The Quest of the Sacred Slipper

CONTENTS

THE QUEST OF THE SACRED SLIPPER

CHAPTER I

THE PHANTOM SCIMITAR

I was not the only passenger aboard the S.S. Mandalay who perceived the
disturbance and wondered what it might portend and from whence proceed. A
goodly number of passengers were joining the ship at Port Said. I was lounging
against the rail, pipe in mouth, lazily wondering, with a large vagueness.

What a heterogeneous rabble it was!—a brightly coloured rabble, but the
colours all were dirty, like the town and the canal. Only the sky was clean;
the sky and the hard, merciless sunlight which spared nothing of the
uncleanness, and defied one even to think of the term dear to tourists,
“picturesque.” I was in that kind of mood. All the natives appeared to be
pockmarked; all the Europeans greasy with perspiration.

But what was the stir about?

I turned to the dark, bespectacled young man who leaned upon the rail beside
me. From the first I had taken to Mr. Ahmad Ahmadeen.

“There is some kind of undercurrent of excitement among the natives,” I said,
“a sort of subdued Greek chorus is audible. What’s it all about?”

Mr. Ahmadeen smiled. After a gaunt fashion, he was a handsome man and had a
pleasant smile.

“Probably,” he replied, “some local celebrity is joining the ship.”

I stared at him curiously.

“Any idea who he is?” (The soul of the copyhunter is a restless soul.)

A group of men dressed in semi-European fashion—that is, in European
fashion save for their turbans, which were green—passed close to us along
the deck.

Ahmadeen appeared not to have heard the question.

The disturbance, which could only be defined as a subdued uproar, but could be
traced to no particular individual or group, grew momentarily louder—and
died away. It was only when it had completely ceased that one realized how
pronounced it had been—how altogether peculiar, secret; like that
incomprehensible murmuring in a bazaar when, unknown to the insular visitor, a
reputed saint is present.

Then it happened; the inexplicable incident which, though I knew it not,
heralded the coming of strange things, and the dawn of a new power; which
should set up its secret standards in England, which should flood Europe and
the civilized world with wonder.

A shrill scream marked the overture—a scream of fear and of pain, which
dropped to a groan, and moaned out into the silence of which it was the cause.

“My God! what’s that?”

I started forward. There was a general crowding rush, and a darkly tanned and
bearded man came on board, carrying a brown leather case. Behind him surged
those who bore the victim.

“It’s one of the lascars!”

“No—an Egyptian!”

“It was a porter—?”

“What is it—?”

“Someone been stabbed!”

“Where’s the doctor?”

“Stand away there, if you please!”

That was a ship’s officer; and the voice of authority served to quell the
disturbance. Through a lane walled with craning heads they bore the insensible
man. Ahmadeen was at my elbow.

“A Copt,” he said softly. “Poor devil!” I turned to him. There was a queer
expression on his lean, clean-shaven, bronze face.

“Good God!” I said. “His hand has been cut off!”

That was the fact of the matter. And no one knew who was responsible for the
atrocity. And no one knew what had become of the severed hand! I wasted not a
moment in linking up the story. The pressman within me acted automatically.

“The gentleman just come aboard, sir,” said a steward, “is Professor Deeping.
The poor beggar who was assaulted was carrying some of the Professor’s
baggage.” The whole incident struck me as most odd. There was an idea lurking
in my mind that something else—something more—lay behind all this.
With impatience I awaited the time when the injured man, having received
medical attention, was conveyed ashore, and Professor Deeping reappeared. To
the celebrated traveller and Oriental scholar I introduced myself.

He was singularly reticent.

“I was unable to see what took place, Mr. Cavanagh,” he said. “The poor fellow
was behind me, for I had stepped from the boat ahead of him. I had just taken a
bag from his hand, but he was carrying another, heavier one. It is a clean cut,
like that of a scimitar. I have seen very similar wounds in the cases of men
who have suffered the old Moslem penalty for theft.”

Nothing further had come to light when the Mandalay left, but I found new
matter for curiosity in the behaviour of the Moslem party who had come on board
at Port Said.

In conversation with Mr. Bell, the chief officer, I learned that the supposed
leader of the party was one, Mr. Azraeel. “Obviously,” said Bell, “not his real
name or not all it. I don’t suppose they’ll show themselves on deck; they’ve
got their own servants with them, and seem to be people of consequence.”

This conversation was interrupted, but I found my unseen fellow voyagers
peculiarly interesting and pursued inquiries in other directions. I saw members
of the distinguished travellers’ retinue going about their duties, but never
obtained a glimpse of Mr. Azraeel nor of any of his green-turbaned companions.

“Who is Mr. Azraeel?” I asked Ahmadeen.

“I cannot say,” replied the Egyptian, and abruptly changed the subject.

Some curious aroma of mystery floated about the ship. Ahmadeen conveyed to me
the idea that he was concealing something. Then, one night, Mr. Bell invited me
to step forward with him.

“Listen,” he said.

From somewhere in the fo’c’sle proceeded low chanting.

“Hear it?”

“Yes. What the devil is it?”

“It’s the lascars,” said Bell. “They have been behaving in a most unusual
manner ever since the mysterious Mr. Azraeel joined us. I may be wrong in
associating the two things, but I shan’t be sorry to see the last of our
mysterious passengers.”

The next happening on board the Mandalay which I have to record was the attempt
to break open the door of Professor Deeping’s stateroom. Except when he was
actually within, the Professor left his room door religiously locked.

He made light of the affair, but later took me aside and told me a curious
story of an apparition which had appeared to him.

“It was a crescent of light,” he said, “and it glittered through the darkness
there to the left as I lay in my berth.”

“A reflection from something on the deck?”

Deeping smiled, uneasily.

“Possibly,” he replied; “but it was very sharply defined. Like the blade of a
scimitar,” he added.

I stared at him, my curiosity keenly aroused. “Does any explanation suggest
itself to you?” I said.

“Well,” he confessed, “I have a theory, I will admit; but it is rather going
back to the Middle Ages. You see, I have lived in the East a lot; perhaps I
have assimilated some of their superstitions.”

He was oddly reticent, as ever. I felt convinced that he was keeping something
back. I could not stifle the impression that the clue to these mysteries lay
somewhere around the invisible Mohammedan party.

“Do you know,” said Bell to me, one morning, “this trip’s giving me the creeps.
I believe the damned ship’s haunted! Three bells in the middle watch last
night, I’ll swear I saw some black animal crawling along the deck, in the
direction of the forward companion-way.”

“Cat?” I suggested.

“Nothing like it,” said Mr. Bell. “Mr. Cavanagh, it was some uncanny thing! I’m
afraid I can’t explain quite what I mean, but it was something I wanted to
shoot!”

“Where did it go?”

The chief officer shrugged his shoulders. “Just vanished,” he said. “I hope I
don’t see it again.”

At Tilbury the Mohammedan party went ashore in a body. Among them were veiled
women. They contrived so to surround a central figure that I entirely failed to
get a glimpse of the mysterious Mr. Azraeel. Ahmadeen was standing close by the
companion-way, and I had a momentary impression that one of the women slipped
something into his hand. Certainly, he started; and his dusky face seemed to
pale.

Then a deck steward came out of Deeping’s stateroom, carrying the brown bag
which the Professor had brought aboard at Port Said. Deeping’s voice came:

“Hi, my man! Let me take that bag!”

The bag changed hands. Five minutes later, as I was preparing to go ashore,
arose a horrid scream above the berthing clamour. Those passengers yet aboard
made in the direction from which the scream had proceeded.

A steward—the one to whom Professor Deeping had spoken—lay writhing
at the foot of the stairs leading to the saloon-deck. His right hand had been
severed above the wrist!

CHAPTER II

THE GIRL WITH THE VIOLET EYES

During the next day or two my mind constantly reverted to the incidents of the
voyage home. I was perfectly convinced that the curtain had been partially
raised upon some fantasy in which Professor Deeping figured.

But I had seen no more of Deeping nor had I heard from him, when abruptly I
found myself plunged again into the very vortex of his troubled affairs. I was
half way through a long article, I remember, upon the mystery of the outrage at
the docks. The poor steward whose hand had been severed lay in a precarious
condition, but the police had utterly failed to trace the culprit.

I had laid down my pen to relight my pipe (the hour was about ten at night)
when a faint sound from the direction of the outside door attracted my
attention. Something had been thrust through the letter-box.

“A circular,” I thought, when the bell rang loudly, imperatively.

I went to the door. A square envelope lay upon the mat—a curious
envelope, pale amethyst in colour. Picking it up, I found it to bear my
name—written simply—

“Mr. Cavanagh.”

Tearing it open I glanced at the contents. I threw open the door. No one was
visible upon the landing, but when I leaned over the banister a white-clad
figure was crossing the hall, below.

Without hesitation, hatless, I raced down the stairs. As I crossed the dimly
lighted hall and came out into the peaceful twilight of the court, my elusive
visitor glided under the archway opposite.

Just where the dark and narrow passage opened on to Fleet Street I overtook
her—a girl closely veiled and wrapped in a long coat of white ermine.

“Madam,” I said.

She turned affrightedly.

“Please do not detain me!” Her accent was puzzling, but pleasing. She glanced
apprehensively about her.

You have seen the moon through a mist?—and known it for what it was in
spite of its veiling? So, now, through the cloudy folds of the veil, I saw the
stranger’s eyes, and knew them for the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen, had
ever dreamt of.

“But you must explain the meaning of your note!”

“I cannot! I cannot! Please do not ask me!”

She was breathless from her flight and seemed to be trembling. From behind the
cloud her eyes shone brilliantly, mysteriously.

I was sorely puzzled. The whole incident was bizarre—indeed, it had in it
something of the uncanny. Yet I could not detain the girl against her will.
That she went in apprehension of something, of someone, was evident.

Past the head of the passage surged the noisy realities of Fleet Street. There
were men there in quest of news; men who would have given much for such a story
as this in which I was becoming entangled. Yet a story more tantalizingly
incomplete could not well be imagined.

I knew that I stood upon the margin of an arena wherein strange adversaries
warred to a strange end. But a mist was over all. Here, beside me, was one who
could disperse the mist—and would not. Her one anxiety seemed to be to
escape.

Suddenly she raised her veil; and I looked fully into the only really violet
eyes I had ever beheld. Mentally, I started. For the face framed in the snowy
fur was the most bewitchingly lovely imaginable. One rebellious lock of
wonderful hair swept across the white brow. It was brown hair, with an
incomprehensible sheen in the high lights that suggested the heart of a
blood-red rose.

“Oh,” she cried, “promise me that you will never breathe a word to any one
about my visit!”

“I promise willingly,” I said; “but can you give me no hint?”

“Honestly, truly, I cannot, dare not, say more! Only promise that you will do
as I ask!”

Since I could perceive no alternative—

“I will do so,” I replied.

“Thank you—oh, thank you!” she said; and dropping her veil again she
walked rapidly away from me, whispering, “I rely upon you. Do not fail me.
Good-bye!”

Her conspicuous white figure joined the hurrying throngs upon the pavement
beyond. My curiosity brooked no restraint. I hurried to the end of the
courtway. She was crossing the road. From the shadows where he had lurked, a
man came forward to meet her. A vehicle obstructed the view ere I could confirm
my impression; and when it had passed, neither my lovely visitor nor her
companion were anywhere in sight.

But, unless some accident of light and shade had deceived me, the man who had
waited was Ahmad Ahmadeen!

It seemed that some astral sluice-gate was raised; a dreadful sense of
foreboding for the first time flooded my mind. Whilst the girl had stood before
me it had been different—the mysterious charm of her personality had
swamped all else. But now, the messenger gone, it was the purport of her
message which assumed supreme significance.

Written in odd, square handwriting upon the pale amethyst paper, this was the
message—

Prevail upon Professor Deeping to place what he has in the brown case in the
porch of his house to-night. If he fails to do so, no power on earth can save
him from the Scimitar of Hassan.



A FRIEND.

CHAPTER III

“HASSAN OF ALEPPO”

Professor Deeping’s number was in the telephone directory, therefore, on
returning to my room, where there still lingered the faint perfume of my late
visitor’s presence, I asked for his number. He proved to be at home.

“Strange you should ring me up, Cavanagh,” he said; “for I was about to ring
you up.”

“First,” I replied, “listen to the contents of an anonymous letter which I have
received.”

(I remembered, and only just in time, my promise to the veiled messenger.)

“To me,” I added, having read him the note, “it seems to mean nothing. I take
it that you understand better than I do.”

“I understand very well, Cavanagh!” he replied. “You will recall my story of
the scimitar which flashed before me in the darkness of my stateroom on the
Mandalay? Well, I have seen it again! I am not an imaginative man: I had always
believed myself to possess the scientific mind; but I can no longer doubt that
I am the object of a pursuit which commenced in Mecca! The happenings on the
steamer prepared me for this, in a degree. When the man lost his hand at Port
Said I doubted. I had supposed the days of such things past. The attempt to
break into my stateroom even left me still uncertain. But the outrage upon the
steward at the docks removed all further doubt. I perceived that the contents
of a certain brown leather case were the objective of the crimes.”

I listened in growing wonder.

“It was not necessary in order to further the plan of stealing the bag that the
hands were severed,” resumed the Professor. “In fact, as was rendered evident
by the case of the steward, this was a penalty visited upon any one who touched
it! You are thinking of my own immunity?”

“I am!”

“This is attributable to two things. Those who sought to recover what I had in
the case feared that my death en route might result in its being lost to them
for ever. They awaited a suitable opportunity. They had designed to take it at
Port Said certainly, I think; but the bag was too large to be readily
concealed, and, after the outrage, might have led to the discovery of the
culprit. In the second place, they are uncertain of my faith. I have long
passed for a true Believer in the East! As a Moslem I visited Mecca—”

“You visited Mecca!”

“I had just returned from the hadj when I joined the Mandalay at Port Said! My
death, however, has been determined upon, whether I be Moslem or Christian!”

“Why?”

“Because,” came the Professor’s harsh voice over the telephone, “of the
contents of the brown leather case! I will not divulge to you now the nature of
these contents; to know might endanger you. But the case is locked in my safe
here, and the key, together with a full statement of the true facts of the
matter, is hidden behind the first edition copy of my book ‘Assyrian
Mythology,’ in the smaller bookcase—”

“Why do you tell me all this?” I interrupted.

He laughed harshly.

“The identity of my pursuer has just dawned upon me,” he said. “I know that my
life is in real danger. I would give up what is demanded of me, but I believe
its possession to be my strongest safeguard.”

Mystery upon mystery! I seemed to be getting no nearer to the heart of this
maze. What in heaven’s name did it all mean? Suddenly an idea struck me.

“Is our late fellow passenger, Mr. Ahmadeen, connected with the matter?” I
asked.

“In no way,” replied Deeping earnestly. “Mr. Ahmadeen is, I believe, a person
of some consequence in the Moslem world; but I have nothing to fear from him.”

“What steps have you taken to protect yourself?”

Again the short laugh reached my ears.

“I’m afraid long residence in the East has rendered me something of a fatalist,
Cavanagh! Beyond keeping my door locked, I have taken no steps whatever. I fear
I am quite accessible!”

A while longer we talked; and with every word the conviction was more strongly
borne in upon me that some uncanny menace threatened the peace, perhaps the
life, of Professor Deeping.

I had hung up the receiver scarce a moment when, acting upon a sudden
determination, I called up New Scotland Yard, and asked for Detective-Inspector
Bristol, whom I knew well. A few words were sufficient keenly to arouse his
curiosity, and he announced his intention of calling upon me immediately. He
was in charge of the case of the severed hand.

I made no attempt to resume work in the interval preceding his arrival. I had
not long to wait, however, ere Bristol was ringing my bell; and I hurried to
the door, only too glad to confide in one so well equipped to analyze my doubts
and fears. For Bristol is no ordinary policeman, but a trained observer, who,
when I first made his acquaintance, completely upset my ideas upon the mental
limitations of the official detective force.

In appearance Bristol suggests an Anglo-Indian officer, and at the time of
which I write he had recently returned from Jamaica and his face was as bronzed
as a sailor’s. One would never take Bristol for a detective. As he seated
himself in the armchair, without preamble I plunged into my story. He listened
gravely.

“What sort of house is Professor Deeping’s?” he asked suddenly.

“I have no idea,” I replied, “beyond the fact that it is somewhere in Dulwich.”

“May I use your telephone?”

“Certainly.”

Very quickly Bristol got into communication with the superintendent of P
Division. A brief delay, and the man came to the telephone whose beat included
the road wherein Professor Deeping’s house was situated.

“Why!” said Bristol, hanging up the receiver after making a number of
inquiries, “it’s a sort of rambling cottage in extensive grounds. There’s only
one servant, a manservant, and he sleeps in a detached lodge. If the Professor
is really in danger of attack he could not well have chosen a more likely
residence for the purpose!”

“What shall you do? What do you make of it all?”

“As I see the case,” he said slowly, “it stands something like this: Professor
Deeping has...”

The telephone bell began to ring.

I took up the receiver.

“Hullo! Hullo.”

“Cavanagh!—is that Cavanagh?”

“Yes! yes! who is that?”

“Deeping! I have rung up the police, and they are sending some one. But I
wish...”

His voice trailed off. The sound of a confused and singular uproar came to me.

“Hullo!” I cried. “Hullo!”

A shriek—a deathful, horrifying cry—and a distant babbling alone
answered me. There was a crash. Clearly, Deeping had dropped the receiver. I
suppose my face blanched.

“What is it?” asked Bristol anxiously.

“God knows what it is!” I said. “Deeping has met with some mishap—”

When, over the wires—

“Hassan of Aleppo!” came a dying whisper. “Hassan ... of Aleppo...”

CHAPTER IV

THE OBLONG BOX

“You had better wait for us,” said Bristol to the taxi-man.

“Very good, sir. But I shan’t be able to take you further back than the Brixton
Garage. You can get another cab there, though.”

A clock chimed out—an old-world chime in keeping with the loneliness, the
curiously remote loneliness, of the locality. Less than five miles from St.
Paul’s are spots whereto, with the persistence of Damascus attar, clings the
aroma of former days. This iron gateway fronting the old chapel was such a
spot.

Just within stood a plain-clothes man, who saluted my companion respectfully.

“Professor Deeping,” I began.

The man, with a simple gesture, conveyed the dreadful news.

“Dead! dead!” I cried incredulously.

He glanced at Bristol.

“The most mysterious case I have ever had anything to do with, sir,” he said.

The power of speech seemed to desert me. It was unthinkable that Deeping, with
whom I had been speaking less than an hour ago, should now be no more; that
some malign agency should thus murderously have thrust him into the great
borderland.

In that kind of silence which seems to be peopled with whispering spirits we
strode forward along the elm avenue. It was very dark where the moon failed to
penetrate. The house, low and rambling, came into view, its facade bathed in
silver light. Two of the visible windows were illuminated. A sort of loggia ran
along one side.

On our left, as we made for this, lay a black ocean of shrubbery. It intruded,
raggedly, upon the weed-grown path, for neglect was the keynote of the place.

We entered the cottage, crossed the tiny lobby, and came to the study. A man,
evidently Deeping’s servant, was sitting in a chair by the door, his head
sunken in his hands. He looked up, haggard-faced.

“My God! my God!” he groaned. “He was locked in, gentlemen! He was locked in;
and yet something murdered him!”

“What do you mean?” said Bristol. “Where were you?”

“I was away on an errand, sir. When I returned, the police were knocking the
door down. He was locked in!”

We passed him, entering the study.

It was a museum-like room, lighted by a lamp on the littered table. At first
glance it looked as though some wild thing had run amok there. The disorder was
indescribable.

“Touched nothing, of course?” asked Bristol sharply of the officer on duty.

“Nothing, sir. It’s just as we found it when we forced the door.”

“Why did you force the door?”

“He rung us up at the station and said that something or somebody had got into
the house. It was evident the poor gentleman’s nerve had broken down, sir. He
said he was locked in his study. When we arrived it was all in
darkness—but we thought we heard sounds in here.”

“What sort of sounds?”

“Something crawling about!”

Bristol turned.

“Key is in the lock on the inside of the door,” he said. “Is that where you
found it?”

“Yes, sir!”

He looked across to where the brass knob of a safe gleamed dully.

“Safe locked?”

“Yes, sir.”

Professor Deeping lay half under the table, a spectacle so ghastly that I shall
not attempt to describe it.

“Merciful heavens!” whispered Bristol. “He’s nearly decapitated!”

I clutched dizzily at the mantelpiece. It was all so utterly, incredibly
horrible. How had Deeping met his death? The windows both were latched and the
door had been locked from within!

“You searched for the murderer, of course?” asked Bristol.

“You can see, sir,” replied the officer, “that there isn’t a spot in the room
where a man could hide! And there was nobody in here when we forced the door!”

“Why!” cried my companion suddenly. “The Professor has a chisel in his hand!”

“Yes. I think he must have been trying to prise open that box yonder when he
was attacked.”

Bristol and I looked, together, at an oblong box which lay upon the floor near
the murdered man. It was a kind of small packing case, addressed to Professor
Deeping, and evidently had not been opened.

“When did this arrive?” asked Bristol. Lester, the Professor’s man, who had
entered the room, replied shakily—

“It came by carrier, sir, just before I went out.”

“Was he expecting it?”

“I don’t think so.”

Inspector Bristol and the officer dragged the box fully into the light. It was
some three feet long by one foot square, and solidly constructed.

“It is perfectly evident,” remarked Bristol, “that the murderer stayed to
search for—”

“The key of the safe!”

“Exactly. If the men really heard sounds here, it would appear that the
assassin was still searching at that time.”

“I assure you,” the officer interrupted, “that there was no living thing in the
room when we entered.”

Bristol and I looked at one another in horrified wonder.

“It’s incomprehensible!” he said.

“See if the key is in the place mentioned by the Professor, Mr. Cavanagh,
whilst I break the box.”

I went to a great, open bookcase, which the frantic searcher seemed to have
overlooked. Removing the bulky “Assyrian Mythology,” there, behind the volume,
lay an envelope, containing a key, and a short letter. Not caring to approach
more closely to the table and to that which lay beneath it, I was peering at
the small writing, in the semi-gloom by the bookcase, when Bristol cried—

“This box is unopenable by ordinary means! I shall have to smash it!”

At his words, I joined him where he knelt on the floor. Mysteriously, the chest
had defied all his efforts.

“There’s a pick-axe in the garden,” volunteered Lester. “Shall I bring it?”

“Yes.”

The man ran off.

“I see the key is safe,” said Bristol. “Possibly the letter may throw some
light upon all this.”

“Let us hope so,” I replied. “You might read it.”

He took the letter from my hand, stepped up to the table, and by the light of
the lamp read as follows—

EDWARD DEEPING.

“It is almost incredible!” I said hoarsely.

Bristol returned the letter to me without a word, and turning to Lester, who
had reentered carrying a heavy pick-axe, he attacked the oblong box with savage
energy.

Through the house of death the sound of the blows echoed and rang with a sort
of sacrilegious mockery. The box fell to pieces.

“My God! look, sir!”

Lester was the trembling speaker.

The box, I have said, was but three feet long by one foot square, and had
clearly defied poor Deeping’s efforts to open it. But a crescent-shaped knife,
wet with blood, lay within!

CHAPTER V

THE OCCUPANT OF THE BOX

Dimly to my ears came the ceaseless murmur of London. The night now was far
advanced, and not a sound disturbed the silence of the court below my windows.

Professor Deeping’s “Assyrian Mythology” lay open before me, beside it my
notebook. A coal dropped from the fire, and I half started up out of my chair.
My nerves were all awry, and I had more than my horrible memories of the
murdered man to thank for it. Let me explain what I mean.

When, after assisting, or endeavouring to assist, Bristol at his elaborate
inquiries, I had at last returned to my chambers, I had become the victim of a
singular delusion—though one common enough in the case of persons whose
nerves are overwrought. I had thought myself followed.

During the latter part of my journey I found myself constantly looking from the
little window at the rear of the cab. I had an impression that some vehicle was
tracking us. Then, when I discharged the man and walked up the narrow passage
to the court, it was fear of a skulking form that dodged from shadow to shadow
which obsessed me.

Finally, as I entered the hall and mounted the darkened stair, from the first
landing I glanced down into the black well beneath. Blazing yellow eyes, I
thought, looked up at me!

I will confess that I leapt up the remaining flight of stairs to my door, and,
safely within, found myself trembling as if with a palsy.

When I sat down to write (for sleep was an impossible proposition) I placed my
revolver upon the table beside me. I cannot say why. It afforded me some sense
of protection, I suppose. My conclusions, thus far, amounted to the
following—

The apparition of the phantom scimitar was due to the presence of someone who,
by means of the moonlight, or of artificial light, cast a reflection of such a
weapon as that found in the oblong chest upon the wall of a darkened
apartment—as, Deeping’s stateroom on the Mandalay, his study, etc.

A group of highly efficient assassins, evidently Moslem fanatics, who might or
might not be of the ancient order of the Hashishin, had pursued the stolen
slipper to England. They had severed any hand, other than that of a Believer,
which had touched the case containing it. (The Coptic porter was a Christian.)

Uncertain, possibly, of Deeping’s faith, or fearful of endangering the success
of their efforts by an outrage upon him en route, they had refrained from this
until his arrival at his house. He had been warned of his impending end by
Ahmad Ahmadeen.

