 CHAPTER VIII. In what order we dashed down to the drawing-room I cannot recall, but none was before me when I leaped over the threshold and saw Miss Elphin prone on the French windows. These were closed and bolted, and she lay with her hands outstretched in the alcove which they formed. I bent over her, and Naelyn Smith was at my elbow. Get my bag, I said. She has swooned. It is nothing serious. Her father, pale and wide-eyed, hovered about me, muttering incoherently. But I managed to reassure him, and his gratitude when I, having administered a simple restorative, the girl sighed shudderingly and opened her eyes. It was quite pathetic. I would permit no questioning at that time, and on her father's arm she retired to her own rooms. It was some fifteen minutes later that her message was brought to me. I followed the maid to a quaint little octagonal apartment, and Grieber Elphin stood before me, the candlelight caressing the soft curves of her face and gleaming in the meshes of her rich brown hair. When she had answered my first question she hesitated in pretty confusion. We are anxious to know what alarmed you, Miss Elphin. She bit her lip and glanced with apprehension towards the window. I'm almost afraid to tell, Father, she began rapidly. You would think me imaginative, but you've been so kind. It was two green eyes. Oh! Dr. Petrie, they looked at me from the steps leading to the lawn, and they shone like the eyes of a cat. The words thrilled me strangely. Are you sure it was not a cat, Miss Elphin? The eyes were too large, Dr. Petrie, and there was something dreadful, most dreadful in their appearance. I feel foolish and silly for having fainted twice in two days. But the suspense is telling upon me, I suppose. Father thinks—she was becoming charmingly confidential, as a woman often will with a tactful physician—that shut up here we are safe from whatever threatens us. I noted with concern a repetition of the nervous shudder, but since our return someone else has been in red mode. Whatever do you mean, Miss Elphin? Oh! I don't quite know what I do mean, Dr. Petrie. What does it all mean? Vernon has been explaining to me that some awful Chinaman is seeking the life of Mr. Nail and Smith. But if the same man wants to kill my father, why is he not done so? I am afraid you puzzle me. Of course. I must do so. But the man in the train, he could have killed us both quite easily, and last night someone was in Father's room. In his room? I could not sleep, and I heard something moving. My room is the next one. I knocked on the wall and woke Father. There was nothing, so I said it was the howling of the dog that had frightened me. How could anyone get into his room? I cannot imagine, but I am not sure it was a man. Miss Elphin, you alarm me. What do you suspect? You must think me hysterical and silly, but whilst Father and I have been away from red mode perhaps the usual precautions have been neglected. Is there any creature, any large creature, which could climb up the wall to the window? Do you know of anything with a long, thin body? For a moment I offered no reply, studying the girl's pretty face, her eager, blue-gray eyes widely opened and fixed upon mine. She was not of the neurotic type. With her clear complexion and sun-kissed neck, her arms healthy toned by exposure to country heirs were rounded and firm, and she had the agile shape of a young Diana with none of the anemic Langer which breeds morbid dreams. She was frightened, yes, who would not have been, but the mere idea of this thing which she believed to be in red mode without the apparition of the green eyes must have prostrated a victim of nerves. Have you seen a creature, Miss Elphin? She hesitated again, glancing down and pressing her fingertips together. As Father awoke and called out to know why I knocked, I glanced from my window. The moonlight threw half the lawn into shadow, and just disappearing in the shadow was something—something of a brown colour, marked with sections. What size and shape? It moved so quickly I could form no idea of its shape, but I saw six feet of it flash across the grass. Did you hear anything? A swishing sound in the shrubbery, then nothing more. She met my eyes, expecting me. Her confidence in my powers of understanding and sympathy was gratifying, though I knew that I but occupied the position of a father-confessor. Have you any idea, I said, how it came about that you awoke in the train yesterday whilst your father did not? We had coffee at a refreshment-room. It must have been drugged in some way. I scarcely tasted mine. The flavour was so awful, but Father is an old traveller, and drank the whole of his cupful. Mr. Elphin's voice called from below. Dr. Petrie, said the girl, quickly, what do you think they want to do to him? Ah! I replied. I wish I knew that. Will you think over what I told you, for I do assure you there is something here in red mode, something that comes and goes in spite of Father's fortifications? Caesar knows there is. Listen to him. He drags at his chain so that I wonder he does not break it. As we passed downstairs, the howling of the mastiff sounded eerily through the house, as did the clank-clank of the tightening chain as he threw the weight of his big body upon it. I sat in Smith's room that night for some time, he pacing the floor, smoking and talking. Elphin has influential Chinese friends, he said, but they dare not have him in Nanyang at present. He knows the country as he knows Norfolk. He would see things. His precautions here have baffled the enemy, I think. The attempt in the train points to an anxiety to waste no opportunity, but whilst Elphin was absent he was getting his outfit in London, by the way. They've been fixing some second string to their fiddle here. In case no opportunity offered before he returned they provided for getting at him here. But how, Smith? That's the mystery. But the dead dog in the shrubbery is significant. Do you think some emissary of