moment before, I was now trebly anxious
to retire, and for this reason: on the bottom step of the stair, facing
me, stood Dr. Fu-Manchu!

CHAPTER XIX. DR. FU-MANCHU’S LABORATORY

I cannot conceive that any ordinary mortal ever attained to anything like
an intimacy with Dr. Fu-Manchu; I cannot believe that any man could ever
grow used to his presence, could ever cease to fear him. I suppose I had
set eyes upon Fu-Manchu some five or six times prior to this occasion, and
now he was dressed in the manner which I always associated with him,
probably because it was thus I first saw him. He wore a plain yellow robe,
and, with his pointed chin resting upon his bosom, he looked down at me,
revealing a great expanse of the marvelous brow with its sparse,
neutral-colored hair.

Never in my experience have I known such force to dwell in the glance of
any human eye as dwelt in that of this uncanny being. His singular
affliction (if affliction it were), the film or slight membrane which
sometimes obscured the oblique eyes, was particularly evident at the
moment that I crossed the threshold, but now, as I looked up at Dr.
Fu-Manchu, it lifted—revealing the eyes in all their emerald
greenness.

The idea of physical attack upon this incredible being seemed childish—inadequate.
But, following that first instant of stupefaction, I forced myself to
advance upon him.

A dull, crushing blow descended on the top of my skull, and I became
oblivious of all things.

My return to consciousness was accompanied by tremendous pains in my head,
whereby, from previous experience, I knew that a sandbag had been used
against me by some one in the shop, presumably by the immobile shopman.
This awakening was accompanied by none of those hazy doubts respecting
previous events and present surroundings which are the usual symptoms of
revival from sudden unconsciousness; even before I opened my eyes, before
I had more than a partial command of my senses, I knew that, with my
wrists handcuffed behind me, I lay in a room which was also occupied by
Dr. Fu-Manchu. This absolute certainty of the Chinaman’s presence was
evidenced, not by my senses, but only by an inner consciousness, and the
same that always awoke into life at the approach not only of Fu-Manchu in
person but of certain of his uncanny servants.

A faint perfume hung in the air about me; I do not mean that of any
essence or of any incense, but rather the smell which is suffused by
Oriental furniture, by Oriental draperies; the indefinable but
unmistakable perfume of the East.

Thus, London has a distinct smell of its own, and so has Paris, whilst the
difference between Marseilles and Suez, for instance, is even more marked.

Now, the atmosphere surrounding me was Eastern, but not of the East that I
knew; rather it was Far Eastern. Perhaps I do not make myself very clear,
but to me there was a mysterious significance in that perfumed atmosphere.
I opened my eyes.

I lay upon a long low settee, in a fairly large room which was furnished
as I had anticipated in an absolutely Oriental fashion. The two windows
were so screened as to have lost, from the interior point of view, all
resemblance to European windows, and the whole structure of the room had
been altered in conformity, bearing out my idea that the place had been
prepared for Fu-Manchu’s reception some time before his actual return. I
doubt if, East or West, a duplicate of that singular apartment could be
found.

The end in which I lay, was, as I have said, typical of an Eastern house,
and a large, ornate lantern hung from the ceiling almost directly above
me. The further end of the room was occupied by tall cases, some of them
containing books, but the majority filled with scientific paraphernalia;
rows of flasks and jars, frames of test-tubes, retorts, scales, and other
objects of the laboratory. At a large and very finely carved table sat Dr.
Fu-Manchu, a yellow and faded volume open before him, and some dark red
fluid, almost like blood, bubbling in a test-tube which he held over the
flame of a Bunsen-burner.

The enormously long nail of his right index finger rested upon the opened
page of the book to which he seemed constantly to refer, dividing his
attention between the volume, the contents of the test-tube, and the
progress of a second experiment, or possibly a part of the same, which was
taking place upon another corner of the littered table.

A huge glass retort (the bulb was fully two feet in diameter), fitted with
a Liebig’s Condenser, rested in a metal frame, and within the bulb,
floating in an oily substance, was a fungus some six inches high, shaped
like a toadstool, but of a brilliant and venomous orange color. Three flat
tubes of light were so arranged as to cast violet rays upward into the
retort, and the receiver, wherein condensed the product of this strange
experiment, contained some drops of a red fluid which may have been
identical with that boiling in the test-tube.

These things I perceived at a glance: then the filmy eyes of Dr. Fu-Manchu
were raised from the book, turned in my direction, and all else was
forgotten.