Who was Ahmadeen? And who was his beautiful associate? I found myself unable,
at present, to answer either of those questions. In order to gain access to
Professor Deeping, who so carefully secluded himself, a box had been sent to
him by ordinary carrier. (As I sat at my table, Scotland Yard was busy
endeavouring to trace the sender.) Respecting this box we had made an
extraordinary discovery.

It was of the kind used by Eastern conjurors for what is generally known as
“the Box Trick.” That is to say, it could only be opened (short of smashing it)
from the inside! You will remember what we found within it? Consider this with
the new fact, above, and to what conclusion do you come?

Something (it is not possible to speak of someone in connection with so small a
box) had been concealed inside, and had killed Professor Deeping whilst he was
actually engaged in endeavouring to force it open. This inconceivable creature
had then searched the study for the slipper—or for the key of the safe.
Interrupted and trapped by the arrival of the police, the creature had returned
to the box, re-closed it, and had actually been there when the study was
searched!

For a creature so small as the murderous thing in the box to slip out during
the confusion, and at some time prior to Bristol’s arrival, was no difficult
matter. The inspector and I were certain that these were the facts.

But what was this creature?

I turned to the chapter in “Assyrian Mythology”—“The Tradition of the
Hashishin.”

The legends which the late Professor Deeping had collected relative to this
sect of religious murderers were truly extraordinary. Of the cult’s extinction
at the time of writing he was clearly certain, but he referred to the popular
belief, or Moslem legend, that, since Hassan of Khorassan, there had always
been a Sheikh-al-jebal, and that a dreadful being known as Hassan of Aleppo was
the present holder of the title.

He referred to the fact that De Sacy has shown the word Assassin to be derived
from Hashishin, and quoted El-Idrisi to the same end. The Hashishin performed
their murderous feats under the influence of hashish, or Indian hemp; and
during the state of ecstasy so induced, according to Deeping, they acquired
powers almost superhuman. I read how they could scale sheer precipices, pass
fearlessly along narrow ledges which would scarce afford foothold for a rat,
cast themselves from great heights unscathed, and track one marked for death in
such a manner as to remain unseen not only by the victim but by others about
him. At this point of my studies I started, in a sudden nervous panic, and laid
my hand upon my revolver.

I thought of the eyes which had seemed to look up from the black well of the
staircase—I thought of the horrible end of this man whose book lay upon
the table ... and I thought I heard a faint sound outside my study door!

The key of Deeping’s safe, and his letter to me, lay close by my hand. I
slipped them into a drawer and locked it. With every nerve, it seemed, strung
up almost to snapping point, I mechanically pursued my reading.

“At the time of the Crusades,” wrote Deeping, “there was a story current of
this awful Order which I propose to recount. It is one of the most persistent
dealing with the Hashishin, and is related to-day of the apparently mythical
Hassan of Aleppo. I am disposed to believe that at one time it had a solid
foundation, for a similar practice was common in Ancient Egypt and is mentioned
by Georg Ebers.”

My door began very slowly to open!

Merciful God! What was coming into the room!

So very slowly, so gently, nay, all but imperceptibly, did it move, that had my
nerves been less keenly attuned I doubt not I should have remained unaware of
the happening. Frozen with horror, I sat and watched. Yet my mental condition
was a singular one.

My direct gaze never quitted the door, but in some strange fashion I saw the
words of the next paragraph upon the page before me!

“As making peculiarly efficient assassins, when under the influence of the
drug, and as being capable of concealing themselves where a normal man could
not fail to be detected—”

(At this moment I remembered that my bathroom window was open, and that the
waste-pipe passed down the exterior wall.)

“—the Sheikh-al-jebal took young boys of a certain desert tribe, and for
eight hours of every day, until their puberty, confined them in a wooden
frame—”

What looked like a reed was slowly inserted through the opening between door
and doorpost! It was brought gradually around ... until it pointed directly
toward me!

I seemed to put forth a mighty mental effort, shaking off the icy hand of fear
which held me inactive in my chair. A saving instinct warned me—and I
ducked my head.

Something whirred past me and struck the wall behind.

Revolver in hand, I leapt across the room, dashed the door open, and fired
blindly—again—and again—and again—down the passage.

And in the brief gleams I saw it!

I cannot call it man, but I saw the thing which, I doubt not, had killed poor
Deeping with the crescent-knife and had propelled a poison-dart at me.

It was a tiny dwarf! Neither within nor without a freak exhibition had I seen
so small a human being! A kind of supernatural dread gripped me by the throat
at sight of it. As it turned with animal activity and bounded into my bathroom,
I caught a three-quarter view of the creature’s swollen, incredible
head—which was nearly as large as that of a normal man!

Never while my mind serves me can I forget that yellow, grinning face and those
canine fangs—the tigerish, blazing eyes—set in the great, misshapen
head upon the tiny, agile body.

Wildly, I fired again. I hurled myself forward and dashed into the room.

Like nothing so much as a cat, the gleaming body (the dwarf was but scantily
clothed) streaked through the open window!

Certain death, I thought, must be his lot upon the stones of the court far
below. I ran and looked down, shaking in every limb, my mind filled with a
loathing terror unlike anything I had ever known.

Brilliant moonlight flooded the pavement beneath; for twenty yards to left and
right every stone was visible.

The court was empty!

Human, homely London moved and wrought intimately about me; but there, at sight
of the empty court below, a great loneliness swept down like a mantle—a
clammy mantle of the fabric of dread. I stood remote from my fellows, in an
evil world peopled with the creatures of Hassan of Aleppo.

Moved by some instinct, as that of a frightened child, I dropped to my knees
and buried my face in trembling hands.

CHAPTER VI

THE RING OF THE PROPHET

“There is no doubt,” said Mr. Rawson, “that great personal danger attaches to
any contact with this relic. It is the first time I have been concerned with
anything of the kind.”

Mr. Bristol, of Scotland Yard, standing stiffly military by the window, looked
across at the gray-haired solicitor. We were all silent for a few moments.

“My late client’s wishes,” continued Mr. Rawson, “are explicit. His last
instructions, evidently written but a short time prior to his death, advise me
that the holy slipper of the Prophet is contained in the locked safe at his
house in Dulwich. He was clearly of opinion that you, Mr. Cavanagh, would incur
risk—great risk—from your possession of the key. Since attempts
have been made upon you, murderous attempts, the late Professor Deeping, my
unfortunate client, evidently was not in error.”

“Mysterious outrages,” said Bristol, “have marked the progress of the stolen
slipper from Mecca almost to London.”

“I understand,” interrupted the solicitor, “that a fanatic known as Hassan of
Aleppo seeks to restore the relic to its former resting-place.”

“That is so.”

“Exactly; and it accounts for the Professor’s wish that the safe should not be
touched by any one but a Believer—and for his instructions that its
removal to the Antiquarian Museum and the placing of the slipper within that
institution be undertaken by a Moslem or Moslems.”

Bristol frowned.

“Any one who has touched the receptacle containing the thing,” he said, “has
either been mutilated or murdered. I want to apprehend the authors of those
outrages, but I fail to see why the slipper should be put on exhibition. Other
crimes are sure to follow.”

“I can only pursue my instructions,” said Mr. Rawson dryly. “They are, that the
work be done in such a manner as to expose all concerned to a minimum of risk
from these mysterious people; that if possible a Moslem be employed for the
purpose; and that Mr. Cavanagh, here, shall always hold the key or keys to the
case in the museum containing the slipper. Will you undertake to look for
some—Eastern workmen, Mr. Bristol? In the course of your inquiries you
may possibly come across such a person.”

“I can try,” replied Bristol. “Meanwhile, I take it, the safe must remain at
Dulwich?”

“Certainly. It should be guarded.”

“We are guarding it and shall guard it,” Bristol assured him. “I only hope we
catch someone trying to get at it!”

Shortly afterward Bristol and I left the office, and, his duties taking him to
Scotland Yard, I returned to my chambers to survey the position in which I now
found myself. Indeed, it was a strange one enough, showing how great things
have small beginnings; for, as a result of a steamer acquaintance I found
myself involved in a dark business worthy of the Middle Ages. That Professor
Deeping should have stolen one of the holy slippers of Mohammed was no affair
of mine, and that an awful being known as Hassan of Aleppo should have pursued
it did not properly enter into my concerns; yet now, with a group of Eastern
fanatics at large in England, I was become, in a sense, the custodian of the
relic. Moreover, I perceived that I had been chosen that I might safeguard
myself. What I knew of the matter might imperil me, but whilst I held the key
to the reliquary, and held it fast, I might hope to remain immune though I must
expect to be subjected to attempts. It would be my affair to come to terms.

Contemplating these things I sat, in a world of dark dreams, unconscious of the
comings and goings in the court below, unconscious of the hum which told of
busy Fleet Street so near to me. The weather, as is its uncomfortable habit in
England, had suddenly grown tropically hot, plunging London into the vapours of
an African spring, and the sun was streaming through my open window fully upon
the table.

I mopped my clammy forehead, glancing with distaste at the pile of work which
lay before me. Then my eyes turned to an open quarto book. It was the late
Professor Deeping’s “Assyrian Mythology,” and embodied the result of his
researches into the history of the Hashishin, the religious murderers of whose
existence he had been so skeptical. To the Chief of the Order, the terrible
Sheikh Hassan of Aleppo, he referred as a “fabled being”; yet it was at the
hands of this “fabled being” that he had met his end! How incredible it all
seemed. But I knew full well how worthy of credence it was.

Then upon my gloomy musings a sound intruded—the ringing of my door bell.
I rose from my chair with a weary sigh, went to the door, and opened it. An
aged Oriental stood without. He was tall and straight, had a snow-white beard
and clear-cut, handsome features. He wore well-cut European garments and a
green turban. As I stood staring he saluted me gravely.

“Mr. Cavanagh?” he asked, speaking in faultless English.

“I am he.”

“I learn that the services of a Moslem workman are required.”

“Quite correct, sir; but you should apply at the offices of Messrs. Rawson
& Rawson, Chancery Lane.”

The old man bowed, smiling.

“Many thanks; I understood so much. But, my position being a peculiar one, I
wished to speak with you—as a friend of the late Professor.”

I hesitated. The old man looked harmless enough, but there was an air of
mystery about the matter which put me on my guard.

“You will pardon me,” I said, “but the work is scarcely of a kind—”

He raised his thin hand.

“I am not undertaking it myself. I wished to explain to you the conditions
under which I could arrange to furnish suitable porters.”

His patient explanation disposed me to believe that he was merely some kind of
small contractor, and in any event I had nothing to fear from this frail old
man.

“Step in, sir,” I said, repenting of my brusquerie—and stood aside for
him.

He entered, with that Oriental meekness in which there is something majestic. I
placed a chair for him in the study, and reseated myself at the table. The old
man, who from the first had kept his eyes lowered deferentially, turned to me
with a gentle gesture, as if to apologize for opening the conversation.

“From the papers, Mr. Cavanagh,” he began, “I have learned of the circumstances
attending the death of Professor Deeping. Your papers”—he smiled, and I
thought I had never seen a smile of such sweetness—“your papers know all!
Now I understand why a Moslem is required, and I understand what is required of
him. But remembering that the object of his labours would be to place a holy
relic on exhibition for the amusement of unbelievers, can you reasonably expect
to obtain the services of one?”

His point of view was fair enough.

“Perhaps not,” I replied. “For my own part I should wish to see the slipper
back in Mecca, or wherever it came from. But Professor Deeping—”

“Professor Deeping was a thorn in the flesh of the Faithful!”

My visitor’s voice was gravely reproachful.

“Nevertheless his wishes must be considered,” I said, “and the methods adopted
by those who seek to recover the relic are such as to alienate all sympathy.”

“You speak of the Hashishin?” asked the old man. “Mr. Cavanagh, in your own
faith you have had those who spilled the blood of infidels as freely!”

“My good sir, the existence of such an organization cannot be tolerated today!
This survival of the dark ages must be stamped out. However just a cause may
be, secret murder is not permissible, as you, a man of culture, a Believer,
and”—I glanced at his unusual turban—“a descendant of the Prophet,
must admit.”

“I can admit nothing against the Guardian of the Tradition, Mr. Cavanagh! The
Prophet taught that we should smite the Infidel. I ask you—have you the
courage of your convictions?”

“Perhaps; I trust so.”

“Then assist me to rid England of what you have called a survival of the dark
ages. I will furnish porters to remove and carry the safe, if you will deliver
to me the key!”

I sprang to my feet.

“That is madness!” I cried. “In the first place I should be compromising with
my conscience, and in the second place I should be defenceless against those
who might—”

“I have with me a written promise from one highly placed—one to whose
will Hassan of Aleppo bows!”

My mind greatly disturbed, I watched the venerable speaker. I had determined
now that he was some religious leader of Islam in England, who had been deputed
to approach me; and, let me add, I was sorely tempted to accede to his
proposal, for nothing would be gained by any one if the slipper remained for
ever at the museum, whereas by conniving at its recovery by those who, after
all, were its rightful owners I should be ridding England of a weird and
undesirable visitant.

I think I should have agreed, when I remembered that the Hashishin had murdered
Professor Deeping and had mutilated others wholly innocent of offence. I looked
across at the old man. He had drawn himself up to his great height, and for the
first time fully raising the lids, had fixed upon me the piercing gaze of a
pair of eagle eyes. I started, for the aspect of this majestic figure was
entirely different from that of the old stranger who had stood suppliant before
me a moment ago.

“It is impossible,” I said. “I can come to no terms with those who shield
murderers.”

He regarded me fixedly, but did not move.

“Es-selam ’aleykum!” I added (“Peace be on you!”) closing the interview in the
Eastern manner.

The old man lowered his eyes, and saluted me with graceful gravity.

“Wa-’aleykum!” he said (“And on you!”). I conducted him to the door and closed
it upon his exit. In his last salute I had noticed the flashing of a ring which
he wore upon his left hand, and he was gone scarce ten seconds ere my heart
began to beat furiously. I snatched up “Assyrian Mythology” and with trembling
fingers turned to a certain page.

There I read—

Each Sheikh of the Assassins is said to be invested with the “Ring of the
Prophet.” It bears a green stone, shaped in the form of a scimitar or crescent.

My dreadful suspicion was confirmed. I knew who my visitor had been.

“God in heaven!” I whispered. “It was Hassan of Aleppo!”

CHAPTER VII

FIRST ATTEMPT ON THE SAFE

On the following morning I was awakened by the arrival of Bristol. I hastened
to admit him.

“Your visitor of yesterday,” he began, “has wasted no time!”

“What has happened?”

He tugged irritably at his moustache. “I don’t know!” he replied. “Of course it
was no surprise to find that there isn’t a Mohammedan who’ll lay his little
finger on Professor Deeping’s safe! There’s no doubt in my mind that every
lascar at the docks knows Hassan of Aleppo to be in England. Some other
arrangement will have to be arrived at, if the thing is ever to be taken to the
Antiquarian Museum. Meanwhile we stand to lose it. Last night—”

He accepted a cigarette, and lighted it carefully.

“Last night,” he resumed, “a member of P Division was on point duty outside the
late Professor’s house, and two C.I.D. men were actually in the room where the
safe is. Result—someone has put in at least an hour’s work on the lock,
but it proved too tough a job!”

I stared at him amazedly.

“Someone has been at the lock!” I cried. “But that is impossible, with two men
in the room—unless—”

“They were both knocked on the head!”

“Both! But by whom! My God! They are not—”

“Oh, no! It was done artistically. They both came round about four o’clock this
morning.”

“And who attacked them?”

“They had no idea. Neither of them saw a thing!”

My amazement grew by leaps and bounds. “But, Bristol, one of them must have
seen the other succumb!”

“Both did! Their statements tally exactly!”

“I quite fail to follow you.”

“That’s not surprising. Listen: When I got on the scene about five o’clock,
Marden and West, the two C.I.D. men, had quite recovered their senses, though
they were badly shaken, and one had a cracked skull. The constable was
conscious again, too.”

“What! Was he attacked?”

“In exactly the same way! I’ll give you Marden’s story, as he gave it to me a
few minutes after the surgeon had done with him. He said that they were sitting
in the study, smoking, and with both windows wide open. It was a fearfully hot
night.”

“Did they have lights?”

“No. West sat in an armchair near the writing-table; Marden sat by the window
next to the door. I had arranged that every hour one of them should go out to
the gate and take the constable’s report. It was just after Marden had been out
at one o’clock that it happened.

“They were sitting as I tell you when Marden thought he heard a curious sort of
noise from the gate. West appeared to have heard nothing; but I have no doubt
that it was the sound of the constable’s fall. West’s pipe had gone out, and he
struck a match to relight it. As he did so, Marden saw him drop the match,
clench both fists, and with eyes glaring in the moonlight and his teeth coming
together with a snap, drop from his chair.

“Marden says that he was half up from his seat when something struck him on the
back of the head with fearful force. He remembered nothing more until he awoke,
with the dawn creeping into the room, and heard West groaning somewhere beside
him. They both had badly damaged skulls with great bruises behind the ear. It
is instructive to note that their wounds corresponded almost to a fraction of
an inch. They had been stunned by someone who thoroughly understood his
business, and with some heavy, blunt weapon. A few minutes later came the man
to relieve the constable; and the constable was found to have been treated in
exactly the same way!”

“But if Marden’s account is true—”

“West, as he lost consciousness, saw Marden go in exactly the same way.”

“Marden was seated by the open window, but I cannot conjecture how any one can
have got at West, who sat by the table!”

“The case of Marden is little less than remarkable; he was some distance from
the window. No one could possibly have reached him from outside.”

“And the constable?”

“The constable can give us no clue. He was suddenly struck down, as the others
were. I examined the safe, of course, but didn’t touch it, according to
instructions. Someone had been at work on the lock, but it had defied their
efforts. I’m fully expecting though that they’ll be back to-night, with
different tools!”

“The place is watched during the day, of course?”

“Of course. But it’s unlikely that anything will be attempted in daylight.
Tonight I am going down myself.”

“Could you arrange that I join you?”

“I could, but you can see the danger for yourself?”

“It is extraordinarily mysterious.”

“Mr. Cavanagh, it’s uncanny!” said Bristol. “I can understand that one of these
Hashishin could easily have got up behind the man on duty out in the open. I
know, and so do you, that they’re past masters of that kind of thing; but
unless they possess the power to render themselves invisible, it’s not evident
how they can have got behind West whilst he sat at the table, with Marden
actually watching him!”

“We must lay a trap for them to-night.”

“Rely upon me to do so. My only fear is that they may anticipate it and change
their tactics. Hassan of Aleppo apparently knows as much of our plans as we do
ourselves.”

Inspector Bristol, though a man of considerable culture, clearly was infected
with a species of supernatural dread.

CHAPTER VIII

THE VIOLET EYES AGAIN

At four o’clock in the afternoon I had heard nothing further from Bristol, but
I did not doubt that he would advise me of his arrangements in good time. I
sought by hard work to forget for a time the extraordinary business of the
stolen slipper; but it persistently intruded upon my mind. Particularly, my
thoughts turned to the night of Professor Deeping’s murder, and to the
bewitchingly pretty woman who had warned me of the impending tragedy. She had
bound me to secrecy—a secrecy which had proved irksome, for it had since
appeared to me that she must have been an accomplice of Hassan of Aleppo. At
the time I had been at a loss to define her peculiar accent, now it seemed
evidently enough to have been Oriental.

I threw down my pen in despair, for work was impossible, went downstairs, and
walked out under the arch into Fleet Street. Quite mechanically I turned to the
left, and, still engaged with idle conjectures, strolled along westward.

Passing the entrance to one of the big hotels, I was abruptly recalled to the
realities—by a woman’s voice.

“Wait for me here,” came musically to my ears.

I stopped, and turned. A woman who had just quitted a taxi-cab was entering the
hotel. The day was hot and thunderously oppressive, and this woman with the
musical voice wore a delicate costume of flimsiest white. A few steps upward
she paused and glanced back. I had a view of a Greek profile, and for one
magnetic instant looked into eyes of the deepest and most wonderful violet.

Then, shaking off inaction, I ran up the steps and overtook the lady in white
as a porter swung open the door to admit her. We entered together.

“Madame,” I said in a low tone, “I must detain you for a moment. There is
something I have to ask.”

She turned, exhibiting the most perfect composure, lowered her lashes and
raised them again, the gaze of the violet eyes sweeping me from head to foot
with a sort of frigid scorn.

“I fear you have made a mistake, sir. We have never met before!”

Her voice betrayed no trace of any foreign accent!

“But,” I began—and paused.

I felt myself flush; for this encounter in the foyer of an hotel, with many
curious onlookers, was like to prove embarrassing if my beautiful acquaintance
persisted in her attitude. I fully realized what construction would be put upon
my presence there, and foresaw that forcible and ignominious ejection must be
my lot if I failed to establish my right to address her.

She turned away, and crossed in the direction of the staircase. A sunbeam
sought out a lock of hair that strayed across her brow, and kissed it to a
sudden glow like that which lurks in the heart of a blush rose.

That wonderful sheen, which I had never met with elsewhere in nature, but which
no artifice could lend, served to remove my last frail doubt which had survived
the evidence of the violet eyes. I had been deceived by no strange resemblance;
this was indeed the woman who had been the harbinger of Professor Deeping’s
death. In three strides I was beside her again. Curious glances were set upon
me, and I saw a servant evidently contemplating approach; but I ignored all
save my own fixed purpose.

“You must listen to what I have to say!” I whispered. “If you decline, I shall
have no alternative but to call in the detective who holds a warrant for your
arrest!”

She stood quite still, watching me coolly. “I suppose you would wish to avoid a
scene?” I added.

“You have already made me the object of much undesirable attention,” she
replied scornfully. “I do not need your assurance that you would disgrace me
utterly! You are talking nonsense, as you must be aware—unless you are
insane. But if your object be to force your acquaintance upon me, your methods
are novel, and, under the circumstances, effective. Come, sir, you may talk to
me—for three minutes!”

The musical voice had lost nothing of its imperiousness, but for one instant
the lips parted, affording a fleeting glimpse of pearl beyond the coral.

Her sudden change of front was bewildering. Now, she entered the lift and I
followed her. As we ascended side by side I found it impossible to believe that
this dainty white figure was that of an associate of the Hashishin, that of a
creature of the terrible Hassan of Aleppo. Yet that she was the same girl who,
a few days after my return from the East, had shown herself conversant with the
plans of the murderous fanatics was beyond doubt. Her accent on that occasion
clearly had been assumed, with what object I could not imagine. Then, as we
quitted the lift and entered a cosy lounge, my companion seated herself upon a
Chesterfield, signing to me to sit beside her.

As I did so she lay back smiling, and regarding me from beneath her black
lashes. Thus, half veiled, her great violet eyes were most wonderful.

“Now, sir,” she said softly, “explain yourself.”

“Then you persist in pretending that we have not met before?”

“There is no occasion for pretence,” she replied lightly; and I found myself
comparing her voice with her figure, her figure with her face, and vainly
endeavouring to compute her age. Frankly, she was bewildering—this lovely
girl who seemed so wholly a woman of the world.

“This fencing is useless.”

“It is quite useless! Come, I know New York, London, and I know Paris, Vienna,
Budapest. Therefore I know mankind! You thought I was pretty, I suppose? I may
be; others have thought so. And you thought you would like to make my
acquaintance without troubling about the usual formalities? You adopted a
singularly brutal method of achieving your object, but I love such insolence in
a man. Therefore I forgave you. What have you to say to me?”

I perceive that I had to deal with a bold adventuress, with a consummate
actress, who, finding herself in a dangerous situation, had adopted this daring
line of defence, and now by her personal charm sought to lure me from my
purpose.

But with the scimitar of Hassan of Aleppo stretched over me, with the dangers
of the night before me, I was in no mood for a veiled duel of words, for an
interchange of glances in thrust and parry, however delightful such warfare
might have been with so pretty an adversary.

For a long time I looked sternly into her eyes; but their violet mystery
defied, whilst her red-lipped smile taunted me.

“Unfortunately,” I said, with slow emphasis, “you are protected by my promise,
made on the occasion of our previous meeting. But murder has been done, so that
honour scarcely demands that I respect my promise further—”

She raised her eyebrows slightly.

“Surely that depends upon the quality of the honour!” she said.

“I believe you to be a member of a murderous organization, and unless you can
convince me that I am wrong, I shall act accordingly.”

At that she leaned toward me, laying her hand on my arm.

“Please do not be so cruel,” she whispered, “as to drag me into a matter with
which truly I have no concern. Believe me, you are utterly mistaken. Wait one
moment, and I will prove it.”

She rose, and before I could make move to detain her, quitted the room; but the
door scarcely had closed ere I was afoot. The corridor beyond was empty. I ran
on. The lift had just descended. A dark man whom I recognized stood near the
closed gate.

“Quick!” I said, “I am Cavanagh of the Report! Did you see a lady enter the
lift?”

“I did, Mr. Cavanagh,” answered the hotel detective; for this was he.

In such a giant inn as this I knew full well that one could come and go almost
with impunity, though one had no right to the hospitality of the establishment;
and it was with a premonition respecting what his answer would be, that I asked
the man—

“Is she staying here?”

“She is not. I have never seen her before!”

The girl with the violet eyes had escaped, taking all her secrets with her!

CHAPTER IX

SECOND ATTEMPT ON THE SAFE

“You see,” said Bristol, “the Hashishin must know that the safe won’t remain
here unopened much longer. They will therefore probably make another attempt
to-night.”