Fu Manchu is actually inside the moat? It's impossible, Petrie. You are thinking of secret passages and so forth. There are none. Elphin has measured up every foot of the place. There isn't a rat hole left unaccounted for. And as for a tunnel under the moat the house stands on a solid mass of Roman masonry, a former camp of Hadrian's time. I have seen of an old plan of the round moat priory as it was called. There is no entrance and no exit saved by the steps. So how was the dog killed? I knocked out my pipe on the bar of a grate. We are in the thick of it here, I said. We are always in the thick of it, replied Smith. Our danger is no greater in Norfolk than in London. But what did they want to do? That man in the train with the case of instruments. What instruments? The apparition of the green eyes tonight. Can they have been the eyes of Fu Manchu? Is some peculiar unique outrage contemplated something calling for the presence of the master? He may have to prevent Elfams leaving England without killing him. Quite so. He probably has instructions to be merciful. For God help the victim of the Chinese mercy. I went to my own room then, but I did not even undress, refilling my pipe and seating myself at the open window. Having looked upon the awful Chinese doctor, the memory of his face with its filmed green eyes could never leave me. The idea that he might be near at that moment was a poor narcotic. The howling and baying of the mastiff was almost continuous. When all else in red moat was still, the dog's mournful note yet rose on the night with something menacing in it. I sat looking out across the sloping turf to where the shrubbery showed is a black island in a green sea. The moon swam in a cloudless sky, and the air was warm and fragrant with country scents. He was in the shrubbery that Demby's collie had met his mysterious death, that the things seen by Miss Elfam had disappeared. What uncanny secret did it hold? Caesar became silent. As the stopping of a clock will sometimes awaken a sleeper, the abrupt cessation of the distant howling to which I had grown accustomed now recalled me to a world of gloomy imaginings. I glanced at my watch in the moonlight. It was twelve minutes past midnight. As I replaced it, the dog suddenly burst out afresh, but now in a tone of sheer anger, he was alternately howling and snarling in a way that sounded new to me. The crashes as he leapt to the end of his chain shook the building in which he was confined. It was as I stood up to lean from the window and command a view of the corner of the house, that he broke loose. With a horse-bay he took that decisive leap, and I heard his heavy body fall against the wooden wall. There followed a strange guttural cry, and the growling of the dog died away at the rear of the house. He was out, but that guttural note had not come from the throat of a dog. Of what was he in pursuit? At which point his mysterious quarry entered the shrubbery I do not know. I only know that I saw absolutely nothing until Caesar's lithe shape was streaked across the lawn and the great creature went crashing into the undergrowth. In a faint sound above and to my right told me that I was not the only spectator of the scene. I leaned farther from the window. Is that you, Miss Eltham? I asked. Oh, Dr. Petrie, she said. I'm so glad you're awake. Can we do nothing to help? Caesar will be killed. Did you see what he went after? No, she called back, and drew her breath sharply. For a strange figure went racing across the grass. It was that of a man in a blue dressing-gown who held a lantern high before him and a revolver in his right hand. Coincident with my recognition of Mr. Eltham, he leaped, plunging into the shrubbery in the wake of the dog. But the night held yet another surprise. From Nail and Smith's voice came, Come back! Come back, Eltham! I ran out into the passage and downstairs. The front door was open, a terrible conflict waged in the shrubbery between the mastiff and something else. Passing round to the lawn I met Smith fully dressed. He had just dropped from a first-floor window. The man is mad! He snapped. Heaven knows what lurks in there. He should not have gone alone. Together we ran towards the dancing light of Eltham's lantern. The sounds of conflict ceased suddenly, stumbling over stumps and lashed by low-sweeping branches. We struggled forward to where the clergyman knelt amongst the bushes. He glanced up with tears in his eyes, as was revealed by the dim light. Look! he cried. The body of the dog lay at his feet. It was pitiable to think that the fearless brute should have met his death in such a fashion, and when I bent down and examined him, I was glad to find traces of life. Drag him out. He is not dead, I said. And hurry! wrapped Smith, peering about him right and left. So we three hurried from that haunted place, dragging the dog with us. We were not molested. No sound disturbed the now perfect stillness. By the lawn edge we came upon Denby, half dressed, and almost immediately Edwards the gardener also appeared. The white faces of the house servants showed at one window a Miss Elfam called to me from her room. Is he dead? No, I replied, only stunned. We carried the dog round to the yard, and I examined his head. It had been struck by some heavy blunt instrument, and the skull was not broken. It is hard to kill a mastiff. Will you attend to him, doctor? asked Elfam. We must see that the villain does not escape. His face was grim and set. This was a different man from the different clergymen we knew. This was Parson Dan again. I accepted the care of the canine patient, and Elfam with the others went off for more lights to search the shrubbery. As I was washing a bad wound between the mastiff's ears, Miss Elfam joined me. It was the sound of her voice, I think, rather than the more scientific ministrations which recalled Caesar to life. For as she entered his tail wagged feebly, and a moment later he struggled to his feet, one of