“It seems likely,” I replied; and was silent. Outside the open windows
whispered the shrubbery, as a soft breeze stole through the bushes. Beyond, the
moon made play in the dim avenue. From the old chapel hard by the sweet-toned
bell proclaimed midnight. Our vigil was begun. In this room it was that
Professor Deeping had met death at the hands of the murderous Easterns; here it
was that Marden and West had mysteriously been struck down the night before.

To-night was every whit as hot, and Bristol and I had the windows widely
opened. My companion was seated where the detective, Marden, had sat, in a
chair near the westerly window, and I lay back in the armchair that had been
occupied by West.

I may repeat here that the house of the late Professor Deeping was more
properly a cottage, surrounded by a fairly large piece of ground, for the most
part run wild. The room used as a study was on the ground floor, and had
windows on the west and on the south. Those on the west (French windows) opened
on a loggia; those on the south opened right into the dense tangle of a
neglected shrubbery. The place possessed an oppressive atmosphere of
loneliness, for which in some measure its history may have been responsible.

The silence, seemingly intensified by each whisper that sped through the elms
and crept about the shrubbery, grew to such a stillness that I told myself I
had experienced nothing like it since crossing with a caravan I had slept in
the desert. Yet noisy, whirling London was within gunshot of us; and this,
though hard enough to believe, was a reflection oddly comforting. Only one
train of thought was possible, and this I pursued at random.

By what means were Marden and West struck down? In thus exposing ourselves, in
order that we might trap the author or authors of the outrage, did we act
wisely?

“Bristol,” I said suddenly, “it was someone who came through the open window.”

“No one,” he replied, “came through the windows. West saw absolutely nothing.
But if any one comes that way to-night, we have him!”

“West may have seen nothing; but how else could any one enter?”

Bristol offered no reply; and I plunged again into a maze of speculation.

Powerful mantraps were set in such a way that any one or anything, ignorant of
their positions, coming up to the windows must unavoidably be snared. These had
been placed in position with much secrecy after dusk, and the man on duty at
the gate stood with his back to the wall. No one could approach him except from
the front. My thoughts took a new turn.

Was the girl with the violet eyes an ally of the Hashishin? Thus far, although
she so palpably had tricked me, I had found myself unable to speak of her to
Bristol; for the idea had entered my mind that she might have learned of the
plan to murder Deeping without directly being implicated. Now came yet another
explanation. The publicity given to that sensational case might have interested
some third party in the fate of the stolen slipper! Could it be that others, in
no way connected with the dreadful Hassan of Aleppo, were in quest of the
slipper?

Scotland Yard had taken care to ensure that the general public be kept in
ignorance of the existence of such an organization as the Hashishin, but I must
assume that this hypothetical third party were well aware that they had Hassan,
as well as the authorities, to count with. Granting the existence of such a
party, my beautiful acquaintance might be classified as one of its members. I
spoke again.

“Bristol,” I said, “has it occurred to you that there may be others, as well as
Hassan of Aleppo, seeking to gain possession of the sacred slipper?”

“It has not,” he replied. “In the strictest sense of the expression, they would
be out for trouble! What gave you the idea?”

“I hardly know,” I returned evasively, for even now I was loath to betray the
mysterious girl with the wonderful eyes.

The chapel bell sounding the half-hour, Bristol rose with a sigh that might
have been one of relief, and went out to take the report of the man on duty at
the gate. As his footsteps died away along the elm avenue, it came to me how,
in the darkness about, menace lurked; and I felt myself succumbing to the
greatest dread experienced by man—the dread of the unknown.

All that I knew of the weird group of fanatics—survivals of a dim and
evil past—who must now be watching this cottage as bloodlustful devotees
watch a shrine violated, burst upon my mind. I peopled the still blackness with
lurking assassins, armed with the murderous knowledge of by-gone centuries,
armed with invisible weapons which struck down from afar, supernaturally.

I glanced toward the corner of the room where the safe stood, reliquary of a
worthless thing for which much blood had been spilled.

Then sounded footsteps along the avenue, and my fear whispered that they were
not those of Bristol but of one who had murdered him, and who came guilefully,
to murder me!

I snatched the revolver from my pocket and crossed the darkened room. Just to
the right of one of the French windows I stood looking out across the loggia to
the end of the avenue. The night was a bright one, and the room was flooded
with a reflected mystic light, but outside the moon paved the avenue with
pearl, and through the trees I saw a figure approaching.

Was it Bristol? It had his build, it had his gait; but my fears remained. Then
the figure crossed the patch of shrubbery and stepped on to the loggia.

“Mr. Cavanagh!”

I laughed dryly at my own cowardice, but my heart was still beating abnormally.

“Here I am, Bristol, in a ghastly funk!”

“I don’t wonder! They may be on us any time now. All’s well at the gate, but
Morris says he heard, or thought he heard something at the side of the chapel
opposite, a while ago.”

“Wind in the bushes?”

“It may have been; but he says there was no breeze at the time.”

We resumed our seats.

“Bristol,” I said, “now that the danger grows imminent, doesn’t it seem to you
foolhardy for us thus to expose ourselves?”

“Perhaps it is,” he agreed; “but how otherwise are we likely to learn what
happened to Marden and West?”

“The enemy may adopt different measures to-night.”

“I think not. Our dispositions are the same, and I credit them with cunning
enough to know it. At the same time I credit ourselves with having kept the
existence of the steel traps completely secret. They will assume (so I’ve
reasoned) that we intend to rely entirely upon our superior vigilance,
therefore they will try the same game as last night.”

Silence fell.

The moon rays, creeping around from the right of the avenue, crossing the
shrubbery and encroaching upon the low wall of the loggia, now flooded its
floor. Against the silvern light, Bristol appeared to me in black silhouette.
The breeze, too, seemed now to blow from a slightly different direction. It
came through the windows on my right, beyond which lay the unkempt bushes which
extended on that side to the wall of the grounds.

So we sat, until the moonlight poured fully in upon Bristol’s back. So we sat
when the clock chimed the hour of one.

Bristol arose and once more went out to the gate. He had arranged to visit
Morris’s post every half-hour. Again I experienced the nervous dread that he
would be attacked in the avenue; but again he returned unscathed.

“All’s well,” he said.

But from his tones I knew that he had not forgotten that it was at this hour
Marden and West had suffered mysterious attack.

Neither of us, I think, was disposed to talk. We both were unwilling to break
the silence, wherein, with all our ears, we listened for the slightest
disturbance.

And now my attention turned anew to the course of the slowly creeping moon
rays. In my mind an idea was struggling for definition. There was something
significant in the lunar lighting of the room. Why, I asked myself, had the
attack been made at one o’clock? Did the time signify anything? If so, what? I
looked toward Bristol.

His figure, the chair upon which he sat, were sharply outlined by the cold
light. The wall behind me, and to my left, was illuminated brilliantly; but no
light fell directly upon me.

The idea was taking shape. From the loggia and the avenue Bristol, I reasoned,
must be clearly visible. From the shrubbery on the south, through the other
windows could I be seen? Yes, silhouetted against the moonlight!

A faint sound, quite indescribable, came to my ears from somewhere
outside-beyond.

“My God!” whispered Bristol. “Did you hear it?”

“Yes! What?”

“It must have been Morris!—”

Bristol was half standing, one hand upon the arm of the chair, the other
concealed, but grasping his revolver as I well knew. I, too, had my revolver in
my hand, and as I twisted in my seat, preparatory to rising, in sheer
nervousness I dropped the weapon upon the carpet.

With an exclamation of dismay, I stooped quickly to recover it.

As I did so something whistled past my ear, so closely as almost to touch
it—and struck with a dull thud upon the wall beyond!

“Bristol!” I whispered.

But as I raised my eyes to him he seemed to crumple up, and fell loosely
forward into the patch of moonlight spread upon the floor! “God in heaven!” I
said aloud.

In a cold sweat of fear I crouched there, for it had become evident to me that,
as I bent, I was entirely in shadow.

There was a rustling in the bushes on the left; but before I could turn in that
direction, my attention was claimed elsewhere. Over into the loggia leapt an
almost naked brown figure!

It was that of a small but strongly built man, who carried a short, exceedingly
thick bamboo rod in his hand. My fear was too great to admit of my accurately
observing anything at that time, but I noticed that some kind of leather thong
or loop was attached to the end of the squat cane.

The panic fear of the supernatural was strongly upon me, and I was unable to
realize that this Eastern apparition was a creature of flesh and blood. With my
nerves strung up to snapping point, I crouched watching him. He entered the
room, bending over the body of Bristol.

A hot breath fanned my cheek!

At that my overwrought nerves betrayed me. I uttered a stifled cry, looking
upward ... and into a pair of gleaming eyes which looked down into mine!

A second brown man (who must have entered by one of the windows overlooking the
shrubbery) was bending over me!

Scarce knowing what I did, I raised my revolver and blazed straight into the
dimly-seen face. Down upon me silently dropped a naked body, and something warm
came flowing over my hand. But, knowing my foes to be of flesh and blood,
feeling myself at handgrips now with a palpable enemy, I threw off the body,
leapt up and fired, though blindly, at the flying shape that flashed across the
loggia—and was lost in the shadow pools under the elms.

Upon the din of my shooting fell silence like a cloak. A moment I listened,
tense, still; then I turned to the table and lighted the lamp.

In its light I saw Bristol lying like a dead man. Close beside him was a big
and heavy lump of clay. It had been shaped as a ball, but now it was flattened
out curiously. Bending over my unfortunate companion and learning that, though
unconscious, he lived, I learnt, too, how the Hashishin contrived to strike men
insensible without approaching them; I learnt that the one whom I had shot, who
lay in his blood almost on the spot where Professor Deeping once had lain, was
an expert slinger.

The contrivance which he carried, as did the other who had escaped, was a
sling, of the ancient Persian type. In place of stones, heavy lumps of clay
were used, which operated much the same as a sand-bag, whilst enabling the
operator to work from a considerable distance.

Hidden, over by the ancient chapel it might be, one of this evil twain had
struck down Morris, the constable; from the shelter of the trees, from many
yards away, they had shot their singular missiles through the open windows at
Bristol and myself. Bristol had succumbed, and now, with a redness showing
through his close-cut hair immediately behind the right ear, lay wholly
unconscious at my feet.

It had been a divine accident which had caused me to drop my revolver, and,
stooping to recover it, unknowingly to frustrate the design of the second
slinger upon myself. The light of the lamp fell upon the face of the dead
Hashishin. He lay forward upon his hands, crouching almost, but with his face,
his dreadful, featureless face, twisted up at me from under his left shoulder.

God knows he deserved his end; but that mutilated face is often grinning,
bloodily, in my dreams.

And then as I stood, between that horrid exultation which is born of killing
and the panic which threatened me out of the darkness, I saw something
advancing ... slowly ... slowly ... from the elmen shades toward the loggia.

It was a shape—it was a shadow. Silent it came—on—and on.
Where the dusk lay deepest it paused, undefined; for I could give it no name of
man or spirit. But a horror seemed to proceed from it as light from a lamp.

I groped about the table near to me, never taking my eyes from that sinister
form outside. As my fingers closed upon the telephone, distant voices and the
sound of running footsteps (of those who had heard the shots) came welcome to
my ears.

The form stirred, seeming to raise phantom arms in execration, and a stray
moonbeam pierced the darkness shrouding it. For a fleeting instant something
flashed venomously.

The sounds grew nearer. I could tell that the newcomers had found Morris lying
at the gate. Yet still I stood, frozen with uncanny fear, and
watching—watching the spot to which that stray beam had pierced; the spot
where I had seen the moon gleam upon the ring of the Prophet!

CHAPTER X

AT THE BRITISH ANTIQUARIAN MUSEUM

A little group of interested spectators stood at the head of the square glass
case in the centre of the lofty apartment in the British Antiquarian Museum
known as the Burton Room (by reason of the fact that a fine painting of Sir
Richard Burton faces you as you enter). A few other people looked on curiously
from the lower end of the case. It contained but one exhibit—a dirty and
dilapidated markoob—or slipper of morocco leather that had once been red.

“Our latest acquisition, gentlemen,” said Mr. Mostyn, the curator, speaking in
a low tone to the distinguished Oriental scholars around him. “It has been left
to the Institution by the late Professor Deeping. He describes it in a document
furnished by his solicitor as one of the slippers worn by the Prophet Mohammed,
but gives us no further particulars. I myself cannot quite place the relic.”

“Nor I,” interrupted one of the group. “It is not mentioned by any of the
Arabian historians to my knowledge—that is, if it comes from Mecca, as I
understand it does.”

“I cannot possibly assert that it comes from Mecca, Dr. Nicholson,” Mostyn
replied. “The Professor may have taken it from Al-Madinah—perhaps from
the mysterious inner passage of the baldaquin where the treasures of the place
lie. But I can assure you that what little we do know of its history is
sufficiently unsavoury.”

I fancied that the curator’s tired cultured voice faltered as he spoke; and
now, without apparent reason, he moved a step to the right and glanced oddly
along the room. I followed the direction of his glance, and saw a tall man in
conventional morning dress, irreproachable in every detail, whose head was
instantly bent upon his catalogue. But before his eyes fell I knew that their
long almond shape, as well as the peculiar burnt pallor of his countenance,
were undoubtedly those of an Oriental.

“There have been mysterious outrages committed, I believe, upon many of those
who have come in contact with the slipper?” asked one of the savants.

“Exactly. Professor Deeping was undoubtedly among the victims. His instructions
were explicit that the relic should be brought here by a Moslem, but for a long
time we failed to discover any Moslem who would undertake the task; and, as you
are aware, while the slipper remained at the Professor’s house attempts were
made to steal it.”

He ceased uneasily, and glanced at the tall Eastern figure. It had edged a
little nearer; the head was still bowed and the fine yellow waxen fingers of
the hand from which he had removed his glove fumbled with the catalogue’s
leaves. It may well have been that in those days I read menace in every eye,
yet I felt assured that the yellow visitor was eavesdropping—was
malignantly attentive to the conversation.

The curator spoke lower than ever now; no one beyond the circle could possibly
hear him as he proceeded—

“We discovered an Alexandrian Greek who, for personal reasons, not unconnected
with matrimony, had turned Moslem! He carried the slipper here, strongly
escorted, and placed it where you now see it. No other hand has touched it.”
(The speaker’s voice was raised ever so slightly.) “You will note that there is
a rail around the case, to prevent visitors from touching even the glass.”

“Ah,” said Dr. Nicholson quizzically, “And has anything untoward happened to
our Graeco-Moslem friend?”

“Perhaps Inspector Bristol can tell,” replied the curator.

The straight, military figure of the well-known Scotland Yard man was
conspicuous among the group of distinguished—and mostly
round-shouldered—scholars.

“Sorry, gentlemen,” he said, smiling, “but Mr. Acepulos has vanished from his
tobacco shop in Soho. I am not apprehensive that he had been kidnapped or
anything of that kind. I think rather that the date of his disappearance
tallies with that on which he cashed his cheque for service rendered! His
present wife is getting most unbeautifully fat, too.”

“What precautions,” someone asked, “are being taken to guard the slipper?”

“Well,” Mostyn answered, “though we have only the bare word of the late
Professor Deeping that the slipper was actually worn by Mohammed, it has
certainly an enormous value according to Moslem ideas. There can be no doubt
that a group of fanatics known as Hashishin are in London engaged in an
extraordinary endeavour to recover it.”

Mostyn’s voice sank to an impressive whisper. My gaze sought again the tall
Eastern visitor and was held fascinated by the baffled straining in those
velvet eyes. But the lids fell as I looked; and the effect was that of a fire
suddenly extinguished. I determined to draw Bristol’s attention to the man.

“Accordingly,” Mostyn continued, “we have placed it in this room, from which I
fancy it would puzzle the most accomplished thief to remove it.”

The party, myself included, stared about the place, as he went on to
explain—

“We have four large windows here; as you see. The Burton Room occupies the end
of a wing; there is only one door; it communicates with the next room, which in
turn opens into the main building by another door on the landing. We are on the
first floor; these two east windows afford a view of the lawn before the main
entrance; those two west ones face Orpington Square; all are heavily barred as
you see. During the day there is a man always on duty in these two rooms. At
night that communicating door is locked. Short of erecting a ladder in full
view either of the Square or of Great Orchard Street, filing through four iron
bars and breaking the window and the case, I fail to see how anybody can get at
the slipper here.”

“If a duplicate key to the safe—” another voice struck in; I knew it
afterward for that of Professor Rhys-Jenkyns.

“Impossible to procure one, Professor,” cried Mostyn, his eyes sparkling with
an almost boyish interest. “Mr. Cavanagh here holds the keys of the case, under
the will of the late Professor Deeping. They are of foreign workmanship and
more than a little complicated.”

The eyes of the savants were turned now in my direction.

“I suppose you have them in a place of safety?” said Dr. Nicholson.

“They are at my bankers,” I replied.

“Then I venture to predict,” said the celebrated Orientalist, “that the slipper
of the Prophet will rest here undisturbed.”

He linked his arm into that of a brother scholar and the little group straggled
away, Mostyn accompanying them to the main entrance.

But I saw Inspector Bristol scratching his chin; he looked very much as if he
doubted the accuracy of the doctor’s prediction. He had already had some
experience of the implacable devotion of the Moslem group to this treasure of
the Faithful.

“The real danger begins,” I suggested to him, “when the general public is
admitted—after to-day, is it not?”

“Yes. All to-day’s people are specially invited, or are using special
invitation cards,” he replied. “The people who received them often give their
tickets away to those who will be likely really to appreciate the opportunity.”

I looked around for the tall Oriental. He seemed to have vanished, and for some
reason I hesitated to speak of him to Bristol; for my gaze fell upon an
excessively thin, keen-faced man whose curiously wide-open eyes met mine
smilingly, whose gray suit spoke Stein-Bloch, whose felt was a Boss raw-edge
unmistakably of a kind that only Philadelphia can produce. At the height of the
season such visitors are not rare, but this one had an odd personality, and
moreover his keen gaze was raking the place from ceiling to floor.

Where had I met him before? To the best of my recollection I had never set eyes
upon the man prior to that moment; and since he was so palpably an American I
had no reason for assuming him to be associated with the Hashishin. But I
remembered—indeed, I could never forget—how, in the recent past, I
had met with an apparent associate of the Moslems as evidently European as this
curiously alert visitor was American. Moreover ... there was something
tauntingly familiar, yet elusive, about that gaunt face.

Was it not upon the eve of the death of Professor Deeping that the girl with
the violet eyes had first intruded her fascinating personality into my tangled
affairs? Patently, she had then been seeking the holy slipper, and by craft had
endeavoured to bend me to her will. Then had I not encountered her again,
meeting the glance of her unforgettable violet eyes outside a Strand hotel? The
encounter had presaged a further attempt upon the slipper! Certainly she acted
on behalf of someone interested in it; and since neither Bristol nor I could
conceive of any one seeking to possess the bloodstained thing except the
mysterious leader of the Hashishin—Hassan of Aleppo—as a creature
of that awful fanatic being I had written her down.

Why, then, if the mysterious Eastern employed a European girl, should he not
also employ an American man? It might well be that the relic, in entering the
doors of the impregnable Antiquarian Museum, had passed where the diabolical
arts of the Hashishin had no power to reach it—where the beauty of
Western women and the craft of Eastern man were equally useless weapons.
Perhaps Hassan’s campaign was entering upon a new phase.

Was it a shirking of plain duty on my part that wish—that ever-present
hope—that the murderous company of fanatics who had pursued the stolen
slipper from its ancient resting-place to London, should succeed in recovering
it? I leave you to judge.

The crescent of Islam fades to-day and grows pale, but there are yet fierce
Believers, a lust for the blood of the infidel. In such as these a faith dies
the death of an adder, and is more venomous in its death-throes than in the
full pulse of life. The ghastly indiscretion of Professor Deeping, in rifling a
Moslem Sacristy, had led to the mutilation of many who, unwittingly, had
touched the looted relic, had brought about his own end, had established a
league of fantastic assassins in the heart of the metropolis.

Only once had I seen the venerable Hassan of Aleppo—a stately, gentle old
man; but I knew that the velvet eyes could blaze into a passionate fury that
seemed to scorch whom it fell upon. I knew that the saintly Hassan was Sheikh
of the Hashishin. And familiarity with that dreadful organization had by no
means bred contempt. I was the holder of the key, and my fear of the fanatics
grew like a magic mango, darkened the sunlight of each day, and filled the
night with indefinable dread.

You, who have not read poor Deeping’s “Assyrian Mythology”, cannot picture a
creature with a huge, distorted head, and a tiny, dwarfed body—a thing
inhuman, yet human—a man stunted and malformed by the cruel arts of
brother men—a thing obnoxious to life, with but one passion, the passion
to kill. You cannot conceive of the years of agony spent by that creature
strapped to a wooden frame—in order to prevent his growth! You cannot
conceive of his fierce hatred of all humanity, inflamed to madness by the
Eastern drug, hashish, and directed against the enemies of Islam—the
holders of the slipper—by the wonderful power of Hassan of Aleppo.

But I had not only read of such beings, I had encountered one!

And he was but one of the many instruments of the Hashishin. Perhaps the girl
with the violet eyes was another. What else to be dreaded Hassan might hold in
store for us I could not conjecture.

Do you wonder that I feared? Do you wonder that I hoped (I confess it), hoped
that the slipper might be recovered without further bloodshed?

CHAPTER XI

THE HOLE IN THE BLIND

I stepped over to the door, where a constable stood on duty.

“You observed a tall Eastern gentleman in the room a while ago, officer?”

“I did, sir.”

“How long is he gone?”

The man started and began to peer about anxiously.

“That’s a funny thing, sir,” he said. “I was keeping my eyes specially upon
him. I noticed him hovering around while Mr. Mostyn was speaking; but although
I could have sworn he hadn’t passed out, he’s gone!”

“You didn’t notice his departure, then?”

“I’m sorry to say I didn’t, sir.”

The man clearly was perplexed, but I found small matter for wonder in the
episode. I had more than suspected the stranger to be a spy of Hassan’s, and
members of that strange company were elusive as will-o’-the-wisps.

Bristol, at the far end of the room, was signalling to me. I walked back and
joined him.

“Come over here,” he said, in a low voice, “and pretend to examine these
things.”

He glanced significantly to his left. Following the glance, my eyes fell upon
the lean American; he was peering into the receptacle which held the holy
slipper.

Bristol led me across the room, and we both faced the wall and bent over a
glass case. Some yellow newspaper cuttings describing its contents hung above
it, and these we pretended to read.

“Did you notice that man I glanced at?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s Earl Dexter, the first crook in America! Ssh! Only goes in on
very big things. We had word at the Yard he was in town; but we can’t touch
him—we can only keep our eyes on him. He usually travels openly and in
his own name, but this time he seems to have slipped over quietly. He always
dresses the same and has just given me ‘good day!’ They call him The Stetson
Man. We heard this morning that he had booked two first-class sailings in the
Oceanic, leaving for New York three weeks hence. Now, Mr. Cavanagh, what is his
game?”

“It has occurred to me before, Bristol,” I replied, “and you may remember that
I mentioned the idea to you, that there might be a third party interested in
the slipper. Why shouldn’t Earl Dexter be that third party?”

“Because he isn’t a fool,” rapped Bristol shortly. “Earl Dexter isn’t a man to
gather up trouble for himself. More likely if his visit has anything really to
do with the slipper he’s retained by Hassan and Company. Museum-breaking may be
a bit out of the line of Hashishin!”

This latter suggestion dovetailed with my own ideas, and oddly enough there was
something positively wholesome in the notion of the straightforward crookedness
of a mere swell cracksman.

Then happened a singular thing, and one that effectually concluded our
whispered colloquy. From the top end of the room, beyond the case containing
the slipper, one of the yellow blinds came down with a run.

Bristol turned in a flash. It was not a remarkable accident, and might portend
no more than a loose cord; but when, having walked rapidly up the room, we
stood before the lowered blind, it appeared that this was no accident at all.

Some four feet from the bottom of the blind (or five feet from the floor) a
piece of linen a foot square had been neatly slashed out!

I glanced around the room. Several fashionably dressed visitors were looking
idly in our direction, but I could fasten upon no one of them as a likely
perpetrator.

Bristol stared at me in perplexity.

“Who on earth did it,” he muttered, “and what the blazes for?”

CHAPTER XII

THE HASHISHIN WATCH

“The American gentleman has just gone out, sir,” said the sergeant at the door.

I nodded grimly and raced down the steps. Despite my half-formed desire that
the slipper should be recovered by those to whom properly it belonged, I
experienced at times a curious interest in its welfare. I cannot explain this.
Across the hall in front of me I saw Earl Dexter passing out of the Museum. I
followed him through into Kingsway and thence to Fleet Street. He sauntered
easily along, a nonchalant gray figure. I had begun to think that he was bound
for his hotel and that I was wasting my time when he turned sharply into quiet
Salisbury Square; it was almost deserted.

My heart leapt into my mouth with a presentiment of what was coming as I saw an
elegant and beautifully dressed woman sauntering along in front of us on the
far side.

Was it that I detected something familiar in her carriage, in the poise of her
head—something that reminded me of former unforgettable encounters;
encounters which without exception had presaged attempts upon the slipper of
the Prophet? Or was it that I recollected how Dexter had booked two passages to
America? I cannot say, but I felt my heart leap; I knew beyond any possibility
of doubt that this meeting in Salisbury Square marked the opening of a new
chapter in the history of the slipper.

Dexter slipped his arm within that of the girl in front of him and they paced
slowly forward in earnest conversation. I suppose my action was very amateurish
and very poor detective work; but regardless of discovery I crossed the road
and passed close by the pair.

I am certain that Dexter was speaking as I came up, but, well out of earshot,
his voice was suddenly arrested. His companion turned and looked at me.

I was prepared for it, yet was thrilled electrically by the flashing glance of
the violet eyes—for it was she—the beautiful harbinger of
calamities!

My brain was in a whirl; complication piled itself upon complication; yet in
the heart of all this bewilderment I thought I could detect the key of the
labyrinth, but at the time my ideas were in disorder, for the violet eyes were
not lowered but fixed upon me in cold scorn.

I knew myself helpless, and bending my head with conscious embarrassment I
passed on hurriedly.

I had work to do in plenty, but I could not apply my mind to it; and now,
although the obvious and sensible thing was to go about my business, I wandered
on aimlessly, my brain employed with a hundred idle conjectures and the query,
“Where have I seen The Stetson Man?” seeming to beat, like a tattoo, in my
brain. There was something magnetic about the accursed slipper, for without
knowing by what route I had arrived there, I found myself in Great Orchard
Street and close under the walls of the British Antiquarian Museum. Then I was
effectually aroused from my reverie.

Two men, both tall, stood in the shadow of a doorway on the Opposite side of
the street, staring intently up at the Museum windows. It was a tropically hot
afternoon and they stood in deepest shadow. No one else was in Orchard
Street—that odd little backwater—at the time, and they stood gazing
upward intently and gave me not even a passing glance.

But I knew one for the Oriental visitor of the morning, and despite broad
noonday and the hum of busy London about me, my blood seemed to turn to water.
I stood rooted to the spot, held there by a most surprising horror.

For the gray-bearded figure of the other watcher was one I could never forget;
its benignity was associated with the most horrible hours of my life, with
deeds so dreadful that recollection to this day sometimes breaks my sleep,
arousing me in the still watches, bathed in a cold sweat of fear.

It was Hassan of Aleppo!

If he saw me, if either of them saw me, I cannot say. What I should have done,
what I might have done it is useless to speak of here—for I did nothing.
Inert, thralled by the presence of that eerie, dreadful being, I watched them
leave the shadow of the doorway and pace slowly on with their dignified Eastern
gait.

Then, knowing how I had failed in my plain duty to my fellow-men—how,
finding a serpent in my path, I had hesitated to crush it, had weakly succumbed
to its uncanny fascination—I made my way round to the door of the Museum.

CHAPTER XIII

THE WHITE BEAM

That night the deviltry began. Mr. Mostyn found himself wholly unable to sleep.
Many relics have curious histories, and the experienced archaeologist becomes
callous to that uncanniness which seems to attach to some gruesome curios. But
the slipper of the Prophet was different. No mere ghostly menace threatened its
holders; an avenging scimitar followed those who came in contact with it;
gruesome tragedies, mutilations, murders, had marked its progress throughout.

The night was still—as still as a London night can be; for there is
always a vague murmuring in the metropolis as though the sleeping city breathed
gently and sometimes stirred in its sleep.

Then, distinct amid these usual nocturnal noises, rose another, unaccountable
sound, a muffled crash followed by a musical tinkling.

Mostyn sprang up in bed, drew on a dressing-gown, and took from the small safe
at his bed-head the Museum keys and a loaded revolver. A somewhat dishevelled
figure, pale and wild-eyed, he made his way through the private door and into
the ghostly precincts of the Museum. He did not hesitate, but ascended the
stairs and unlocked the door of the Assyrian gallery.

Along its ghostly aisles he passed, and before the door which gave admittance
to the Burton Room paused, fumbling a moment for the key.

Inside the room something was moving!

Mostyn was keenly alarmed; he knew that he must enter at once or never. He
inserted the key in the lock, swung open the heavy door, stepped through and
closed it behind him. He was a man of tremendous moral courage, for
now,—alone in the apartment which harboured the uncanny relic, alone in
the discharge of his duty, he stood with his back to the door trembling
slightly, but with the idea of retreat finding no place in his mind.

One side of the room lay in blackest darkness; through the furthermost window
of the other a faint yellowed luminance (the moonlight through the blind)
spread upon the polished parquet flooring. But that which held the curator
spell-bound—that which momentarily quickened into life the latent
superstition, common to all mankind, was a beam of cold light which poured its
effulgence fully upon the case containing the Prophet’s slipper! Where the
other exhibits lay either in utter darkness or semi-darkness this one it seemed
was supernaturally picked out by this lunar searchlight!

It was ghostly-unnerving; but, the first dread of it passed, Mostyn recalled
how during the day a hole inexplicably had been cut in that blind; he recalled
that it had not been mended, but that the damaged blind had merely been rolled
up again.

And as a dawning perception of the truth came to him, as falteringly he
advanced a step toward the mystic beam, he saw that one side of the case had
been shattered—he saw the broken glass upon the floor; and in the dense
shadow behind and under the beam of light, vaguely he saw a dull red object.

It moved—it seemed to live! It moved away from the case and in the
direction of the eastern windows.

“My God!” whispered Mostyn; “it’s the Prophet’s slipper!”

And wildly, blindly, he fired down the room. Later he knew that he had fired in
panic, for nothing human was or could be in the place; yet his shot was not
without effect. In the instant of its flash, something struck sharply against
the dimly seen blind of one of the east windows; he heard the crash of broken
glass.

He leapt to the switch and flooded the room with light. A fear of what it might
hold possessed him, and he turned instantly.

Hard by the fragments of broken glass upon the floor and midway between the
case and the first easterly window lay the slipper. A bell was ringing
somewhere. His shot probably had aroused the attention of the policeman.
Someone was clamouring upon the door of the Museum, too. Mostyn raced forward
and raised the blind—that toward which the slipper had seemed to move.

The lower pane of the window was smashed. Blood was trickling down upon the
floor from the jagged edges of the glass.

“Hullo there! Open the door! Open the door!”

Bells were going all over the place now; sounds of running footsteps came from
below; but Mostyn stood staring at the broken window and at the solid iron bars
which protected it without, which were intact, substantial—which showed
him that nothing human could possibly have entered.

Yet the case was shattered, the holy slipper lay close beside him upon the
floor, and from the broken window-pane blood was
falling—drip-drip-drip...

That was the story as I heard it half an hour later. For Inspector Bristol,
apprised of the happening, was promptly on the scene; and knowing how keen was
my interest in the matter, he rang me up immediately. I arrived soon after
Bristol and found a perplexed group surrounding the uncanny slipper of the
Prophet. No one had dared to touch it; the dread vengeance of Hassan of Aleppo
would visit any unbeliever who ventured to lay hand upon the holy, bloody
thing. Well we knew it, and as though it had been a venomous scorpion we, a
company of up-to-date, prosaic men of affairs, stood around that dilapidated
markoob, and kept a respectful distance.

Mostyn, an odd figure in pyjamas and dressing-gown, turned his pale,
intellectual face to me as I entered.

“It will have to be put back ... secretly,” he said.

His voice was very unsteady. Bristol nodded grimly and glanced at the two
constables, who, with a plain-clothes man unknown to me, made up that midnight
company.

“I’ll do it, sir,” said one of the constables suddenly.

“One moment”—Mostyn raised his hand!

In the ensuing silence I could hear the heavy breathing of those around me. We
were all looking at the slipper, I think.

“Do you understand, fully,” the curator continued, “the risk you run?”

“I think so, sir,” answered the constable; “but I’m prepared to chance it.”

“The hands,” resumed Mostyn slowly, “of those who hitherto have ventured to
touch it have been”—he hesitated—“cut off.”

“Your career in the Force would be finished if it happened to you, my lad,”
said Bristol shortly.

“I suppose they’d look after me,” said the man, with grim humour.

“They would if you met with—an accident, in the discharge of your duty,”
replied the inspector; “but I haven’t ordered you to do it, and I’m not going
to.”

“All right, sir,” said the man, with a sort of studied truculence, “I’ll take
my chance.”

I tried to stop him; Mostyn, too, stepped forward, and Bristol swore frankly.
But it was all of no avail.

A sort of chill seemed to claim my very soul when I saw the constable stoop,
unconcernedly pick up the slipper, and replace it in the broken case.

It was out of a silence cathedral-like, awesome, that he spoke.

“All you want is a new pane of glass, sir,” he said—“and the thing’s
done.”

I anticipate in mentioning it here; but since Constable Hughes has no further
place in these records I may perhaps be excused for dismissing him at this
point.

He was picked up outside the section house on the following evening with his
right hand severed just above the wrist.

CHAPTER XIV

A SCREAM IN THE NIGHT

The day that followed was one of the hottest which we experienced during the
heat wave. It was a day crowded with happenings. The Burton Room was closed to
the public, whilst a glazier worked upon the broken east window and a new blind
was fitted to the west. Behind the workmen, guarded by a watchful
commissionaire, yawned the shattered case containing the slipper.

I wondered if the visitors to the other rooms of the Museum realized, as I
realized, that despite the blazing sunlight of tropical London, the shadow of
Hassan of Aleppo lay starkly on that haunted building?

At about eleven o’clock, as I hurried along the Strand, I almost collided with
the girl of the violet eyes! She turned and ran like the wind down Arundel
Street, whilst I stood at the corner staring after her in blank amazement, as
did other passers-by; for a man cannot with dignity race headlong after a
pretty woman down a public thoroughfare!

My mystification grew hourly deeper; and Bristol wallowed in perplexities.

“It’s the most horrible and confusing case,” he said to me when I joined him at
the Museum, “that the Yard has ever had to handle. It bristles with outrages
and murders. God knows where it will all end. I’ve had London scoured for a
clue to the whereabouts of Hassan and Company and drawn absolutely blank! Then
there’s Earl Dexter. Where does he come in? For once in a way he’s living in
hiding. I can’t find his headquarters. I’ve been thinking—”

He drew me aside into the small gallery which runs parallel with the Assyrian
Room.

“Dexter has booked two passages in the Oceanic. Who is his companion?”

I wondered, I had wondered more than once, if his companion were my beautiful
violet-eyed acquaintance. A scruple—perhaps an absurd
scruple—hitherto had kept me silent respecting her, but now I determined
to take Bristol fully into my confidence. A conviction was growing upon me that
she and Earl Dexter together represented that third party whose existence we
had long suspected. Whether they operated separately or on behalf of the
Moslems (of which arrangement I could not conceive) remained to be seen. I was
about to voice my doubts and suspicions when Bristol went on hurriedly—

“I have thoroughly examined the Burton Room, and considering that the windows
are thirty feet from the ground, that there is no sign of a ladder having stood
upon the lawn, and that the iron bars are quite intact, it doesn’t look humanly
possible for any one to have been in the room last night prior to Mostyn’s
arrival!”

“One of the dwarfs—”

“Not even one of the dwarfs,” said Bristol, “could have passed between those
iron bars!”

“But there was blood on the window!”

“I know there was, and human blood. It’s been examined!”

He stared at me fixedly. The thing was unspeakably uncanny.

“To-night,” he went on, “I am remaining in here”—nodding toward the
Assyrian Room—“and I have so arranged it that no mortal being can
possibly know I am here. Mostyn is staying, and you can stay, too, if you care
to. Owing to Professor Deeping’s will you are badly involved in the beastly
business, and I have no doubt you are keen to see it through.”

“I am,” I admitted, “and the end I look for and hope for is the recovery of the
slipper by its murderous owners!”

“I am with you,” said Bristol. “It’s just a point of honour; but I should be
glad to make them a present of it. We’re ostentatiously placing a constable on
duty in the hallway to-night—largely as a blind. It will appear that
we’re taking no other additional precautions.”

He hurried off to make arrangements for my joining him in his watch, and thus
again I lost my opportunity of confiding in him regarding the mysterious girl.

I half anticipated, though I cannot imagine why, that Earl Dexter would put in
an appearance, during the day. He did not do so, however, for Bristol had put a
constable on the door who was well acquainted with the appearance of The
Stetson Man. The inspector, in the course of his investigations, had come upon
what might have been a clue, but what was at best a confusing one. Close by the
wall of the curator’s house and lying on the gravel path he had found a part of
a gold cuff link. It was of American manufacture.

Upon such slender evidence we could not justly assume that it pointed to the
presence of Dexter on the night of the attempted robbery, but it served to
complicate a matter already sufficiently involved.

In pursuance of Bristol’s plan, I concealed myself that evening just before the
closing of the Museum doors, in a recess behind a heavy piece of Babylonian
sculpture. Bristol was similarly concealed in another part of the room, and
Mostyn joined us later.

The Museum was closed; and so far as evidence went the authorities had relied
again upon the bolts and bars hitherto considered impregnable, and upon the
constable in the hall. The broken window was mended, the cut blind replaced,
and within, in its shattered case, reposed the slipper of the Prophet.

All the blinds being lowered, the Assyrian Room was a place of gloom, yellowed
on the western side by the moonlight through the blind. The door communicating
with the Burton Room was closed but not fastened.

“They operated last night,” Bristol whispered to me, “at the exact time when
the moonlight shone through the hole in the westerly blind on to the case. If
they come to-night, and I am quite expecting them, they will have to dispense
with that assistance; but they know by experience where to reach the case.”

“Despite our precautions,” I said, “they will almost certainly know that a
watch is being kept.”

“They may or they may not,” replied Bristol. “Either way I’m disposed to think
there will be another attempt. Their mysterious method is so rapid that they
can afford to take chances.”

This was not my first night vigil since I had become in a sense the custodian
of the relic, but it was quite the most dreary. Amid the tomb-like objects
about us we seemed two puny mortals toying with stupendous things. We could not
smoke and must converse only in whispers; and so the night wore on until I
began to think that our watch would be dully uneventful.

“Our big chance,” whispered Mostyn, “is in the fact that any day may change the
conditions. They can’t afford to wait.”

He ceased abruptly, grasping my arm. From somewhere, somewhere outside the
building, we all three had heard a soft whistle. A moment of tense listening
followed.

“If only we could have had the place surrounded,” whispered Bristol—“but
it was impossible, of course.”

A faint grating noise echoed through the lofty Burton Room. Bristol slipped
past me in the semi-gloom, and gently opened the communicating door a few
inches.

A-tiptoe, I joined him, and craning across his shoulder saw a strange and
wonderful thing.

The newly glazed east window again was shattered with a booming crash! The
yellow blind was thrust aside. A long something reached out toward the broken
case. There was a sort of fumbling sound, and paralyzed with the wonder of
it—for the window, remember, was thirty feet from the ground—I
stood frozen to my post.

Not so Bristol. As the weird tentacle (or more exactly it reminded me of a
gigantic crab’s claw) touched the case, the Inspector leapt forward. A white
beam from his electric torch cut through to the broken cabinet.

The thing was withdrawn ... and with it went the slipper of the Prophet.

“Raise the blinds!” cried Bristol. “Mr. Cavanagh! Mr. Mostyn! We must not let
them give us the slip!”

I got up the blind of the nearer window as Bristol raised the other. Not a
living thing was in sight from either!

Mostyn was beside me, his hand resting on my shoulder. I noted how he trembled.
Bristol turned and looked back at us. The light from his pocket torch flashed
upon the curator’s face; and I have never seen such an expression of horrified
amazement as that which it wore. Faintly, I could hear the constable racing up
the steps from the hall.

Ideas of the supernatural came to us all, I know; when, with a scuffling sound
not unlike that of a rat in a ceiling, something moved above us!

“Damn my thick head!” roared Bristol, furiously. “He’s on the roof! It’s flat
as a floor and there’s enough ivy alongside the water-spout on your house
adjoining, Mr. Mostyn, to afford foothold to an invading army!”

He plunged off toward the open door, and I heard him racing down the Assyrian
Room.

“He had a short rope ladder fixed from the gutter!” he cried back at us.
“Graham! Graham!” (the constable on duty in the hall)—“Get the front door
open! Get...” His voice died away as he leapt down the stairs.

From the direction of Orpington Square came a horrid, choking scream. It rose
hideously; it fell, rose again—and died.

The thief escaped. We saw the traces upon the ivy where he had hastened down.
Bristol ascended by the same route, and found where the ladder-hooks had twice
been attached to the gutterway. Constable Graham, who was first actually to
leave the building, declared that he heard the whirr of a re-started motor
lower down Great Orchard Street.

Bristol’s theory, later to be dreadfully substantiated, was that the thief had
broken the glass and reached into the case with an arrangement similar to that
employed for pruning trees, having a clutch at the end, worked with a cord.

“Hassan has been too clever for us!” said the inspector. “But—what in
God’s name did that awful screaming mean?”

I had a theory, but I did not advance it then.

It was not until nearly dawn that my theory, and Bristol’s, regarding the
clutch arrangement, both were confirmed. For close under the railings which
abut on Orpington Square, in a pool of blood we found just such an instrument
as Bristol had described.

And still clutching it was a pallid and ghastly shrunken hand that had been
severed from above the wrist!

“Merciful God!” whispered the inspector—“look at the opal ring on the
finger! Look at the bandage where he cut himself on the broken window-glass
that first night, when Mr. Mostyn disturbed him. It wasn’t the Hashishin who
stole the thing.... It’s Earl Dexter’s hand!”

No one spoke for a moment. Then—

“Which of them has—” began Mostyn huskily.

“The slipper of the Prophet?” interrupted Bristol. “I wonder if we shall ever
know?”

CHAPTER XV

A SHRIVELLED HAND

Around a large square table in a room at New Scotland Yard stood a group of
men, all of whom looked more or less continuously at something that lay upon
the polished deal. One of the party, none other than the Commissioner himself,
had just finished speaking, and in silence now we stood about the gruesome
object which had furnished him with the text of his very terse address.

I knew myself privileged in being admitted to such a conference at the C.I.D.
headquarters and owed my admission partly to Inspector Bristol, and partly to
the fact that under the will of the late Professor Deeping I was concerned in
the uncanny business we were met to discuss.

Novelty has a charm for every one; and to find oneself immersed in a maelstrom
of Eastern devilry, with a group of scientific murderers in pursuit of a holy
Moslem relic, and unexpectedly to be made a trustee of that dangerous
curiosity, makes a certain appeal to the adventurous. But to read of such
things and to participate in them are widely different matters. The slipper of
the Prophet and the dreadful crimes connected with it, the mutilations,
murders, the uncanny mysteries which made up its history, were filling my world
with horror.

Now, in silence we stood around that table at New Scotland Yard and watched, as
though we expected it to move, the ghastly “clue” which lay there. It was a
shrivelled human hand, and about the thumb and forefinger there still dryly
hung a fragment of lint which had bandaged a jagged wound. On one of the
shrunken fingers was a ring set with a large opal.

Inspector Bristol broke the oppressive silence.

“You see, sir,” he said, addressing the Commissioner, “this marks a new
complication in the case. Up to this week although, unfortunately, we had made
next to no progress, the thing was straightforward enough. A band of Eastern
murderers, working along lines quite novel to Europe, were concealed somewhere
in London. We knew that much. They murdered Professor Deeping, but failed to
recover the slipper. They mutilated everyone who touched it mysteriously. The
best men in the department, working night and day, failed to effect a single
arrest. In spite of the mysterious activity of Hassan of Aleppo the slipper was
safely lodged in the British Antiquarian Museum.”

The Commissioner nodded thoughtfully.

“There is no doubt,” continued Bristol, “that the Hashishin were watching the
Museum. Mr. Cavanagh, here”—he nodded in my direction—“saw Hassan
himself lurking in the neighbourhood. We took every precaution, observed the
greatest secrecy; but in spite of it all a constable who touched the accursed
thing lost his right hand. Then the slipper was taken.”

He stopped, and all eyes again were turned to the table.

“The Yard,” resumed Bristol slowly, “had information that Earl Dexter, the
cleverest crook in America, was in England. He was seen in the Museum, and the
night following the slipper was stolen. Then outside the place I
found—that!”

He pointed to the severed hand. No one spoke for a moment. Then—

“The new problem,” said the Commissioner, “is this: who took the slipper,
Dexter or Hassan of Aleppo?”

“That’s it, sir,” agreed Bristol. “Dexter had two passages booked in the
Oceanic: but he didn’t sail with her, and—that’s his hand!”

“You say he has not been traced?” asked the Commissioner.

“No doctor known to the Medical Association,” replied Bristol, “is attending
him! He’s not in any of the hospitals. He has completely vanished. The
conclusion is obvious!”

“The evident deduction,” I said, “is that Dexter stole the slipper from the
Museum—God knows with what purpose—and that Hassan of Aleppo
recovered it from him.”

“You think we shall next hear of Earl Dexter from the river police?” suggested
Bristol.

“Personally,” replied the Commissioner, “I agree with Mr. Cavanagh. I think
Dexter is dead, and it is very probable that Hassan and Company are already
homeward bound with the slipper of the Prophet.”

With all my heart I hoped that he might be right, but an intuition was with me
crying that he was wrong, that many bloody deeds would be, ere the sacred
slipper should return to the East.

CHAPTER XVI

THE DWARF

The manner in which we next heard of the whereabouts of the Prophet’s slipper
was utterly unforeseen, wildly dramatic. That the Hashishin were aware that I,
though its legal trustee, no longer had charge of the relic nor knowledge of
its resting-place, was sufficiently evident from the immunity which I enjoyed
at this time from that ceaseless haunting by members of the uncanny
organization ruled by Hassan. I had begun to feel more secure in my chambers,
and no longer worked with a loaded revolver upon the table beside me. But the
slightest unusual noise in the night still sufficed to arouse me and set me
listening intently, to chill me with dread of what it might portend. In short,
my nerves were by no means recovered from the ceaseless strain of the events
connected with and arising out of the death of my poor friend, Professor
Deeping.

One evening as I sat at work in my chambers, with the throb of busy Fleet
Street and its thousand familiar sounds floating in to me through the open
windows, my phone bell rang.

Even as I turned to take up the receiver a foreboding possessed me that my
trusteeship was no longer to be a sinecure. It was Bristol who had rung me up,
and upon very strange business.

“A development at last!” he said; “but at present I don’t know what to make of
it. Can you come down now?”

“Where are you speaking from?”

“From the Waterloo Road—a delightful neighbourhood. I shall be glad if
you can meet me at the entrance to Wyatt’s Buildings in half an hour.”

“What is it? Have you found Dexter?”

“No, unfortunately. But it’s murder!”

I knew as I hung up the receiver that my brief period of peace was ended; that
the lists of assassination were reopened. I hurried out through the court into
Fleet Street, thinking of the key of the now empty case at the Museum which
reposed at my bankers, thinking of the devils who pursued the slipper, thinking
of the hundred and one things, strange and terrible, which went to make up the
history of that gruesome relic.

Wyatt’s Buildings, Waterloo Road, are a gloomy and forbidding block of
dwellings which seem to frown sullenly upon the high road, from which they are
divided by a dark and dirty courtyard. Passing an iron gateway, you enter, by
way of an arch, into this sinister place of uncleanness. Male residents in
their shirt sleeves lounge against the several entrances. Bedraggled women
nurse dirty infants and sit in groups upon the stone steps, rendering them
almost impassable. But to-night a thing had happened in Wyatt’s Buildings which
had awakened in the inhabitants, hardened to sordid crime, a sort of torpid
interest.

Faces peered from most of the windows which commanded a view of the courtyard,
looking like pallid blotches against the darkness; but a number of police
confined the loungers within their several doorways, so that the yard itself
was comparatively clear.

I had had some difficulty in forcing a way through the crowd which thronged the
entrance, but finally I found myself standing beside Inspector Bristol and
looking down upon that which had brought us both to Wyatt’s Buildings.

There was no moon that night, and only the light of the lamp in the archway,
with some faint glimmers from the stairways surrounding the court, reached the
dirty paving. Bristol directed the light of a pocket-lamp upon the hunched-up
figure which lay in the dust, and I saw it to be that of a dwarfish creature,
yellow skinned and wearing only a dark loin cloth. He had a malformed and
disproportionate head, a head that had been too large even for a big man. I
knew after first glance that this was one of the horrible dwarfs employed by
the Hashishin in their murderous business. It might even be the one who had
killed Deeping; but this was impossible to determine by reason of the fact that
the hideous, swollen head, together with the features, was completely crushed.
I shall not describe the creature’s appearance in further detail.

Having given me an opportunity to examine the dead dwarf, Bristol returned the
electric lamp to his pocket and stood looking at me in the semi-gloom. A
constable stood on duty quite near to us, and others guarded the archway and
the doors to the dwellings. The murmur of subdued voices echoed hollowly in the
wells of the staircases, and a constant excited murmur proceeded from the crowd
at the entrance. No pressmen had yet been admitted, though numbers of them were
at the gates.

“It happened less than an hour ago,” said Bristol. “The place was much as you
see it now, and from what I can gather there came the sound of a shot and
several people saw the dwarf fall through the air and drop where he lies!”

The light was insufficient to show the expression upon the speaker’s face, but
his voice told of a great wonder.

“It is a bit like an Indian conjuring trick,” I said, looking up to the sky
above us; “who fired the shot?”

“So far,” replied Bristol, “I have failed to find out; but there’s a bullet in
the thing’s head. He was dead before he reached the pavement.”

“Did no one see the flash of the pistol?”

“No one that I have got hold of yet. Of course this kind of evidence is very
unreliable; these people regularly go out of their way to mislead the police.”

“You think the body may have been carried here from somewhere else?”

“Oh, no; this is where it fell, right enough. You can see where his head struck
the stones.”

“He has not been moved at all?”

“No; I shall not move him until I’ve worked out where in heaven’s name he can
have fallen from! You and I have seen some mysterious things happen, Mr.
Cavanagh, since the slipper of the Prophet came to England and brought these
people”—he nodded toward the thing at our feet—“in its train; but
this is the most inexplicable incident to date. I don’t know what to make of it
at all. Quite apart from the question of where the dwarf fell from, who shot at
him and why?”

“Have you no theory?” I asked. “The incident to my mind points directly to one
thing. We know that this uncanny creature belonged to the organization of
Hassan of Aleppo. We know that Hassan implacably pursues one object—the
slipper. In pursuit of the slipper, then, the dwarf came here.
Bristol!”—I laid my hand upon his arm, glancing about me with a very real
apprehension—“the slipper must be somewhere near!”

Bristol turned to the constable standing hard by.

“Remain here,” he ordered. Then to me: “I should like you to come up on to the
roof. From there we can survey the ground and perhaps arrive at some
explanation of how the dwarf came to fall upon that spot.”

Passing the constable on duty at one of the doorways and making our way through
the group of loiterers there, we ascended amid conflicting odours to the
topmost floor. A ladder was fixed against the wall communicating with a trap in
the ceiling. Several individuals in their shirt sleeves and all smoking clay
pipes had followed us up. Bristol turned upon them.

“Get downstairs,” he said—“all the lot of you, and stop there!”

With muttered imprecations our audience dispersed, slowly returning by the way
they had come. Bristol mounted the ladder and opened the trap. Through the
square opening showed a velvet patch spangled with starry points. As he passed
up on to the roof and I followed him, the comparative cleanness of the air was
most refreshing after the varied fumes of the staircase.

Side by side we leaned upon the parapet looking down into the dirty courtyard
which was the theatre of this weird mystery; looking down upon the stage,
sordidly Western, where a mystic Eastern tragedy had been enacted.

I could see the constable standing beside the crushed thing upon the stones.

“Now,” said Bristol, with a sort of awe in his voice, “where did he fall from?”

And at his words, looking down at the spot where the dwarf lay, and noting that
he could not possibly have fallen there from any of the buildings surrounding
the courtyard, an eerie sensation crept over me; for I was convinced that the
happening was susceptible of no natural explanation.

I had heard—who has not heard?—of the Indian rope trick, where a
fakir throws a rope into the air which remains magically suspended whilst a boy
climbs upward and upward until he disappears into space. I had never credited
accounts of the performance; but now I began seriously to wonder if the arts of
Hassan of Aleppo were not as great or greater than the arts of fakir. But the
crowning mystery to my mind was that of the Hashishin’s death. It would seem
that as he had hung suspended in space he had been shot!

“You say that someone heard the sound of the shot?” I asked suddenly.

“Several people,” replied Bristol; “but no one knows, or no one will say, from
what direction it came. I shall go on with the inquiry, of course, and
cross-examine every soul in Wyatt’s Buildings. Meanwhile, I’m open to confess
that I am beaten.”

In the velvet sky countless points blazed tropically. The hum of the traffic in
Waterloo Road reached us only in a muffled way. Sordidness lay beneath us, but
up there under the heavens we seemed removed from it as any Babylonian
astronomer communing with the stars.

When, some ten minutes later, I passed out into the noise of Waterloo Road, I
left behind me an unsolved mystery and took with me a great dread; for I knew
that the quest of the sacred slipper was not ended, I knew that another tragedy
was added to its history—and I feared to surmise what the future might
hold for all of us.

CHAPTER XVII

THE WOMAN WITH THE BASKET

Deep in thought respecting the inexplicable nature of this latest mystery, I
turned in the direction of the bridge, and leaving behind me an ever-swelling
throng at the gate of Wyatt’s Buildings, proceeded westward.

The death of the dwarf had lifted the case into the realms of the marvellous,
and I noted nothing of the bustle about me, for mentally I was still surveying
that hunched-up body which had fallen out of empty space.

Then in upon my preoccupation burst a woman’s scream!

I aroused myself from reverie, looking about to right and left. Evidently I had
been walking slowly, for I was less than a hundred yards from Wyatt’s
Buildings, and hard by the entrance to an uninviting alley from which I thought
the scream had proceeded.

And as I hesitated, for I had no desire to become involved in a drunken brawl,
again came the shrill scream: “Help! help!”

I cannot say if I was the only passer-by who heard the cry; certainly I was the
only one who responded to it. I ran down the narrow street, which was
practically deserted, and heard windows thrown up as I passed for the cries for
help continued.

Just beyond a patch of light cast by a street lamp a scene was being enacted
strange enough at any time and in any place, but doubly singular at that hour
of the night, or early morning, in a lane off the Waterloo Road.

An old woman, from whose hand a basket of provisions had fallen, was struggling
in the grasp of a tall Oriental! He was evidently trying to stifle her screams
and at the same time to pinion her arms behind her!

I perceived that there was more in this scene than met the eye. Oriental
footpads are rarities in the purlieus of Waterloo Road. So much was evident;
and since I carried a short, sharp argument in my pocket, I hastened to advance
it.

At the sight of the gleaming revolver barrel the man, who was dressed in dark
clothes and wore a turban, turned and ran swiftly off. I had scarce a glimpse
of his pallid brown face ere he was gone, nor did the thought of pursuit enter
my mind. I turned to the old woman, who was dressed in shabby black and who was
rearranging her thick veil in an oddly composed manner, considering the nature
of the adventure that had befallen her.

She picked up her basket, and turned away. Needless to say I was rather shocked
at her callous ingratitude, for she offered no word of thanks, did not even
glance in my direction, but made off hurriedly toward Waterloo Road.

I had been on the point of inquiring if she had sustained any injury, but I
checked the words and stood looking after her in blank wonderment. Then my
ideas were diverted into a new channel. I perceived, as she passed under an
adjacent lamp, that her basket contained provisions such as a woman of her
appearance would scarcely be expected to purchase. I noted a bottle of wine, a
chicken, and a large melon.

The nationality of the assailant from the first had marked the affair for no
ordinary one, and now a hazy notion of what lay behind all this began to come
to me.

Keeping well in the shadows on the opposite side of the way, I followed the
woman with the basket. The lane was quite deserted; for, the disturbance over,
those few residents who had raised their windows had promptly lowered them
again. She came out into Waterloo Road, crossed over, and stood waiting by a
stopping-place for electric cars. I saw her arranging a cloth over her basket
in such a way as effectually to conceal the contents. A strong mental
excitement possessed me. The detective fever claims us all at one time or
another, I think, and I had good reason for pursuing any inquiry that promised
to lead to the elucidation of the slipper mystery. A theory, covering all the
facts of the assault incident, now presented itself, and I stood back in the
shadow, watchful; in a degree, exultant.

A Greenwich-bound car was hailed by the woman with the basket. I could not be
mistaken, I felt sure, in my belief that she cast furtive glances about her as
she mounted the steps. But, having seen her actually aboard, my attention
became elsewhere engaged.

All now depended upon securing a cab before the tram car had passed from view!

I counted it an act of Providence that a disengaged taxi appeared at that
moment, evidently bound for Waterloo Station. I ran out into the road with cane
upraised.

As the man drew up—

“Quick!” I cried. “You see that Greenwich car—nearly at the Ophthalmic
Hospital? Follow it. Don’t get too near. I will give you further instructions
through the tube.” I leapt in. We were off!

The rocking car ahead was rounding the bend now toward St. George’s Circus. As
it passed the clock and entered South London Road it stopped. I raised the
tube.

“Pass it slowly!”

We skirted the clock tower, and bore around to the right. Then I drew well back
in the corner of the cab.

The woman with the basket was descending! “Pull up a few yards beyond!” I
directed. As the car re-started, and passed us, the taxi became stationary. I
peered out of the little window at the back.

The woman was returning in the direction of Waterloo Road!

“Drive slowly back along Waterloo Road,” was my next order. “Pretend you are
looking for a fare; I will keep out of sight.”

The man nodded. It was unlikely that any one would notice the fact that the cab
was engaged.

I was borne back again upon my course. The woman kept to the right, and, once
we were entered into the straight road which leads to the bridge, I again
raised the speaking-tube.

“Pull up,” I said. “On the right-hand side is an old woman carrying a basket,
fifty yards ahead. Do you see her? Keep well behind, but don’t lose sight of
her.”

The man drew up again and sat watching the figure with the basket until it was
almost lost from sight. Then slowly we resumed our way. I would have continued
the pursuit afoot now, but I feared that my quarry might again enter a vehicle.
She did not do so, however, but coming abreast of the turning in which the
mysterious assault had taken place, she crossed the road and disappeared from
view.

I leapt out of the cab, thrust half a crown into the man’s hand, and ran on to
the corner. The night was now far advanced, and I knew that the chances of
detection were thereby increased. But the woman seemed to have abandoned her
fears, and I saw her just ahead of me walking resolutely past the lamp beyond
which a short time earlier she had met with a dangerous adventure.

Since the opposite side of the street was comparatively in darkness, I slipped
across, and in a state of high nervous tension pursued this strange work of
espionage. I was convinced that I had forestalled Bristol and that I was hot
upon the track of those who could explain the mystery of the dead dwarf.

The woman entered the gate of the block of dwellings even more forbidding in
appearance than those which that night had staged a dreadful drama.

As the figure with the basket was lost from view I crept on, and in turn
entered the evil-smelling hallway. I stepped cautiously, and standing beneath a
gaslight protected by a wire frame, I congratulated myself upon having reached
that point of vantage as silently as any Sioux stalker.

Footsteps were receding up the stone stairs. Craning my neck, I peered up the
well of the staircase. I could not see the woman, but from the sound of her
tread it was possible to count the landings which she passed. When she had
reached the fourth, and I heard her step upon yet another flight, I knew that
she must be bound for the topmost floor; and observing every precaution, almost
holding my breath in a nervous endeavour to make not the slightest sound,
rapidly I mounted the stairs.

I was come to the third landing in this secret fashion when quite distinctly I
heard the grating of a key in a lock!

Since four doors opened upon each of the landings, at all costs, I thought, I
must learn by which door she entered.

Throwing caution to the winds I raced up the remaining flights ... and there at
the top the woman confronted me, with blazing eyes!—with eyes that
thrilled every nerve; for they were violet eyes, the only truly violet eyes I
have ever seen! They were the eyes of the woman who like a charming, mocking
will-o’-the-wisp had danced through this tragic scene from the time that poor
Professor Deeping had brought the Prophet’s slipper to London up to this
present hour!

There at the head of those stone steps in that common dwelling-house I knew
her—and in the violet eyes it was written that she knew, and feared, me!

“What do you want? Why are you following me?”

She made no endeavour to disguise her voice. Almost, I think, she spoke the
words involuntarily.

I stood beside her. Quickly as she had turned from the door at my ascent, I had
noted that it was that numbered forty-eight which she had been about to open.

“You waste words,” I said grimly. “Who lives there?”

I nodded in the direction of the doorway. The violet eyes watched me with an
expression in their depths which I find myself wholly unable to describe. Fear
predominated, but there was anger, too, and with it a sort of entreaty which
almost made me regret that I had taken this task upon myself. From beneath the
shabby black hat escaped an errant lock of wavy hair wholly inconsistent with
the assumed appearance of the woman. The flickering gaslight on the landing
sought out in that wonderful hair shades which seemed to glow with the soft
light seen in the heart of a rose. The thick veil was raised now and all
attempts at deception abandoned. At bay she faced me, this secret woman whom I
knew to hold the key to some of the darkest places which we sought to explore.

“I live there,” she said slowly. “What do you want with me?”

“I want to know,” I replied, “for whom are those provisions in your basket?”

She watched me fixedly.

“And I want to know,” I continued, “something that only you can tell me. We
have met before, madam, but you have always eluded me. This time you shall not
do so. There’s much I have to ask of you, but particularly I want to know who
killed the Hashishin who lies dead at no great distance from here!”

“How can I tell you that? Of what are you speaking?”

Her voice was low and musical; that of a cultured woman. She evidently
recognized the futility of further subterfuge in this respect.

“You know quite well of what I am speaking! You know that you can tell me if
any one can! The fact that you go disguised alone condemns you! Why should I
remind you of our previous meetings—of the links which bind you to the
history of the Prophet’s slipper?” She shuddered and closed her eyes. “Your
present attitude is a sufficient admission!”

She stood silent before me, with something pitiful in her pose—a
wonderfully pretty woman, whose disarranged hair and dilapidated hat could not
mar her beauty; whose clumsy, ill-fitting garments could not conceal her lithe
grace.

Our altercation had not thus far served to arouse any of the inhabitants and on
that stuffy landing, beneath the flickering gaslight, we stood alone, a group
of two which epitomized strange things.

Then, with that quietly dramatic note which marks real life entrances and
differentiates them from the loudly acclaimed episodes of the stage, a third
actor took up his cue.

“Both hands, Mr. Cavanagh!” directed an American voice.

Nerves atwitch, I started around in its direction.

From behind the slightly opened door of No. 48 protruded a steel barrel,
pointed accurately at my head!

I hesitated, glancing from the woman toward the open door.

“Do it quick!” continued the voice incisively. “You are up against a desperate
man, Mr. Cavanagh. Raise your hands. Carneta, relieve Mr. Cavanagh of his gun!”

Instantly the girl, with deft fingers, had obtained possession of my revolver.

“Step inside,” said the crisp, strident voice. Knowing myself helpless and
quite convinced that I was indeed in the clutches of desperate people, I
entered the doorway, the door being held open from within. She whom I had heard
called Carneta followed. The door was reclosed; and I found myself in a
perfectly bare and dim passageway. From behind me came the order—

“Go right ahead!”

Into a practically unfurnished room, lighted by one gas jet, I walked. Some
coarse matting hung before the two windows and a fairly large grip stood on the
floor against one wall. A gas-ring was in the hearth, together with a few cheap
cooking utensils.

I turned and faced the door. First entered Carneta, carrying the basket; then
came a man with a revolver in his left hand and his right arm strapped across
his chest and swathed in bandages. One glance revealed the fact that his right
hand had been severed—revealed the fact, though I knew it already, that
my captor was Earl Dexter.

He looked even leaner than when I had last seen him. I had no doubt that his
ghastly wound had occasioned a tremendous loss of blood. His gaunt face was
positively emaciated, but the steely gray eyes had lost nothing of their
brightness. There was a good deal about Mr. Earl Dexter, the cracksman, that
any man must have admired.

“Shut the door, Carneta,” he said quietly. His companion closed the door and
Dexter sat down on the grip, regarding me with his oddly humorous smile.

“You’re a visitor I did not expect, Mr. Cavanagh,” he said. “I expected someone
worse. You’ve interfered a bit with my plans but I don’t know that I can’t
rearrange things satisfactorily. I don’t think I’ll stop for supper,
though—” He glanced at the girl, who stood silent by the door.

“Just pack up the provisions,” he directed, nodding toward the basket—“in
the next room.”

She departed without a word.

“That’s a noticeable dust coat you’re wearing, Mr. Cavanagh,” said the
American; “it gives me a great notion. I’m afraid I’ll have to borrow it.”

He glanced, smiling, at the revolver in his left hand and back again to me.
There was nothing of the bully about him, nothing melodramatic; but I took off
the coat without demur and threw it across to him.

“It will hide this stump,” he said grimly; “and any of the Hashishin gentlemen
who may be on the look-out—though I rather fancy the road is clear at the
moment—will mistake me for you. See the idea? Carneta will be in a cab
and I’ll be in after her and away before they’ve got time to so much as
whistle.”

Very awkwardly he got into the coat.

“She’s a clever girl, Carneta,” he said. “She’s doctored me all along since
those devils cut my hand off.”

As he finished speaking Carneta returned.

She had discarded her rags and wore a large travelling coat and a fashionable
hat.

“Ready?” asked Dexter. “We’ll make a rush for it. We meant to go to-night
anyway. It’s getting too hot here!” He turned to me.

“Sorry to say,” he drawled, “I’ll have to tie you up and gag you. Apologize;
but it can’t be helped.”

Carneta nodded and went out of the room again, to return almost immediately
with a line that looked as though it might have been employed for drying
washing.

“Hands behind you,” rapped Dexter, toying with the revolver—“and think
yourself lucky you’ve got two!”

There was no mistaking the manner of man with whom I had to deal, and I obeyed;
but my mind was busy with a hundred projects. Very neatly the girl bound my
wrists, and in response to a slight nod from Dexter threw the end of the line
up over a beam in the sloping ceiling, for the room was right under the roof,
and drew it up in such a way that, my wrists being raised behind me, I became
utterly helpless. It was an ingenious device indicating considerable
experience.

“Just tie his handkerchief around his mouth,” directed Dexter: “that will keep
him quiet long enough for our purpose. I hope you will be released soon, Mr.
Cavanagh,” he added. “Greatly regret the necessity.”

Carneta bound the handkerchief over my mouth.

Dexter extinguished the gas.

“Mr. Cavanagh,” he said, “I’ve gone through hell and I’ve lost the most useful
four fingers and a thumb in the United States to get hold of the Prophet’s
slipper. Any one can have it that’s open to pay for it—but I’ve got to
retire on the deal, so I’ll drive a hard bargain! Good-night!”

There was a sound of retreating footsteps, and I heard the entrance door close
quietly.

CHAPTER XVIII

WHAT CAME THROUGH THE WINDOW

I had not been in my unnatural position for many minutes before I began to
suffer agonies, agonies not only physical but mental; for standing there like
some prisoner of the Inquisition, it came to me how this dismantled apartment
must be the focus of the dreadful forces of Hassan of Aleppo!

That Earl Dexter had the slipper of the Prophet I no longer doubted, and that
he had sustained, in this dwelling beneath the roof, an uncanny siege during
the days which had passed since the theft from the Antiquarian Museum, was
equally certain. Helpless, gagged, I pictured those hideous creatures, evil
products of the secret East, who might, nay, who must surround that place! I
thought of the horrible little yellow man who lay dead in Wyatt’s Buildings;
and it became evident to me that the house in which I was now imprisoned must
overlook the back of those unsavoury tenements. The windows, sack-covered now,
no doubt commanded a view of the roofs of the buildings. One of the mysteries
that had puzzled us was solved. It was Earl Dexter who had shot the yellow
dwarf as he was bound for this very room! But how humanly the Hashishin had
proposed to gain his goal, how he had travelled through empty space—for
from empty space the shot had brought him down—I could not imagine.

I knew something of the almost supernatural attributes of these people. From
Professor Deeping’s book I knew of the incredible feats which they could
perform when under the influence of the drug hashish. From personal experience
also I knew that they had powers wholly abnormal.

The pain in my arms and back momentarily increased. An awesome silence ruled. I
tortured myself with pictures of murderous yellow men possessed of the power
claimed by the Mahatmas, of levitation. Mentally I could see a distorted
half-animal creature carrying a great gleaming knife and floating
supernaturally toward me through the night!

A soft pattering sound became perceptible on the sloping roof above!

I think I have never known such intense and numbing fear as that which now
descended upon me. Perhaps I may be forgiven it. A more dreadful situation it
would be hard to devise. Knowing that I was on the fifth story of a house,
bound, helpless, I knew, too, that a second mystic guardian of the slipper was
come to accomplish the task in which the first had failed!

I began to pray fervently.

Neither of the windows were closed; and now through the intense darkness I
heard one of them being raised up—up—up...

The sacking was pulled aside inch by inch.

Silhouetted against the faintly luminous background I saw a hunched, unnatural
figure. The real was more dreadful even than the imaginary—for some stray
beam of light touched into cold radiance a huge curved knife which the visitant
held between his teeth!

My fear became a madness, and I twisted my body violently in a wild endeavour
to free myself. A dreadful pain shot through my left shoulder, and the whole
nightmare scene—the thing with the knife at the window—the
low-ceiled room-began to fade away from me. I seemed to be falling into deep
water.

A splintering crash and the sound of shouting formed my last recollections ere
unconsciousness came.

I found myself lying in an armchair with Bristol forcing brandy between my
lips. My left arm hung limply at my side and the pain in my dislocated shoulder
was excruciating.

“Thank God you are all right, Mr. Cavanagh!” said the inspector. “I got the
surprise of my life when we smashed the door in and found you tied up here!”

“You came none too soon,” I said feebly. “God knows how Providence directed you
here.”

“Providence it was,” replied Bristol. “From the roof of Wyatt’s
Buildings—you know the spot?—I saw the second yellow devil coming.
By God! They meant to have it to-night! They don’t value their lives a brass
farthing against that damned slipper!”

“But how—”

“Along the telegraph-wires, Mr. Cavanagh! They cross Wyatt’s Buildings and
cross this house. It was a moonless night or we should have seen it at once! I
watched him, saw him drop to this roof—and brought the men around to the
front.”

“Did he, that awful thing, escape?”

“He dropped full forty feet into a tree—from the tree to the ground, and
went off like a cat!”

“Earl Dexter has escaped us,” I said, “and he has the slipper!”

“God help him!” replied Bristol. “For by now he has that hell-pack at his
heels! What a case! Heavens above, it will drive me mad!”

CHAPTER XIX

A RAPPING AT MIDNIGHT

Inspector Bristol finished his whisky at a gulp and stood up, a tall, massive
figure, stretching himself and yawning.

“The detective of fiction would be hard at work on this case, now,” he said,
smiling, “but I don’t even pretend to be. I am at a standstill and I don’t care
who knows it.”

“You have absolutely no clue to the whereabouts of Earl Dexter?”

“Not the slightest, Mr. Cavanagh. You hear a lot about the machinery of the
law, but as a matter of fact, looking for a clever man hidden in London is a
good deal like looking for a needle in a haystack. Then, he may have been
bluffing when he told you he had the Prophet’s slipper. He’s already had his
hand cut off through interfering with the beastly thing, and I really can’t
believe he would take further chances by keeping it in his possession.
Nevertheless, I should like to find him.”

He leaned back against the mantelpiece, scratching his head perplexedly. In
this perplexity he had my sympathy. No such pursuit, I venture to say, had ever
before been required of Scotland Yard as this of the slipper of the Prophet. An
organization founded in 1090, which has made a science of assassination, which
through the centuries has perfected the malign arts, which, lingering on in a
dark spot in Syria, has suddenly migrated and established itself in London, is
a proposition almost unthinkable.

It was hard to believe that even the daring American cracksman should have
ventured to touch that blood-stained relic of the Prophet, that he should have
snatched it away from beneath the very eyes of the fanatics who fiercely
guarded it. What he hoped to gain by his possession of the slipper was not
evident, but the fact remained that if he could be believed, he had it, and
provided Scotland Yard’s information was accurate, he still lurked in hiding
somewhere in London.

Meanwhile, no clue offered to his hiding-place, and despite the ceaseless
vigilance of the men acting under Bristol’s orders, no trace could be found of
Hassan of Aleppo nor of his fiendish associates.

“My theory is,” said Bristol, lighting a cigarette, “that even Dexter’s
cleverness has failed to save him. He’s probably a dead man by now, which
accounts for our failing to find him; and Hassan of Aleppo has recovered the
slipper and returned to the East, taking his gruesome company with
him—God knows how! But that accounts for our failing to find him.”

I stood up rather wearily. Although poor Deeping had appointed me legal
guardian of the relic, and although I could render but a poor account of my
stewardship, let me confess that I was anxious to take that comforting theory
to my bosom. I would have given much to have known beyond any possibility of
doubt that the accursed slipper and its blood-lustful guardian were far away
from England. Had I known so much, life would again have had something to offer
me besides ceaseless fear, endless watchings. I could have slept again,
perhaps; without awaking, clammy, peering into every shadow, listening, nerves
atwitch to each slightest sound disturbing the night; without groping beneath
the pillow for my revolver.

“Then you think,” I said, “that the English phase of the slipper’s history is
closed? You think that Dexter, minus his right hand, has eluded British
law—that Hassan and Company have evaded retribution?”

“I do!” said Bristol grimly, “and although that means the biggest failure in my
professional career, I am glad—damned glad!”

Shortly afterward he took his departure; and I leaned from the window, watching
him pass along the court below and out under the arch into Fleet Street. He was
a man whose opinions I valued, and in all sincerity I prayed now that he might
be right; that the surcease of horror which we had recently experienced after
the ghastly tragedies which had clustered thick about the haunted slipper,
might mean what he surmised it to mean.

The heat to-night was very oppressive. A sort of steaming mist seemed to rise
from the court, and no cooling breeze entered my opened windows. The clamour of
the traffic in Fleet Street came to me but remotely. Big Ben began to strike
midnight. So far as I could see, residents on the other stairs were all abed
and a velvet shadow carpet lay unbroken across three parts of the court. The
sky was tropically perfect, cloudless, and jewelled lavishly. Indeed, we were
in the midst of an Indian summer; it seemed that the uncanny visitants had
brought, together with an atmosphere of black Eastern deviltry, something, too,
of the Eastern climate.

The last stroke of the Cathedral bell died away. Other more distant bells still
were sounding dimly, but save for the ceaseless hum of the traffic, no unusual
sound now disturbed the archaic peace of the court.

I returned to my table, for during the time that had passed I had badly
neglected my work and now must often labour far into the night. I was just
reseated when there came a very soft rapping at the outer door!

No doubt my mood was in part responsible, but I found myself thinking of Poe’s
weird poem, “The Raven”; and like the character therein I found myself
hesitating.

I stole quietly into the passage. It was in darkness. How odd it is that in
moments of doubt instinctively one shuns the dark and seeks the light. I
pressed the switch lighting the hall lamp, and stood looking at the closed
door.

Why should this late visitor have rapped in so uncanny a fashion in preference
to ringing the bell?

I stepped back to my table and slipped a revolver into my pocket.

The muffled rapping was repeated. As I stood in the study doorway I saw the
flap of the letter-box slowly raised!

Instantly I extinguished both lights. You may brand me as childishly timid, but
incidents were fresh in my memory which justified all my fears.

A faintly luminous slit in the door showed me that the flap was now fully
raised. It was the dim light on the stairway shining through. Then quite
silently the flap was lowered. Came the soft rapping again.

“Who’s there?” I cried.

No one answered.

Wondering if I were unduly alarming myself, yet, I confess, strung up tensely
in anticipation that this was some device of the phantom enemy, I stood in
doubt.

The silence remained unbroken for thirty seconds or more. Then yet again it was
disturbed by that ghostly, muffled rapping.

I advanced a step nearer to the door.

“Who’s there?” I cried loudly. “What do you want?”

The flap of the letter box began to move, and I formed a sudden determination.
Making no sound in my heelless Turkish slippers I crept close up to the door
and dropped upon my knees.

Thereupon the flap became fully lifted, but from where I crouched beneath it I
was unable to see who or what was looking in; yet I hesitated no longer. I
suddenly raised myself and thrust the revolver barrel through the opening!

“Who are you?” I cried. “Answer or I fire!”—and along the barrel I peered
out on to the landing.

Still no one answered. But something impalpable—a powder—a
vapour—to this hour I do not know what—enveloped me with its
nauseating fumes; was puffed fully into my face! My eyes, my mouth, my nostrils
became choked up, it seemed, with a deadly stifling perfume.

Wildly, feeling that everything about me was slipping away, that I was sinking
into a void, for ought I knew that of dissolution, I pulled the trigger once,
twice, thrice...

“My God!”—the words choked in my throat and I reeled back into the
passage—“it’s not loaded!”

I threw up my arms to save myself, lurched, and fell forward into what seemed a
bottomless pit.

CHAPTER XX

THE GOLDEN PAVILION

When I opened my eyes it was to a conviction that I dreamed. I lay upon a
cushioned divan in a small apartment which I find myself at a loss adequately
to describe.

It was a yellow room, then, its four walls being hung with yellow silk, its
floor being entirely covered by a yellow Persian carpet. One lamp, burning in a
frame of some lemon coloured wood and having its openings filled with green
glass, flooded the place with a ghastly illumination. The lamp hung by gold
chains from the ceiling, which was yellow. Several low tables of the same
lemon-hued wood as the lamp-frame stood around; they were inlaid in fanciful
designs with gleaming green stones. Turn my eyes where I would, clutch my
aching head as I might, this dream chamber would not disperse, but remained
palpable before me—yellow and green and gold.

There was a niche behind the divan upon which I lay framed about with yellow
wood. In it stood a golden bowl and a tall pot of yellow porcelain; I lay amid
yellow cushions having golden tassels. Some of them were figured with vivid
green devices.

To contemplate my surroundings assuredly must be to court madness. No door was
visible, no window; nothing but silk and luxury, yellow and green and gold.

To crown all, the air was heavy with a perfume wholly unmistakable by one
acquainted with Egypt’s ruling vice. It was the reek of smouldering
hashish—a stench that seemed to take me by the throat, a vapour damnable
and unclean. I saw that a little censer, golden in colour and inset with
emeralds, stood upon the furthermost corner of the yellow carpet. From it rose
a faint streak of vapour; and I followed the course of the sickly scented smoke
upward through the still air until in oily spirals it lost itself near to the
yellow ceiling. As a sick man will study the veriest trifle I studied that wisp
of smoke, pencilled grayly against the silken draperies, the carven tables,
against the almost terrifying persistency of the yellow and green and gold.

I strove to rise, but was overcome by vertigo and sank back again upon the
yellow cushions. I closed my eyes, which throbbed and burned, and rested my
head upon my hands. I ceased to conjecture if I dreamed or was awake. I knew
that I felt weak and ill, that my head throbbed agonizingly, that my eyes
smarted so as to render it almost impossible to keep them open, that a
ceaseless humming was in my ears.

For some time I lay endeavouring to regain command of myself, to prepare to
face again that scene which had something horrifying in its yellowness, touched
with the green and gold.

And when finally I reopened my eyes, I sat up with a suppressed cry. For a tall
figure in a yellow robe from beneath which peeped yellow slippers, a figure
crowned with a green turban, stood in the centre of the apartment!

It was that of a majestic old man, white bearded, with aquiline nose, and the
fierce eagle eyes of a fanatic set upon me sternly, reprovingly.

With folded arms he stood watching me, and I drew a sharp breath and rose
slowly to my feet.

There amid the yellow and green and gold, amid the abominable reek of burning
hashish I stood and faced Hassan of Aleppo!

No words came to me; I was confounded.

Hassan spoke in that gentle voice which I had heard only once before.

“Mr. Cavanagh,” he said, “I have brought you here that I might warn you. Your
police are seeking me night and day, and I am fully alive to my danger whilst I
stay in your midst. But for close upon a thousand years the Sheikh-al-jebal,
Lord of the Hashishin, has guarded the traditions and the relics of the
Prophet, Salla-’llahu ’ale yhi wasellem! I, Hassan of Aleppo, am Sheikh of the
Order to-day, and my sacred duty has brought me here.”

The piercing gaze never left my face. I was not yet by any means my own man and
still I made no reply.

“You have been wise,” continued Hassan, “in that you have never touched the
sacred slipper. Had you lain hands upon it, no secrecy could have availed you.
The eye of the Hashishin sees all. There is a shaft of light which the true
Believer perceives at night as he travels toward El-Medineh. It is the light
which uprises, a spiritual fire, from the tomb of the Prophet (Salla-’llahu
’aleyhi wasellem!). The relics also are radiant, though in a lesser degree.”

He took a step toward me, spreading out his lean brown hands, palms downward.

“A shaft of light,” he said impressively, “shines upward now from London. It is
the light of the holy slipper.” He gazed intently at the yellow drapery at the
left of the divan, but as though he were looking not at the wall but through
it. His features worked convulsively; he was a man inspired. “I see it now!” he
almost whispered—“that white light by which the guardians of the relic
may always know its resting place!”

I managed to force words to my lips.

“If you know where the slipper is,” I said, more for the sake of talking than
for anything else, “why do you not recover it?”

Hassan turned his eyes upon me again.

“Because the infidel dog,” he cried loudly, “who has soiled it with his unclean
touch, defies us—mocks us! He has suffered the loss of the offending
hand, but the evil ginn protect him; he is inspired by efreets! But God is
great and Mohammed is His only Prophet! We shall triumph; but it is written,
oh, daring infidel, that you again shall become the guardian of the slipper!”

He spoke like some prophet of old and I stared at him fascinated. I was loth to
believe his words.

“When again,” he continued, “the slipper shall be in the receptacle of which
you hold the key, that key must be given to me!”

I thought I saw the drift of his words now; I thought I perceived with what
object I had been trapped and borne to this mysterious abode for whose
whereabouts the police vainly were seeking. By the exercise of the gift of
divination it would seem that Hassan of Aleppo had forecast the future history
of the accursed slipper or believed that he had done so. According to his own
words I was doomed once more to become trustee of the relic. The key of the
case at the Antiquarian Museum, to which he had prophesied the slipper’s
return, would be the price of my life! But—

“In order that these things may be fulfilled,” he continued, “I must permit you
to return to your house. So it is written, so it shall be. Your life is in my
hands; beware when it is demanded of you that you hesitate not in yielding up
the key!”

He raised his hands before him, making a sort of obeisance, I doubt not in the
direction of Mecca, drew aside one of the yellow hangings behind him and
disappeared, leaving me alone again in that nightmare apartment of yellow and
green and gold. A moment I stood watching the swaying curtain. Utter silence
reigned, and a sort of panic seized me infinitely greater than that occasioned
by the presence of the weird Sheikh. I felt that I must escape from the place
or that I should become raving mad.

I leapt forward to the curtain which Hassan had raised and jerked it aside; it
had concealed a door. In this door and about level with my eyes was a kind of
little barred window through which shone a dim green light. I bent forward,
peering into the place beyond, but was unable to perceive anything save a vague
greenness.

And as I peered, half believing that the whole episode was a dreadful, fevered
dream, the abominable fumes of hashish grew, or seemed to grow, quite suddenly
insupportable. Through the square opening, from the green void beyond, a cloud
of oily vapour, pungent, stifling, resembling that of burning Indian hemp,
poured out and enveloped me!

With a gasping cry I fell back, fighting for breath, for a breath of clean air
unpolluted with hashish. But every inhalation drew down into my lungs the fumes
that I sought to escape from. I experienced a deathly sickness; I seemed to be
sinking into a sea of hashish, amid bubbles of yellow and green and gold, and I
knew no more until, struggling again to my feet, surrounded by utter
darkness—I struck my head on the corner of my writing-table ... for I lay
in my own study!

My revolver, unloaded, was upon the table beside me. The night was very still.
I think it must have been near to dawn.

“My God!” I whispered, “did I dream it all? Did I dream it all?”

CHAPTER XXI

THE BLACK TUBE

“There’s no doubt in my mind,” said Inspector Bristol, “that your experience
was real enough.”

The sun was shining into my room now, but could not wholly disperse the cloud
of horror which lay upon it. That I had been drugged was sufficiently evident
from my present condition, and that I had been taken away from my chambers
Inspector Bristol had satisfactorily proved by an examination of the soles of
my slippers.

“It was a clever trick,” he said. “God knows what it was they puffed into your
face through the letter box, but the devilish arts of ten centuries, we must
remember, are at the command of Hassan of Aleppo! The repetition of the trick
at the mysterious place you were taken to is particularly interesting. I should
say you won’t be in a hurry to peer through letter boxes and so forth in the
future?”

I shook my aching head.

“That accursed yellow room,” I replied, “stank with the fumes of hashish. It
may have been some preparation of hashish that was used to drug me.”

Bristol stood looking thoughtfully from the window.

“It was a nightmare business, Mr. Cavanagh,” he said; “but it doesn’t advance
our inquiry a little bit. The prophecy of the old man with the white
beard—whom you assure me to be none other than Hassan of Aleppo—is
something we cannot very well act upon. He clearly believes it himself; for he
has released you after having captured you, evidently in order that you may be
at liberty to take up your duty as trustee of the slipper again. If the slipper
really comes back to the Museum the fact will show Hassan to be something
little short of a magician. I shan’t envy you then, Mr. Cavanagh, considering
that you hold the keys of the case!”

“No,” I replied wearily. “Poor Professor Deeping thought that he acted in my
interests and that my possession of the keys would constitute a safeguard. He
was wrong. It has plunged me into the very vortex of this ghastly affair.”

“It is maddening,” said Bristol, “to know that Hassan and Company are snugly
located somewhere under our very noses, and that all Scotland Yard can find no
trace of them. Then to think that Hassan of Aleppo, apparently by means of some
mystical light, has knowledge of the whereabouts of the slipper and
consequently of the whereabouts of Earl Dexter (another badly wanted man) is
extremely discouraging! I feel like an amateur; I’m ashamed of myself!”

Bristol departed in a condition of irritable uncertainty.

My head in my hands, I sat for long after his departure, with the phantom
characters of the ghoulish drama dancing through my brain. The distorted yellow
dwarfs seemed to gibe apish before me. Severed hands clenched and unclenched
themselves in my face, and gleaming knives flashed across the mental picture.
Predominant over all was the stately figure of Hassan of Aleppo, that
benignant, remorseless being, that terrible guardian of the holy relic who
directed the murderous operations. Earl Dexter, The Stetson Man, with his
tightly bandaged arm, his gaunt, clean-shaven face and daredevil smile,
figured, too, in my feverish daydream; nor was that other character missing,
the girl with the violet eyes whose beautiful presence I had come to dread; for
like a sybil announcing destruction her appearances in the drama had almost
invariably presaged fresh tragedies. I recalled my previous meetings with this
woman of mystery. I recalled my many surmises regarding her real identity and
association with the case. I wondered why in the not very distant past I had
promised to keep silent respecting her; I wondered why up to that present
moment, knowing beyond doubt that her activities were inimical to my interests,
were criminal, I had observed that foolish pledge.

And now my door-bell was ringing—as intuitively I had anticipated. So
certain was I of the identity of my visitor that as I walked along the passage
I was endeavouring to make up my mind how I should act, how I should receive
her.

I opened the door; and there, wearing European garments but a green turban ...
stood Hassan of Aleppo!

When I say that amazement robbed me of the power to speak, to move, almost to
think, I doubt not you will credit me. Indeed, I felt that modern London was
crumbling about me and that I was become involved in the fantastic mazes of one
of those Oriental intrigues such as figure in the Romance of Abu Zeyd, or with
which most European readers have been rendered familiar by the glowing pages of
“The Thousand and One Nights.”

“Effendim,” said my visitor, “do not hesitate to act as I direct!”

In his gloved hand he carried what appeared to be an ebony cane. He raised and
pointed it directly at me. I perceived that it was, in fact, a hollow tube.

“Death is in my hand,” he continued; “enter slowly and I will follow you.”

Still the sense of unreality held me thralled and my brain refused me service.
Like an hypnotic subject I walked back to my study, followed by my terrible
visitor, who reclosed the door behind him.

He sat facing me across my littered table with the mysterious tube held loosely
in his grasp.

How infinitely more terrifying are perils unknown than those known and
appreciated! Had a European armed with a pistol attempted a similar act of
coercion, I cannot doubt that I should have put up some sort of fight; had he
sat before me now as Hassan of Aleppo sat, with a comprehensible weapon thus
laid upon his knees, I should have taken my chance, should have attacked him
with the lamp, with a chair, with anything that came to my hand.

But before this awful, mysterious being who was turning my life into channels
unsuspected, before that black tube with its unknown potentialities, I sat in a
kind of passive panic which I cannot attempt to describe, which I had never
experienced before and have never known since.

“There is one about to visit you,” he said, “whom you know, whom I think you
expect. For it is written that she shall come and such events cast a shadow
before them. I, too, shall be present at your meeting!”

His eagle eyes opened widely; they burned with fanaticism.

“Already she is here!” he resumed suddenly, and bent as one listening. “She
comes under the archway; she crossed the courtyard—and is upon the stair!
Admit her, effendim; I shall be close behind you!”

The door-bell rang.

With the consciousness that the black tube was directed toward the back of my
head, I went and opened the door. My mind was at work again, and busy with
plans to terminate this impossible situation.

On the landing stood a girl wearing a simple white frock which fitted her
graceful figure perfectly. A white straw hat, of the New York tourist type,
with a long veil draped from the back suited her delicate beauty very well. The
red mouth drooped a little at the corners, but the big violet eyes, like lamps
of the soul, seemed afire with mystic light.

“Mr. Cavanagh,” she said, very calmly and deliberately, “there is only one way
now to end all this trouble. I come from the man who can return the slipper to
where it belongs; but he wants his price!”

Her quiet speech served completely to restore my mental balance, and I noted
with admiration that her words were so chosen as to commit her in no way. She
knew quite well that thus far she might appear in the matter with impunity, and
she clearly was determined to say nothing that could imperil her.

“Will you please come in?” I said quietly—and stood aside to admit her.

Exhibiting wonderful composure, she entered—and there, in the badly
lighted hallway came face to face with my other visitor!

It was a situation so dramatic as to seem unreal.

Away from that tall figure retreated the girl with the violet eyes—and
away—until she stood with her back to the wall. Even in the gloom I could
see that her composure was deserting her; her beautiful face was pallid.

“Oh, God!” she whispered, all but inaudible—“You!”

Hassan, grasping the black rod in his hand, signed to her to enter the study.
She stood quite near to me, with her eyes fixed upon him. I bent closer to her.

“My revolver—in left-hand table drawer,” I breathed in her ear. “Get it.
He is watching me!”

I could not tell if my words had been understood, for, never taking her gaze
from the Sheikh of the Assassins, she sidled into the study. I followed her;
and Hassan came last of all. Just within the doorway he stood, confronting us.

“You have come,” he said, addressing the girl and speaking in perfect English
but with a marked accent, “to open your impudent negotiations through Mr.
Cavanagh for the return of the thrice holy relic to the Museum! Your companion,
the man, who is inspired by the Evil One, has even dared to demand ransom for
the slipper from me!”

Hassan was majestic in his wrath; but his eyes were black with venomous hatred.

“He has suffered the penalty which the Koran lays down; he has lost his right
hand. But the lord of all evil protects him, else ere this he had lost his
life! Move no closer to that table!”

I started. Either Hassan of Aleppo was omniscient or he had overheard my
whispered words!

“Easily I could slay you where you stand!” he continued. “But to do so would
profit me nothing. This meeting has been revealed to me. Last night I witnessed
it as I slept. Also it has been revealed to me by Erroohanee, in the mirror of
ink, that the slipper of the Prophet, Salla-’llahu ’ale yhi wasellem! Shall
indeed return to that place accursed, that infidel eyes may look upon it! It is
the will of Allah, whose name be exalted, that I hold my hand, but it is also
His will that I be here, at whatever danger to my worthless body.”

He turned his blazing eyes upon me.

“To-morrow, ere noon,” he said, “the slipper will again be in the Museum from
which the man of evil stole it. So it is written; obscure are the ways. We met
last night, you and I, but at that time much was dark to me that now is light.
The holy ’Alee spoke to me in a vision, saying: ‘There are two keys to the case
in which it will be locked. Secure one, leaving the other with him who holds
it! Let him swear to be secret. This shall be the price of his life!’”

The black tube was pointed directly at my forehead.

“Effendim,” concluded the speaker, “place in my hand the key of the case in the
Antiquarian Museum!”

Hands convulsively clenched, the girl was looking from me to Hassan. My throat
felt parched, but I forced speech to my lips.

“Your omniscience fails you,” I said. “Both keys are at my bank!”

Blacker grew the fierce eyes—and blacker. I gave myself up for lost; I
awaited death—death by some awful, unique means—with what courage I
could muster.

From the court below came the sound of voices, the voices of passers-by who so
little suspected what was happening near to them that had someone told them
they certainly had refused to credit it. The noise of busy Fleet Street came
drumming under the archway, too.

Then, above all, another sound became audible. To this day I find myself unable
to define it; but it resembled the note of a silver bell.

Clearly it was a signal; for, hearing it, Hassan dropped the tube and glanced
toward the open window.

In that instant I sprang upon him!

That I had to deal with a fanatic, a dangerous madman, I knew; that it was his
life or mine, I was fully convinced. I struck out then and caught him fairly
over the heart. He reeled back, and I made a wild clutch for the damnable tube,
horrid, unreasoning fear of which thus far had held me inert.

I heard the girl scream affrightedly, and I knew, and felt my heart chill to
know, that the tube had been wrenched from my hand! Hassan of Aleppo, old man
that he appeared, had the strength of a tiger. He recovered himself and hurled
me from him so that I came to the floor crashingly half under my writing-table!

Something he cried back at me, furiously—and like an enraged animal, his
teeth gleaming out from his beard, he darted from the room. The front door
banged loudly.

Shaken and quivering, I got upon my feet. On the threshold, in a state of
pitiable hesitancy, stood the pale, beautiful accomplice of Earl Dexter. One
quick glance she flashed at me, then turned and ran!

Again the door slammed. I ran to the window, looking out into the court. The
girl came hurrying down the steps, and with never a backward glance ran on and
was lost to view in one of the passages opening riverward.

Out under the arch, statelily passed a tall figure—and Inspector Bristol
was entering! I saw the detective glance aside as the two all but met. He stood
still, and looked back!

“Bristol!” I cried, and waved my arms frantically.

“Stop him! Stop him! It’s Hassan of Aleppo!”

Bristol was not the only one to hear my wild cry—not the only one to dash
back under the arch and out into Fleet Street.

But Hassan of Aleppo was gone!

CHAPTER XXII

THE LIGHT OF EL-MEDINEH

Bristol and I walked slowly in the direction of the entrance of the British
Antiquarian Museum. It was the day following upon the sensational scene in my
chambers.

“There’s very little doubt,” said Bristol, “that Earl Dexter has the slipper
and that Hassan of Aleppo knows where Dexter is in hiding. I don’t know which
of the two is more elusive. Hassan apparently melted into thin air yesterday;
and although The Stetson Man has never within my experience employed disguises,
no one has set eyes upon him since the night that he vanished from his lodgings
off the Waterloo Road. It’s always possible for a man to baffle the police by
remaining closely within doors, but during all the time that has elapsed Dexter
must have taken a little exercise occasionally, and the missing hand should
have betrayed him.”

“The wonder to me is,” I replied, “that he has escaped death at the hands of
the Hashishin. He is a supremely daring man, for I should think that he must be
carrying the slipper of the Prophet about with him!”

“I would rather he did it than I!” commented Bristol. “For sheer audacity
commend me to The Stetson Man! His idea no doubt was to use you as intermediary
in his negotiations with the Museum authorities, but that plan failing, he has
written them direct, thoughtfully omitting his address, of course!”

We were, in fact, at that moment bound for the Museum to inspect this latest
piece of evidence.

“The crowning example of the man’s audacity and cleverness,” added my
companion, “is his having actually approached Hassan of Aleppo with a similar
proposition! How did he get in touch with him? All Scotland Yard has failed to
find any trace of that weird character!”

“Birds of a feather—” I suggested.

“But they are not birds of a feather!” cried Bristol. “On your own showing,
Hassan of Aleppo is simply waiting his opportunity to balance Dexter’s account
forever! I always knew Dexter was a clever man; I begin to think he’s the most
daring genius alive!”

We mounted the steps of the Museum. In the hallway Mostyn, the curator, awaited
us. Having greeted Bristol and myself he led the way to his private office, and
from a pigeon-hole in his desk took out a letter typewritten upon a sheet of
quarto paper.

Bristol spread it out upon the blotting pad and we bent over it curiously.

SIR—

I believe I can supply information concerning the whereabouts of the missing
slipper of Mohammed. As any inquiry of this nature must be extremely perilous
to the inquirer and as the relic is a priceless one, my fee would be 10,000
pounds. The fanatics who seek to restore the slipper to the East must not know
of any negotiations, therefore I omit my address, but will communicate further
if you care to insert instructions in the agony column of Times.



Faithfully,

EARL DEXTER

Bristol laughed grimly.

“It’s a daring game,” he said; “a piece of barefaced impudence quite
characteristic.

“He’s posing as a sort of private detective now, and is prepared for a trifling
consideration to return the slipper which he stole himself! He must know,
though, that we have his severed hand at the Yard to be used in evidence
against him.”

“Is the Burton Room open to the public again?” I asked Mostyn.

“It is open, yes,” he replied, “and a quite unusual number of visitors come
daily to gaze at the empty case which once held the slipper of the Prophet.”

“Has the case been mended?”

“Yes; it is quite intact again; only the exhibit is missing.”

We ascended the stairs, passed along the Assyrian Room, which seemed to be
unusually crowded, and entered the lofty apartment known as the Burton Room.
The sunblinds were drawn, and a sort of dim, religious light prevailed therein.
A group of visitors stood around an empty case at the farther end of the
apartment.

“You see,” said Mostyn, pointing, “that empty case has a greater attraction
than all the other full ones!”

But I scarcely heeded his words, for I was intently watching the movements of
one of the group about the empty case. I have said that the room was but dimly
illuminated, and this fact, together no doubt with some effect of reflected
light, enhanced by my imagination, perhaps produced the phenomenon which was
occasioning me so much amazement.

Remember that my mind was filled with memories of weird things, that I often
found myself thinking of that mystic light which Hassan of Aleppo had called
the light of El-Medineh—that light whereby, undeterred by distance, he
claimed to be able to trace the whereabouts of any of the relics of the
Prophet.

Bristol and Mostyn walked on then; but I stood just within the doorway,
intently, breathlessly watching an old man wearing an out-of-date Inverness
coat and a soft felt hat. He had a gray beard and moustache, and long, untidy
hair, walked with a stoop, and in short was no unusual type of Visitor to that
institution.

But it seemed to me, and the closer I watched him the more convinced I became,
that this was no optical illusion, that a faint luminosity, a sort of elfin
light, played eerily about his head!

As Bristol and Mostyn approached the case the old man began to walk toward me
and in the direction of the door. The idea flashed through my mind that it
might be Hassan of Aleppo himself, Hassan who had predicted that the stolen
slipper should that day be returned to the Museum!

Then he came abreast of me, passed me, and I felt that my surmise had been
wrong. I saw Bristol, from farther up the room, turn and look back. Something
attracted his trained eye, I suppose, which was not perceptible to me. But he
suddenly came striding along. Obviously he was pursuing the old man, who was
just about to leave the apartment. Seeing that the latter had reached the
doorway, Bristol began to run.

The old man turned; and amid a chorus of exclamations from the astonished
spectators, Bristol sprang upon him!

How it all came about I cannot say, cannot hope to describe; but there was a
short, sharp scuffle, the crack of a well-directed blow ... and Bristol was
rolling on his back, the old man, hatless, was racing up the Assyrian Room, and
everyone in the place seemed to be shouting at once!

Bristol, with blood streaming from his face, staggered to his feet, clutching
at me for support.

“After him, Mr. Cavanagh!” he cried hoarsely. “It’s your turn to-day! After
him! That’s Earl Dexter!”

Mostyn waited for no more, but went running quickly through the Assyrian Room.
I may mention here that at the head of the stairs he found the caped Inverness
which had served to conceal Dexter’s mutilated arm, and later, behind a piece
of statuary, a wig and a very ingenious false beard and moustache were
discovered. But of The Stetson Man there was no trace. His brief start had
enabled him to make good his escape.

As Mostyn went off, and a group of visitors flocked in our direction, Bristol,
who had been badly shaken by the blow, turned to them.

“You will please all leave the Burton Room immediately,” he said.

Looks of surprise greeted his words; but with his handkerchief raised to his
face, he peremptorily repeated them. The official note in his voice was readily
to be detected; and the wonder-stricken group departed with many a backward
glance.

As the last left the Burton Room, Bristol pointed, with a rather shaky finger,
at the soft felt hat which lay at his feet. It had formed part of Dexter’s
disguise. Close beside it lay another object which had evidently fallen from
the hat—a dull red thing lying on the polished parquet flooring.

“For God’s sake don’t go near it!” whispered Bristol. “The room must be closed
for the present. And now I’m off after that man. Step clear of it.”

His words were unnecessary; I shunned it as a leprous thing.

It was the slipper of the Prophet!

CHAPTER XXIII

THE THREE MESSAGES

I stood in the foyer of the Astoria Hotel. About me was the pulsing stir of
transatlantic life, for the tourist season was now at its height, and I counted
myself fortunate in that I had been able to secure a room at this
establishment, always so popular with American visitors. Chatting groups
surrounded me and I became acquainted with numberless projects for visiting the
Tower of London, the National Gallery, the British Museum, Windsor Castle, Kew
Gardens, and the other sights dear to the heart of our visiting cousins. Loaded
lifts ascended and descended. Bradshaws were in great evidence everywhere; all
was hustle and glad animation.

The tall military-looking man who stood beside me glanced about him with a
rather grim smile.

“You ought to be safe enough here, Mr. Cavanagh!” he said.

“I ought to be safe enough in my own chambers,” I replied wearily. “How many of
these pleasure-seeking folk would believe that a man can be as greatly in peril
of his life in Fleet Street as in the most uncivilized spot upon the world map?
Do you think if I told that prosperous New Yorker who is buying a cigar yonder,
for instance, that I had been driven from my chambers by a band of Eastern
assassins founded some time in the eleventh century, he would believe it?”

“I am certain he wouldn’t!” replied Bristol. “I should not have credited it
myself before I was put in charge of this damnable case.”

My position at that hour was in truth an incredible one. The sacred slipper of
Mohammed lay once more in the glass case at the Antiquarian Museum from which
Earl Dexter had stolen it. Now, with apish yellow faces haunting my dreams,
with ghostly menaces dogging me day and night, I was outcast from my own rooms
and compelled, in self-defence, to live amid the bustle of the Astoria. So
wholly nonplussed were the police authorities that they could afford me no
protection. They knew that a group of scientific murderers lay hidden in or
near to London; they knew that Earl Dexter, the foremost crook of his day, was
also in the metropolis—and they could make no move, were helpless;
indeed, as Bristol had confessed, were hopeless!

Bristol, on the previous day, had unearthed the Greek cigar merchant, Acepulos,
who had replaced the slipper in its case (for a monetary consideration). He had
performed a similar service when the bloodstained thing had first been put upon
exhibition at the Museum, and for a considerable period had disappeared. We had
feared that his religious pretensions had not saved him from the avenging
scimitar of Hassan; but quite recently he had returned again to his Soho shop,
and in time thus to earn a second cheque.

As Bristol and I stood glancing about the foyer of the hotel, a plain-clothes
officer whom I knew by sight came in and approached my companion. I could not
divine the fact, of course, but I was about to hear news of the money-loving
and greatly daring Graeco-Moslem.

The detective whispered something to Bristol, and the latter started, and
paled. He turned to me.

“They haven’t overlooked him this time, Mr. Cavanagh,” he said. “Acepulos has
been found dead in his room, nearly decapitated!”

I shuddered involuntarily. Even there, amid the chatter and laughter of those
light-hearted tourists, the shadow of Hassan of Aleppo was falling upon me.

Bristol started immediately for Soho and I parted from him in the Strand, he
proceeding west and I eastward, for I had occasion that morning to call at my
bank. It was the time of the year when London is full of foreigners, and as I
proceeded in the direction of Fleet Street I encountered more than one
Oriental. To my excited imagination they all seemed to glance at me furtively,
with menacing eyes, but in any event I knew that I had little to fear whilst I
contrived to keep to the crowded thoroughfares. Solitude I dreaded and with
good reason.

Then at the door of the bank I found fresh matter for reflection. The assistant
manager, Mr. Colby, was escorting a lady to the door. As I stood aside, he
walked with her to a handsome car which waited, and handed her in with marks of
great deference. She was heavily veiled and I had no more than a glimpse of
her, but she appeared to be of middle age and had gray hair and a very stately
manner.

I told myself that I was unduly suspicious, suspicious of everyone and of
everything; yet as I entered the bank I found myself wondering where I had seen
that dignified, grayhaired figure before. I even thought of asking the manager
the name of his distinguished customer, but did not do so, for in the
circumstances such an inquiry must have appeared impertinent.

My business transacted, I came out again by the side entrance which opens on
the little courtyard, for this branch of the London County and Provincial Bank
occupies a corner site.

A ragged urchin who was apparently waiting for me handed me a note. I looked at
him inquiringly.

“For me?” I said.

“Yes, sir. A dark gentleman pointed you out as you was goin’ into the bank.”

The note was written upon a half sheet of paper and, doubting if it was really
intended for me, I unfolded it and read the following—

Mr. Cavanagh, take the keys of the case containing the holy slipper to your
hotel this evening without fail.

HASSAN.

“Who gave you this, boy?” I asked sharply.

“A foreign gentleman, sir, very dark—like an Indian.”

“Where is he?”

“He went off in a cab, sir, after he give me the note.”

I handed the boy sixpence and slowly pursued my way. An idea was forming in my
mind to trap the enemy by seeming acquiescent. I wondered if my movements were
being watched at that moment. Since it was more than probable, I returned to
the bank, entered, and made some trivial inquiry of a cashier, and then came
out again and walked on as far as the Report office.

I had not been in the office more than five minutes before I received a
telegram from Inspector Bristol. It had been handed in at Soho, and the message
was an odd one.

CAVANAGH, Report, London.

Plot afoot to steal keys. Get them from bank and join me 11 o’clock at Astoria.
Have planned trap.



BRISTOL.

This was very mysterious in view of the note so recently received by me, but I
concluded that Bristol had hit upon a similar plan to that which was forming in
my own mind. It seemed unnecessarily hazardous, though, actually to withdraw
the keys from their place of safety.

Pondering deeply upon the perplexities of this maddening case, I shortly
afterward found myself again at the bank. With the manager I descended to the
strong-room, and the safe was unlocked which contained the much-sought-for keys
of the case at the Antiquarian Museum.

“There are the keys, quite safe!—and by the way, this is my second visit
here this morning, Mr. Cavanagh,” said the manager, with whom I was upon rather
intimate terms. “A foreign lady who has recently become a customer of the bank
deposited some valuable jewels here this morning—less than an hour ago,
in fact.”

“Indeed,” I said, and my mind was working rapidly. “The lady who came in the
large blue car, a gray-haired lady?”

“Yes,” was the reply, “did you notice her, then?”

I nodded and said no more, for in truth I had no more to say. I had good reason
to respect the uncanny powers of Hassan of Aleppo, but I doubted if even his
omniscience could tell him (since I had actually gone down into the
strong-room) whether when I emerged I had the keys, or whether my visit and
seeming acceptance of his orders had been no more than a subterfuge!

That the Hashishin had some means of communicating with me at the Astoria was
evident from the contents of the note which I had received, and as I walked in
the direction of the hotel my mind was filled with all sorts of misgivings. I
was playing with fire! Had I done rightly or should I have acted otherwise? I
sighed wearily. The dark future would resolve all my doubts.

When I reached the Astoria, Bristol had not arrived. I lighted a cigarette and
sat down in the lounge to await his coming. Presently a boy approached, handing
me a message which had been taken down from the telephone by the clerk. It was
as follows—

Tell Mr. Cavanagh, who is waiting in the hotel, to take what I am expecting to
his chambers, and say that I will join him there in twenty minutes.



INSPECTOR BRISTOL.

Again I doubted the wisdom of Bristol’s plan. Had I not fled to the Astoria to
escape from the dangerous solitude of my rooms? That he was laying some trap
for the Hashishin was sufficiently evident, and whilst I could not justly
suspect him of making a pawn of me I was quite unable to find any other
explanation of this latest move.

I was torn between conflicting doubts. I glanced at my watch. Yes! There was
just time for me to revisit the bank ere joining Bristol at my chambers! I
hesitated. After all, in what possible way could it jeopardize his plans for me
merely to pretend to bring the keys?

“Hang it all!” I said, and jumped to my feet. “These maddening conjectures will
turn my brain! I’ll let matters stand as they are, and risk the consequences!”

I hesitated no longer, but passed out from the hotel and once more directed my
steps in the direction of Fleet Street.

As I passed in under the arch through which streamed many busy workers, I told
myself that to dread entering my own chambers at high noon was utterly
childish. Yet I did dread doing so! And as I mounted the stair and came to the
landing, which was always more or less dark, I paused for quite a long time
before putting the key in the lock.

The affair of the accursed slipper was playing havoc with my nerves, and I
laughed dryly to note that my hand was not quite steady as I turned the key,
opened my door, and slipped into the dim hallway.

As I closed it behind me, something, probably a slight noise, but possibly
something more subtle—an instinct—made me turn rapidly.

There facing me stood Hassan of Aleppo.

CHAPTER XXIV

I KEEP THE APPOINTMENT

That moment was pungent with drama. In the intense hush of the next five
seconds I could fancy that the world had slipped away from me and that I was
become an unsubstantial thing of dreams. I was in no sense master of myself;
the effect of the presence of this white-bearded fanatic was of a kind which I
am entirely unable to describe. About Hassan of Aleppo was an aroma of evil,
yet of majesty, which marked him strangely different from other men—from
any other that I have ever known. In his venerable presence, remembering how he
was Sheikh of the Assassins, and recalling his bloody history, I was always
conscious of a weakness, physical and mental. He appalled me; and now, with my
back to the door, I stood watching him and watching the ominous black tube
which he held in his hand. It was a weapon unknown to Europe and therefore more
fearful than the most up-to-date of death-dealing instruments.

Hassan of Aleppo pointed it toward me.

“The keys, effendim,” he said; “hand me the keys!”

He advanced a step; his manner was imperious. The black tube was less than a
foot removed from my face. That I had my revolver in my pocket could avail me
nothing, for in my pocket it must remain, since I dared to make no move to
reach it under cover of that unfamiliar, terrible weapon.

The black eyes of Hassan glared insanely into mine.

“You will have placed them in your pocketcase,” he said. “Take it out; hand it
to me!”

I obeyed, for what else could I do? Taking the case from my pocket, I placed it
in his lean brown hand.

An expression of wild exultation crossed his features; the eagle eyes seemed to
be burning into my brain. A puff of hot vapour struck me in the
face—something which was expelled from the mysterious black tube. And
with memories crowding to my mind of similar experiences at the hands of the
Hashishin, I fell back, clutching at my throat, fighting for my life against
the deadly, vaporous thing that like a palpable cloud surrounded me. I tried to
cry out, but the words died upon my tongue. Hassan of Aleppo seemed to grow
huge before my eyes like some ginn of Eastern lore. Then a curtain of darkness
descended. I experienced a violent blow upon the forehead (I suppose I had
pitched forward), and for the time resigned my part in the drama of the sacred
slipper.

CHAPTER XXV

THE WATCHER IN BANK CHAMBERS

At about five o’clock that afternoon Inspector Bristol, who had spent several
hours in Soho upon the scene of the murder of the Greek, was walking along
Fleet Street, bound for the offices of the Report. As he passed the court, on
the corner of which stands a branch of the London County and Provincial Bank,
his eye was attracted by a curious phenomenon.

There are reflectors above the bank windows which face the court, and it
appeared to Bristol that there was a hole in one of these, the furthermost from
the corner. A tiny beam of light shone from the bank window on to the
reflector, or from the reflector on to the window, which circumstance in itself
was not curious. But above the reflector, at an acute angle, this mysterious
beam was seemingly projected upward. Walking a little way up the court he saw
that it shone through, and cast a disc of light upon the ceiling of an office
on the first floor of Bank Chambers above.

It is every detective’s business to be observant, and although many thousands
of passersby must have cast their eyes in the same direction that day, there is
small matter for wonder in the fact that Bristol alone took the trouble to
inquire into the mystery—for his trained eye told him that there was a
mystery here.

Possibly he was in that passive frame of mind when the brain is particularly
receptive of trivial impressions; for after a futile search of the Soho cigar
store for anything resembling a clue, he was quite resigned to the idea of
failure in the case of Hassan and Company. He walked down the court and into
the entrance of Bank Chambers. An Inspection of the board upon the wall showed
him that the first floor apparently was occupied by three firms, two of them
legal, for this is the neighbourhood of the law courts, and the third a press
agency. He stepped up to the first floor. Past the doors bearing the names of
the solicitors and past that belonging to the press agent he proceeded to a
fourth suite of offices. Here, pinned upon the door frame, appeared a card
which bore the legend—

THE CONGO FIBRE COMPANY

Evidently the Congo Fibre Company had so recently taken possession of the
offices that there had been no time to inscribe their title either upon the
doors or upon the board in the hall.

Inspector Bristol was much impressed, for into one of the rooms occupied by the
Fibre Company shone that curious disc of light which first had drawn his
attention to Bank Chambers. He rapped on the door, turned the handle, and
entered. The sole furniture of the office in which he found himself apparently
consisted of one desk and an office stool, which stool was occupied by an
office boy. The windows opened on the court, and a door marked “Private”
evidently communicated with an inner office whose windows likewise must open on
the court. It was the ceiling of this inner office, unless the detective’s
calculation erred, which he was anxious to inspect.

“Yes, sir?” said the boy tentatively.

Bristol produced a card which bore the uncompromising legend: John Henry Smith.

“Take my card to Mr. Boulter, boy,” he said tersely. The boy stared.

“Mr. Boulter, sir? There isn’t any one of that name here.”

“Oh!” said Bristol, looking around him in apparent surprise: “how long is he
gone?”

“I don’t know, sir. I’ve only been here three weeks, and Mr. Knowlson only took
the offices a month ago.”

“Oh,” commented Bristol, “then take my card to Mr. Knowlson; he will probably
be able to give me Mr. Boulter’s present address.”

The boy hesitated. The detective had that authoritative manner which awes the
youthful mind.

“He’s out, sir,” he said, but without conviction.

“Is he?” rapped Bristol. “Well, I’ll leave my card.”

He turned and quitted the office, carefully closing the door behind him. Three
seconds later he reopened it, and peering in, was in time to see the boy knock
upon the private door. A little wicket, or movable panel, was let down, the
card of John Henry Smith was passed through to someone unseen, and the wicket
was reclosed!

The boy turned and met the wrathful eye of the detective. Bristol reentered,
closing the door behind him.

“See here, young fellow,” said he, “I don’t stand for those tricks! Why didn’t
you tell me Mr. Knowlson was in?”

“I’m very sorry, sir!”—the boy quailed beneath his glance—“but he
won’t see any one who hasn’t an appointment.”

“Is there someone with him, then?”

“No.”

“Well, what’s he doing?”

“I don’t know, sir; I’ve never been in to see!”

“What! never been in that room?”

“Never!” declared the boy solemnly. “And I don’t mind telling you,” he added,
recovering something of his natural confidence, “that I am leaving on the 31st.
This job ain’t any use to me!”

“Too much work?” suggested Bristol.

“No work at all!” returned the boy indignantly. “I’m just here for a blessed
buffer, that’s what I’m here for, a buffer!”

“What do you mean?”

“I just have to sit here and see that nobody gets into that office. Lively,
ain’t it? Where’s the prospects?”

Bristol surveyed him thoughtfully.

“Look here, my lad,” he said quietly; “is that door locked?”

“Always,” replied the boy.

“Does Mr. Knowlson come to that shutter when you knock?”

“Yes.”

“Then go and knock!”

The boy obeyed with alacrity. He rapped loudly on the door, not noticing or not
caring that the visitor was standing directly behind him. The shutter was
lowered and a grizzled, bearded face showed for a moment through the opening.

Bristol leant over the boy and pushed a card through into the hand of the man
beyond. On this occasion it did not bear the legend “John Henry Smith,” but the
following—

CHIEF INSPECTOR BRISTOL

C.I.D.

NEW SCOTLAND YARD

“Good afternoon, Mr. Knowlson,” said the detective dryly. “I want to come in!”

There followed a moment of silence, from which Bristol divined that he had
blundered upon some mystery, possibly upon a big case; then a key was turned in
the lock and the door thrown open.

“Come right in, Inspector,” invited a strident voice. “Carter, you can go
home.”

Bristol entered warily, but not warily enough. For as the door was banged upon
his entrance he faced around only in time to find himself looking down the
barrel of a Colt automatic.

With his back to the door which contained the wicket, now reclosed, stood the
man with the bearded face. The revolver was held in his left hand; his right
arm terminated in a bandaged stump. But without that his steel-gray eyes would
have betrayed him to the detective.

“Good God!” whispered Bristol. “It’s Earl Dexter!”

“It is!” replied the cracksman, “and you’ve looked in at a real inconvenient
time! My visitors mostly seem to have that knack. I’ll have to ask you to stay,
Inspector. Sit down in that chair yonder.”

Bristol knew his man too well to think of opening any argument at that time. He
sat down as directed, and ignoring the revolver which covered him all the time,
began coolly to survey the room in which he found himself. In several respects
it was an extraordinary apartment.

The only bright patch in the room was the shining disc upon the ceiling; and
the detective noted with interest that this marked the position of an
arrangement of mirrors. A white-covered table, entirely bare, stood upon the
floor immediately beneath this mysterious apparatus. With the exception of one
or two ordinary items of furniture and a small hand lathe, the office otherwise
was unfurnished. Bristol turned his eyes again upon the daring man who so
audaciously had trapped him—the man who had stolen the slipper of the
Prophet and suffered the loss of his hand by the scimitar of an Hashishin as a
result. When he had least expected to find one, Fate had thrown a clue in
Bristol’s way. He reflected grimly that it was like to prove of little use to
him.

“Now,” said Dexter, “you can do as you please, of course, but you know me
pretty well and I advise you to sit quiet.”

“I am sitting quiet!” was the reply.

“I am sorry,” continued Dexter, with a quick glance at his maimed arm, “that I
can’t tie you up, but I am expecting a friend any moment now.”

He suddenly raised the wicket with a twitch of his elbow and, without removing
his gaze from the watchful detective, cried sharply—

“Carter!”

But there was no reply.

“Good; he’s gone!”

Dexter sat down facing Bristol.

“I have lost my hand in this game, Mr. Bristol,” he said genially, “and had
some narrow squeaks of losing my head; but having gone so far and lost so much
I’m going through, if I don’t meet a funeral! You see I’m up against two tough
propositions.”

Bristol nodded sympathetically.

“The first,” continued Dexter, “is you and Cavanagh, and English law generally.
My idea—if I can get hold of the slipper again—oh! you needn’t
stare; I’m out for it!—is to get the Antiquarian Institution to ransom
it. It’s a line of commercial speculation I have worked successfully before.
There’s a dozen rich highbrows, cranks to a man, connected with it, and they
are my likeliest buyers—sure. But to keep the tone of the market healthy
there’s Hassan of Aleppo, rot him! He’s a dangerous customer to approach, but
you’ll note I’ve been in negotiation with him already and am still, if not
booming, not much below par!”

“Quite so,” said Bristol. “But you’ve cut off a pretty hefty chew nevertheless.
They used to call you The Stetson Man, you used to dress like a fashion plate
and stop at the big hotels. Those days are past, Dexter, I’m sorry to note.
You’re down to the skulking game now and you’re nearer an advert for Clarkson
than Stein-Bloch!”

“Yep,” said Dexter sadly, “I plead guilty, but I think here’s Carneta!”

Bristol heard the door of the outer office open, and a moment later that upon
which his gaze was set opened in turn, to admit a girl who was heavily veiled,
and who started and stood still in the doorway, on perceiving the situation.
Never for one unguarded moment did the American glance aside from his prisoner.

“The Inspector’s dropped in, Carneta!” he drawled in his strident way. “You’re
handy with a ball of twine; see if you can induce him to stay the night!”

The girl, immediately recovering her composure, took off her hat in a
businesslike way and began to look around her, evidently in search of a
suitable length of rope with which to fasten up Bristol.

“Might I suggest,” said the detective, “that if you are shortly quitting these
offices a couple of the window-cords neatly joined would serve admirably?”

“Thanks,” drawled Dexter, nodding to his companion, who went into the outer
office, where she might be heard lowering the windows. She was gone but a few
moments ere she returned again, carrying a length of knotted rope. Under cover
of Dexter’s revolver, Bristol stoically submitted to having his wrists tied
behind him. The end of the line was then thrown through the ventilator above
the door which communicated with the outer office and Bristol was triced up in
such a way that, his wrists being raised behind him to an uncomfortable degree,
he was almost forced to stand upon tiptoe. The line was then secured.

“Very workmanlike!” commented the victim. “You’ll find a large handkerchief in
my inside breast pocket. It’s a clean one, and I can recommend it as a gag!”

Very promptly it was employed for the purpose, and Inspector Bristol found
himself helpless and constrained in a very painful position. Dexter laid down
his revolver.

“We will now give you a free show, Inspector,” he said, genially, “of our
camera obscura!”

He pulled down the blinds, which Bristol noted with interest to be black, but
through an opening in one of them a mysterious ray of light—the same that
he had noticed from Fleet Street—shone upon that point in the ceiling
where the arrangement of mirrors was attached. Dexter made some alteration,
apparently in the focus of the lens (for Bristol had divined that in some way a
lens had been fixed in the reflector above the bank window below) and the disc
of light became concentrated. The white-covered table was moved slightly, and
in the darkness some further manipulation was performed.

“Observe,” came the strident voice—“we now have upon the screen here a
minute moving picture. This little device, which is not protected in any way,
is of my own invention, and proved extremely useful in the Arkwright jewel
case, which startled Chicago. It has proved useful now. I know almost as much
concerning the arrangements below as the manager himself. In confidence,
Inspector, this is my last bid for the slipper! I have plunged on it. Madame
Sforza, the distinguished Italian lady who recently opened an account below,
opened it for 500 pounds cash. She has drawn a portion, but a balance remains
which I am resigned to lose. Her motor-car (hired), her references (forged),
the case of jewels which she deposited this morning (duds!)—all represent
a considerable outlay. It’s a nerve-racking line of operation, too. Any hour of
the day may bring such a visitor as yourself, for example. In short, I am at
the end of my tether.”

Bristol, ignoring the increasing pain in his arms and wrists, turned his eyes
upon the white-covered table and there saw a minute and clear-cut picture, such
as one sees in a focussing screen, of the interior of the manager’s office of
the London County and Provincial Bank!

CHAPTER XXVI

THE STRONG-ROOM

I wonder how often a sense of humour has saved a man from desperation? Perhaps
only the Easterns have thoroughly appreciated that divine gift. I have
interpolated the adventure of Inspector Bristol in order that the sequence of
my story be not broken; actually I did not learn it until later, but when, on
the following day, the whole of the facts came into my possession, I laughed
and was glad that I could laugh, for laughter has saved many a man from
madness.

Certainly the Fates were playing with us, for at a time very nearly
corresponding with that when Bristol found himself bound and helpless in Bank
Chambers I awoke to find myself tied hand and foot to my own bed! Nothing but
the haziest recollections came to me at first, nothing but dim memories of the
awful being who had lured me there; for I perceived now that all the messages
proceeded, not from Bristol, but from Hassan of Aleppo! I had been a fool, and
I was reaping the fruits of my folly. Could I have known that almost within
pistol shot of me the Inspector was trussed up as helpless as I, then indeed my
situation must have become unbearable, since upon him I relied for my speedy
release.

My ankles were firmly lashed to the rails at the foot of my bed; each of my
wrists was tied back to a bedpost. I ached in every limb and my head burned
feverishly, which latter symptom I ascribed to the powerful drug which had been
expelled into my face by the uncanny weapon carried by Hassan of Aleppo. I
reflected bitterly how, having transferred my quarters to the Astoria, I could
not well hope for any visitor to my chambers; and even the event of such a
visitor had been foreseen and provided against by the cunning lord of the
Hashishin. A gag, of the type which Dumas has described in “Twenty Years
After,” the poire d’angoisse, was wedged firmly into my mouth, so that only by
preserving the utmost composure could I breathe. I was bathed in cold
perspiration. So I lay listening to the familiar sounds without and reflecting
that it was quite possible so to lie, undisturbed, and to die alone, my
presence there wholly unsuspected!

Once, toward dusk, my phone bell rang, and my state of mind became agonizing.
It was maddening to think that someone, a friend, was virtually within reach of
me, yet actually as far removed as if an ocean divided us! I tasted the hellish
torments of Tantalus. I cursed fate, heaven, everything; I prayed; I sank into
bottomless depths of despair and rose to dizzy pinnacles of hope, when a
footstep sounded on the landing and a thousand wild possibilities, vague
possibilities of rescue, poured into my mind.

The visitor hesitated, apparently outside my door; and a change, as sudden as
lightning out of a cloud, transformed my errant fancies. A gruesome conviction
seized me, as irrational as the hope which it displayed, that this was one of
the Hashishin—an apish yellow dwarf, a strangler, the awful Hassan
himself!

The footsteps receded down the stairs. And my thoughts reverted into the old
channels of dull despair.

I weighed the chances of Bristol’s seeking me there; and, eager as I was to
give them substance, found them but airy—ultimately was forced to admit
them to be nil.

So I lay, whilst only a few hundred yards from me a singular scene was being
enacted. Bristol, a prisoner as helpless as myself, watched the concluding
business of the day being conducted in the bank beneath him; he watched the
lift descend to the strongroom—the spying apparatus being slightly
adjusted in some way; he saw the clerks hastening to finish their work in the
outer office, and as he watched, absorbed by the novelty of the situation, he
almost forgot the pain and discomfort which he suffered...

“This little peep-show of ours has been real useful,” Dexter confided out of
the darkness. “I got an impression of the key of the strongroom door a week
ago, and Carneta got one of the keys of the safe only this morning, when she
lodged her box of jewellery with the bank! I was at work on that key when you
interrupted me, and as by means of this useful apparatus I have learnt the
combination, you ought to see some fun in the next few hours!”

Bristol repressed a groan, for the prospect of remaining in that position was
thus brought keenly home to him.

The bank staff left the premises one by one until only a solitary clerk worked
on at a back desk. His task completed, he, too, took his departure and the bank
messenger commenced his nightly duty of sweeping up the offices. It was then
that excitement like an anaesthetic dulled the detective’s pain—indeed,
he forgot his aching body and became merely a watchful intelligence.

So intent had he become upon the picture before him that he had not noticed the
fact that he was alone in the office of the Congo Fibre Company. Now he
realized it from the absolute silence about him, and from another circumstance.

The spying apparatus had been left focussed, and on to the screen beneath his
eyes, bending low behind the desks and creeping, Indian-like, around, toward
the head of the stair which communicated with the strongroom and the apartment
used by the messenger, came the alert figure of Earl Dexter!

It may be a surprise to some people to learn that at any time in the day the
door of a bank, unguarded, should be left open, when only a solitary messenger
is within the premises; yet for a few minutes at least each evening this
happens at more than one City bank, where one of the duties of the resident
messenger is to clean the outer steps. Dexter had taken advantage of the man’s
absence below in quest of scrubbing material to enter the bank through the open
door.

Watching, breathless, and utterly forgetful of his own position, Bristol saw
the messenger, all unconscious of danger, come up the stairs carrying a pail
and broom. As his head reached the level of the railings The Stetson Man neatly
sand-bagged him, rushed across to the outer door, and closed it!

Given duplicate keys and the private information which Dexter so ingeniously
had obtained, there are many London banks vulnerable to similar attack.
Certainly, bullion is rarely kept in a branch storeroom, but the detective was
well aware that the keys of the case containing the slipper were kept in this
particular safe!

He was convinced, and could entertain no shadowy doubt, that at last Dexter had
triumphed. He wondered if it had ever hitherto fallen to the lot of a
representative of the law thus to be made an accessory to a daring felony!

But human endurance has well-defined limits. The fading light rendered the
ingenious picture dim and more dim. The pain occasioned by his position became
agonizing, and uttering a stifled groan he ceased to take an interest in the
robbery of the London County and Provincial Bank.

Fate is a comedian; and when later I learned how I had lain strapped to my bed,
and, so near to me, Bristol had hung helpless as a butchered carcass in the
office of the Congo Fibre Company, whilst, in our absence from the stage, the
drama of the slipper marched feverish to its final curtain, I accorded Fate her
well-earned applause. I laughed; not altogether mirthfully.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE SLIPPER

Someone was breaking in at the door of my chambers!

I aroused myself from a state of coma almost death-like and listened to the
blows. The sun was streaming in at my windows.

A splintering crash told of a panel broken. Then a moment later I heard the
grating of the lock, and a rush of footsteps along the passage.

“Try the study!” came a voice that sounded like Bristol’s, save that it was
strangely weak and shaky.

Almost simultaneously the Inspector himself threw open the bedroom
door—and, very pale and haggard-eyed, stood there looking across at me.
It was a scene unforgettable.

“Mr. Cavanagh!” he said huskily—“Mr. Cavanagh! Thank God you’re alive!
But”—he turned—“this way, Marden!” he cried, “Untie him quickly!
I’ve got no strength in my arms!”

Marden, a C.I.D. man, came running, and in a minute, or less, I was sitting up
gulping brandy.

“I’ve had the most awful experience of my life,” said Bristol. “You’ve fared
badly enough, but I’ve been hanging by my wrists—you know Dexter’s
trick!—for close upon sixteen hours! I wasn’t released until Carter, an
office boy, came on the scene this morning!”

Very feebly I nodded; I could not talk.

“The strong-room of your bank was rifled under my very eyes last evening!” he
continued, with something of his old vigour; “and five minutes after the
Antiquarian Museum was opened to the public this morning quite an unusual
number of visitors appeared.

“I saw the bank manager the moment he arrived, and learned a piece of news that
positively took my breath away! I was at the Museum seven minutes later and got
another shock! There in the case was the red slipper!”

“Then,” I whispered—“it hadn’t been stolen?”

“Wrong! It had! This was a duplicate, as Mostyn, the curator, saw at a glance!
Some of the early visitors—they were Easterns—had quite surrounded
the case. They were watched, of course, but any number of Orientals come to see
the thing; and, short of smashing the glass, which would immediately attract
attention, the authorities were unprepared, of course, for any attempt. Anyway,
they were tricked. Somebody opened the case. The real slipper of the Prophet is
gone!”

“They told you at the bank—”

“That you had withdrawn the keys! If Dexter had known that!”

“Hassan of Aleppo took them from me last night! At last the Hashishin have
triumphed.”

Bristol sank into the armchair.

“Every port is watched,” he said. “But—”

CHAPTER XXVIII

CARNETA

“I am entirely at your mercy; you can do as you please with me. But before you
do anything I should like you to listen to what I have to say.”

Her beautiful face was pale and troubled. Violet eyes looked sadly into mine.

“For nearly an hour I have been waiting for this chance—until I knew you
were alone,” she continued. “If you are thinking of giving me up to the police,
at least remember that I came here of my own free will. Of course, I know you
are quite entitled to take advantage of that; but please let me say what I came
to say!”

She pleaded so hard, with that musical voice, with her evident helplessness,
most of all with her wonderful eyes, that I quite abandoned any project I might
have entertained to secure her arrest. I think she divined this masculine
weakness, for she said, with greater confidence—

“Your friend, Professor Deeping, was murdered by the man called Hassan of
Aleppo. Are you content to remain idle while his murderer escapes?”

God knows I was not. My idleness in the matter was none of my choosing. Since
poor Deeping’s murder I had come to handgrips with the assassins more than
once, but Hassan had proved too clever for me, too clever for Scotland Yard.
The sacred slipper was once more in the hands of its fanatic guardian.

One man there was who might have helped the search, Earl Dexter. But Earl
Dexter was himself wanted by Scotland Yard!

From the time of the bank affair up to the moment when this beautiful visitor
had come to my chambers I had thought Dexter, as well as Hassan, to have fled
secretly from England. But the moment that I saw Carneta at my door I divined
that The Stetson Man must still be in London.

She sat watching me and awaiting my answer.

“I cannot avenge my friend unless I can find his murderer.”

Eagerly she bent forward.

“But if I can find him?”

That made me think, and I hesitated before speaking again.

“Say what you came to say,” I replied slowly. “You must know that I distrust
you. Indeed, my plain duty is to detain you. But I will listen to anything you
may care to tell me, particularly if it enables me to trap Hassan of Aleppo.”

“Very well,” she said, and rested her elbows upon the table before her. “I have
come to you in desperation. I can help you to find the man who murdered
Professor Deeping, but in return I want you to help me!”

I watched her closely. She was very plainly, almost poorly, dressed. Her face
was pale and there were dark marks around her eyes. This but served to render
their strange beauty more startling; yet I could see that my visitor was in
real trouble. The situation was an odd one.

“You are possibly about to ask me,” I suggested, “to assist Earl Dexter to
escape the police?”

She shook her head. Her voice trembled as she replied—

“That would not have induced me to run the risk of coming here. I came because
I wanted to find a man who was brave enough to help me. We have no friends in
London, and so it became a question of terms. I can repay you by helping you to
trace Hassan.”

“What is it, then, that Dexter asks me to do?”

“He asks nothing. I, Carneta, am asking!”

“Then you are not come from him?”

At my question, all her self-possession left her. She abruptly dropped her face
into her hands and was shaken with sobs! It was more than I could bear,
unmoved. I forgot the shady past, forgot that she was the associate of a daring
felon, and could only realize that she was a weeping woman, who had appealed to
my pity and who asked my aid.

I stood up and stared out of the window, for I experienced a not unnatural
embarrassment. Without looking at her I said—

“Don’t be afraid to tell me your troubles. I don’t say I should go out of my
way to be kind to Mr. Dexter, but I have no wish whatever to be instrumental
in”—I hesitated—“in making you responsible for his misdeeds. If you
can tell me where to find Hassan of Aleppo, I won’t even ask you where Dexter
is—”

“God help me! I don’t know where he is!”

There was real, poignant anguish in her cry. I turned and confronted her. Her
lashes were all wet with tears.

“What! has he disappeared?”

She nodded, fought with her emotion a moment, and went on unsteadily,

“I want you to help me to find him for in finding him we shall find Hassan!”

“How so?”

Her gaze avoided me now.

“Mr. Cavanagh, he has staked everything upon securing the slipper—and the
Hashishin were too clever for him. His hand—those Eastern fiends cut off
his hand! But he would not give in. He made another bid—and lost again.
It left him almost penniless.”

She spoke of Earl Dexter’s felonious plans as another woman might have spoken
of her husband’s unwise investments! It was fantastic hearing that confession
of The Stetson Man’s beautiful partner, and I counted the interview one of the
strangest I had ever known.

A sudden idea came to me. “When did Dexter first conceive the plan to steal the
slipper?” I asked.

“In Egypt!” answered Carneta. “Yes! You may as well know! He is thoroughly
familiar with the East, and he learned of the robbery of Professor Deeping
almost as soon as it became known to Hassan. I know what you are going to
ask—”

“Ahmad Ahmadeen!”

“Yes! He travelled home as Ahmadeen—the only time he ever used a
disguise. Oh! the thing is accursed!” she cried. “I begged him, implored him,
to abandon his attempts upon it. Day and night we were watched by those ghastly
yellow men! But it was all in vain. He knew, had known for a long time, where
Hassan of Aleppo was in hiding!”

And I reflected that the best men at New Scotland Yard had failed to pick up
the slightest clue!

“The Hashishin, of whom that dreadful man is leader, are rich, or have
supporters who are rich. The plan was to make them pay for the slipper.”

“My God! it was playing with fire!”

She sat silent awhile. Emotion threatened to get the upper hand. Then—

“Two days ago,” she almost whispered, “he set out—to ... get the
slipper!”

“To steal it?”

“To steal it!”

“From Hassan of Aleppo?”

I could scarcely believe that any man, single-handed, could have had the
hardihood to attempt such a thing.

“From Hassan, yes!”

I faced her, amazed, incredulous.

“Dexter had suffered mutilation, he knew that the Hashishin sought his life for
his previous attempts upon the relic of the Prophet, and yet he dared to
venture again into the very lions’ den?”

“He did, Mr. Cavanagh, two days ago. And—”

“Yes?” I urged, as gently as I could, for she was shaking pitifully.

“He never came back!”

The words were spoken almost in a whisper. She clenched her hands and leapt
from the chair, fighting down her grief and with such a stark horror in her
beautiful eyes that from my very soul I longed to be able to help her.

“Mr. Cavanagh” (she had courage, this bewildering accomplice of a cracksman),
“I know the house he went to! I cannot hope to make you understand what I have
suffered since then. A thousand times I have been on the point of going to the
police, confessing all I knew, and leading them to that house! O God! if only
he is alive, this shall be his last crooked deal—and mine! I dared not go
to the police, for his sake! I waited, and watched, and hoped, through two such
nights and days ... then I ventured. I should have gone mad if I had not come
here. I knew you had good cause to hate, to detest me, but I remembered that
you had a great grievance against Hassan. Not as great, O heaven! not as great
as mine, but yet a great one. I remembered, too, that you were the kind of
man—a woman can come to...”

She sank back into the chair, and with her fingers twining and untwining, sat
looking dully before her.

“In brief,” I said, “what do you propose?”

“I propose that we endeavour to obtain admittance to the house of Hassan of
Aleppo—secretly, of course, and all I ask of you in return for revealing
the secret of its situation is—”

“That I let Dexter go free?”

Almost inaudibly she whispered: “If he lives!”

Surely no stranger proposition ever had been submitted to a law-abiding
citizen. I was asked to connive in the escape of a notorious criminal, and at
one and the same time to embark upon an expedition patently burglarious! As
though this were not enough, I was invited to beard Hassan of Aleppo, the most
dreadful being I had ever encountered East or West, in his mysterious
stronghold!

I wondered what my friend, Inspector Bristol, would have thought of the
project; I wondered if I should ever live to see Hassan meet his just deserts
as a result of this enterprise, which I was forced to admit a foolhardy one.
But a man who has selected the career of a war correspondent from amongst those
which Fleet Street offers, is the victim of a certain craving for fresh
experiences; I suppose, has in his character something of an adventurous turn.

For a while I stood staring from the window, then faced about and looked into
the violet eyes of my visitor.

“I agree, Carneta!” I said.

CHAPTER XXIX

WE MEET MR. ISAACS

Quitting the wayside station, and walking down a short lane, we came out upon
Watling Street, white and dusty beneath the afternoon sun. We were less than an
hour’s train journey from London but found ourselves amid the Kentish hop
gardens, amid a rural peace unbroken. My companion carried a camera case slung
across her shoulder, but its contents were less innocent than one might have
supposed. In fact, it contained a neat set of those instruments of the
burglar’s art with whose use she appeared to be quite familiar.

“There is an inn,” she said, “about a mile ahead, where we can obtain some
vital information. He last wrote to me from there.”

Side by side we tramped along the dusty road. We both were silent, occupied
with our own thoughts. Respecting the nature of my companion’s I could
entertain little doubt, and my own turned upon the foolhardy nature of the
undertaking upon which I was embarked. No other word passed between us then,
until upon rounding a bend and passing a cluster of picturesque cottages, the
yard of the Vinepole came into view.

“Do they know you by sight here?” I asked abruptly.

“No, of course not; we never made strategic mistakes of that kind. If we have
tea here, no doubt we can learn all we require.”

I entered the little parlour of the inn, and suggested that tea should be
served in the pretty garden which opened out of it upon the right.

The host, who himself laid the table, viewed the camera case critically.

“We get a lot of photographers down here,” he remarked tentatively.

“No doubt,” said my companion. “There is some very pretty scenery in the
neighbourhood.”

The landlord rested his hands upon the table.

“There was a gentleman here on Wednesday last,” he said; “an old gentleman who
had met with an accident, and was staying somewhere hereabouts for his health.
But he’d got his camera with him, and it was wonderful the way he could use it,
considering he hadn’t got the use of his right hand.”

“He must have been a very keen photographer,” I said, glancing at the girl
beside me.

“He took three or four pictures of the Vinepole,” replied the landlord (which I
doubted, since probably his camera was a dummy); “and he wanted to know if
there were any other old houses in the neighbourhood. I told him he ought to
take Cadham Hall, and he said he had heard that the Gate House, which is about
a mile from here, was one of the oldest buildings about.”

A girl appeared with a tea tray, and for a moment I almost feared that the
landlord was about to retire; but he lingered, whilst the girl distributed the
things about the table, and Carneta asked casually, “Would there be time for me
to photograph the Gate House before dark?”

“There might be time,” was the reply, “but that’s not the difficulty. Mr.
Isaacs is the difficulty.”

“Who is Mr. Isaacs?” I asked.

“He’s the Jewish gentleman who bought the Gate House recently. Lots of money
he’s got and a big motor car. He’s up and down to London almost every day in
the week, but he won’t let anybody take photographs of the house. I know
several who’ve asked.”

“But I thought,” said Carneta, innocently, “you said the old gentleman who was
here on Wednesday went to take some?”

“He went, yes, miss; but I don’t know if he succeeded.”

Carneta poured out some tea.

“Now that you speak of it,” she said, “I too have heard that the Gate House is
very picturesque. What objection can Mr. Isaacs have to photographers?”

“Well, you see, miss, to get a picture of the house, you have to pass right
through the grounds.”

“I should walk right up to the house and ask permission. Is Mr. Isaacs at home,
I wonder?”

“I couldn’t say. He hasn’t passed this way to-day.”

“We might meet him on the way,” said I. “What is he like?”

“A Jewish gentleman sir, very dark, with a white beard. Wears gold glasses.
Keeps himself very much to himself. I don’t know anything about his household;
none of them ever come here.”

Carneta inquired the direction of Cadham Hall and of the Gate House, and the
landlord left us to ourselves. My companion exhibited signs of growing
agitation, and it seemed to me that she had much ado to restrain herself from
setting out without a moment’s delay for the Gate House, which, I readily
perceived, was the place to which our strange venture was leading us.

I found something very stimulating in the reflection that, rash though the
expedition might be, and, viewed from whatever standpoint, undeniably perilous,
it promised to bring me to that secret stronghold of deviltry where the
sinister Hassan of Aleppo so successfully had concealed himself.

The work of the modern journalist had many points of contact with that of the
detective; and since the murder of Professor Deeping I had succumbed to the
man-hunting fever more than once. I knew that Scotland Yard had failed to
locate the hiding-place of the remarkable and evil man who, like an efreet of
Oriental lore, obeyed the talisman of the stolen slipper, striking down
whomsoever laid hand upon its sacredness. It was a novel sensation to know
that, aided by this beautiful accomplice of a rogue, I had succeeded where the
experts had failed!

Misgivings I had and shall not deny. If our scheme succeeded it would mean that
Deeping’s murderer should be brought to justice. If it failed-well, frankly,
upon that possibility I did not dare to reflect!

It must be needless for me to say that we two strangely met allies were ill at
ease, sometimes to the point of embarrassment. We proceeded on our way in
almost unbroken silence, and, save for a couple of farm hands, without meeting
any wayfarer, up to the time that we reached the brow of the hill and had our
first sight of the Gate House lying in a little valley beneath. It was a small
Tudor mansion, very compact in plan and its roof glowed redly in the rays of
the now setting sun.

From the directions given by the host of the Vinepole it was impossible to
mistake the way or to mistake the house. Amid well-wooded grounds it stood, a
place quite isolated, but so typically English that, as I stood looking down
upon it, I found myself unable to believe that any other than a substantial
country gentleman could be its proprietor.

I glanced at Carneta. Her violet eyes were burning feverishly, but her lips
twitched in a bravely pitiful way.

Clearly now my adventure lay before me; that red-roofed homestead seemed to
have rendered it all substantial which hitherto had been shadowy; and I stood
there studying the Gate House gravely, for it might yet swallow me up, as
apparently it had swallowed Earl Dexter.

There, amid that peaceful Kentish landscape, fantasy danced and horrors unknown
lurked in waiting...

The eminence upon which we were commanded an extensive prospect, and eastward
showed a tower and flagstaff which marked the site of Cadham Hall. There were
homeward-bound labourers to be seen in the lanes now, and where like a white
ribbon the Watling Street lay across the verdant carpet moved an insect shape,
speedily.

It was a car, and I watched it with vague interest. At a point where a dense
coppice spread down to the roadway and a lane crossed west to east, the car
became invisible. Then I saw it again, nearer to us and nearer to the Gate
House. Finally it disappeared among the trees.

I turned to Carneta. She, too, had been watching. Now her gaze met mine.

“Mr. Isaacs!” she said; and her voice was less musical than usual. “His
chauffeur, who learned his business in Cairo, is probably the only one of his
servants who remains in England.”

“What!” I began—and said no more.

Where the road upon which we stood wound down into the valley and lost itself
amid the trees surrounding the Gate House, the car suddenly appeared again, and
began to mount the slope toward us!

“Heavens!” whispered Carneta. “He may have seen us—with glasses! Quick!
Let us walk back until the hill-top conceals us; then we must hide somewhere!”

I shared her excitement. Without a moment’s hesitation we both turned and
retraced our steps. Twenty paces brought us to a spot where a stack of mangel
wurzels stood at the roadside.

“This will do!” I said.

We ran around into the field, and crouched where we could peer out on the road
without ourselves being seen. Nor had we taken up this position a moment too
soon.

Topping the slope came a light-weight electric, driven by a man who, in his
spruce uniform, might have passed at a glance for a very dusky European. The
car had a limousine back, and as the chauffeur slowed down, out from the open
windows right and left peered the solitary occupant.

He had the cast of countenance which is associated with the best type of Jew,
with clear-cut aquiline features wholly destitute of grossness. His white beard
was patriarchal and he wore gold-rimmed pince-nez and a glossy silk hat. Such
figures may often be met with in the great money-markets of the world, and Mr.
Isaacs would have passed for a successful financier in even more discerning
communities than that of Cadham.

But I scarcely breathed until the car was past; and, beside me, my companion,
crouching to the ground, was trembling wildly. Fifty yards toward the village
Mr. Isaacs evidently directed the man to return.

The car was put about, and flashed past us at high speed down into the valley.
When the sound of the humming motor had died to something no louder than the
buzz of a sleepy wasp, I held out my hand to Carneta and she rose, pale, but
with blazing eyes, and picked up her camera case.

“If he had detected us, everything would have been lost!” she whispered.

“Not everything!” I replied grimly—and showed her the revolver which I
had held in my hand whilst those eagle eyes had been seeking us. “If he had
made a sign to show that he had seen us, in fact, if he had once offered a safe
mark by leaning from the car, I should have shot him dead without hesitation!”

“We must not show ourselves again, but wait for dusk. He must have seen us,
then, on the hilltop, but I hope without recognizing us. He has the sight and
instincts of a vulture!”

I nodded, slipping the revolver into my pocket, but I wondered if I should not
have been better advised to have risked a shot at the moment that I had
recognized “Mr. Isaacs” for Hassan of Aleppo.

CHAPTER XXX

AT THE GATE HOUSE

From sunset to dusk I lurked about the neighbourhood of the Gate House with my
beautiful accomplice—watching and waiting: a man bound upon stranger
business, I dare swear, than any other in the county of Kent that night.

Our endeavour now was to avoid observation by any one, and in this, I think, we
succeeded. At the same time, Carneta, upon whose experience I relied
implicitly, regarded it as most important that we should observe (from a safe
distance) any one who entered or quitted the gates.

But none entered, and none came out. When, finally, we made along the narrow
footpath skirting the west of the grounds, the night was silent—most
strangely still.

The trees met overhead, but no rustle disturbed their leaves and of animal life
no indication showed itself. There was no moon.

A full appreciation of my mad folly came to me, and with it a sense of heavy
depression. This stillness that ruled all about the house which sheltered the
awful Sheikh of the Assassins was ominous, I thought. In short, my nerves were
playing me tricks.

“We have little to fear,” said my companion, speaking in a hushed and quivering
voice. “The whole of the party left England some days ago.”

“Are you sure?”

“Certain! We learned that before Earl made his attempt. Hassan remains, for
some reason; Hassan and one other—the one who drives the car.”

“But the slipper?”

“If Hassan remains, so does the slipper!” From the knapsack, which, as you will
have divined, did not contain a camera, she took out an electric pocket lamp,
and directed its beam upon the hedge above us.

“There is a gap somewhere here!” she said. “See if you can find it. I dare not
show the light too long.”

Darkness followed. I clambered up the bank and sought for the opening of which
Carneta had spoken.

“The light here a moment,” I whispered. “I think I have it!”

Out shone the white beam, and momentarily fell upon a black hole in the
thickset hedge. The light disappeared, and as I extended my hand to Carneta she
grasped it and climbed up beside me.

“Put on your rubber shoes,” she directed. “Leave the others here.”

There in the darkness I did as she directed, for I was provided with a pair of
tennis shoes. Carneta already was suitably shod.

“I will go first,” I said. “What is the ground like beyond?”

“Just unkempt bushes and weeds.”

Upon hands and knees I crawled through, saw dimly that there was a short
descent, corresponding with the ascent from the lane, and turned, whispering to
my fellow conspirator to follow.

The grounds proved even more extensive than I had anticipated. We pressed on,
dodging low-sweeping branches and keeping our arms up to guard our faces from
outshoots of thorn bushes. Our progress necessarily was slow, but even so quite
a long time seemed to have elapsed ere we came in sight of the house.

This was my first expedition of the kind; and now that my goal was actually in
sight I became conscious of a sort of exultation hard to describe. My
companion, on the contrary, seemed to have become icily cool. When next she
spoke, her voice had a businesslike ring, which revealed the fact that she was
no amateur at this class of work.

“Wait here,” she directed. “I am going to pass all around the house, and I will
rejoin you.”