which was injured. Having provided for his immediate needs, I left him in the charge of his young mistress and joined the search-party. They had entered the shrubbery from four points, and drawn blank. There is absolutely nothing there, and no one could possibly have left the grounds, said Elfam amazingly. We stood on the lawn looking at one another, nailing Smith angry but thoughtful, tugging at the lobe of his left ear, as was his habit in moments of perplexity. CHAPTER IX With the first coming of light, Elfam Smith and I tested the electrical contrivances from every point. They were in perfect order. It became more and more incomprehensible how anyone could have entered and quitted red-mote during the night. The barbed wire fencing was intact and bore no signs of having been tampered with. Smith and I undertook an exhaustive examination of the shrubbery. At the spot where we had found the dog, some five paces to the west of the Copper Beach, the grass and weeds were trampled and the surrounding laurels and rhododendrons bore evidence of a struggle, but no human footprint could be found. The ground is dry, said Smith. We cannot expect much. In my opinion, I said, someone tried to get at Caesar, his presence is dangerous, and in his rage he broke loose. I think so too, agreed Smith. But why did this person make for here? And how, having mastered the dog, get out of red-mote? I'm open to admit the possibility of someone's getting in during the day whilst the gates are open and hiding until dusk, but how in the name of all that's wonderful does he get out? He must possess the attributes of a bird. I thought of Grieber-Eltham's statements, reminding my friend of a description of the thing which he had seen passing into this strangely haunted shrubbery. That line of speculation soon takes us out of our depth, Petrie, he said. Let us stick to what we can understand, and that may help us to a clearer idea of what at present is incomprehensible. My view of the case to date stands thus. One, Eltham, having rashly decided to return to the interior of China, is warned by an official whose friendship he has won in some way to stay in England. Two, I know this official for one of the yellow group represented in England by Dr. Fu Manchu. Three, several attempts, of which we know but little, to get to Eltham are frustrated, presumably by his curious defences. An attempt in a train fails owing to Miss Eltham's distaste for the refreshment-room coffee, and attempt here fails owing to her insomnia. Four, during Eltham's absence from red mode, certain preparations are made for his return. These lead to, a, the death of Denbys Collie, b, the things heard and seen by Miss Eltham, c, the things heard and seen by us all last night. So that the clearing up of my fourth point, the discovery of the nature of these preparations, becomes our immediate concern. The prime object of these preparations, Petrie, was to enable someone to gain access to Eltham's room. The other events are incidental. The dogs had to be got red off, for instance, and there is no doubt that Miss Eltham's wakefulness saved her father a second time. But from what? For heaven's sake, from what? Smith glanced about into the light-patch shadows. From a visit by someone, perhaps, Fu Manchu himself, he said in a hushed voice. The object of that visit I hope we may never learn, for that would mean that it had been achieved. Smith, I said, I do not altogether understand you, but do you think he has some incredible creature hidden here somewhere? It would be like him. I begin to suspect the most formidable creature in the known world to be here. I believe Fu Manchu is somewhere inside red mode. Our conversation was interrupted at this point by Denby, who came to report that he had examined the moat by the roadside and the bank of the stream, but found no footprints or clue of any kind. No one left the grounds of red moat last night, I think, he said, and his voice had all in it. That day dragged slowly on. A party of us scoured the neighbourhood for traces of strangers, examining every foot of the Roman ruin hard by, but vainly. May not your presence here induce Fu Manchu to abandon his plans? Smith? I think not, he replied. You see, unless we prevail upon him, Eltham sails in a fortnight, so the doctor has no time to waste. Furthermore, I have an idea that his arrangements were of such a character that they must go forward. He might turn aside, of course, to assassinate me if opportunity arose, but we know from experience that he permits nothing to interfere with his schemes. There are few states, I suppose, which exact so severe a toll from one's nervous system is the anticipation of calamity. All anticipation is keener, be it of joy or pain, than the reality whereof it is a mental forecast, but that in active waiting at red moat for the blow which we knew full well to be pending exceeded in its nerve taxation anything I hitherto had experienced. I felt as one bound on an Aztec altar with a pre-subsidian knife raised above my breast. And malign forces throbbed about us—forces against which we had no armour. Dreadful as it was, I counted a mercy that the climax was reached so quickly. And it came suddenly enough. For there in that quiet Norfolk home we found ourselves at hand-grips with one of the mysterious horrors which characterised the operations of Dr. Fu Manchu. It was upon us before we realised it. There is no incidental music to the dramas of real life. As we sat on the little terrace in the creeping twilight I remember thinking how the piece of the scene gave the lie to my fears that we boarded upon tragic things. Then Caesar, who had been a docile patient all day, began howling again, and I saw Grieber Eltham shudder, a court's myth's eye, and was about to propose our retirement indoors when the party was broken up in a more turbulent fashion. I suppose it was the presence of the girl which prompted Denby to the rash act, a desire personally to distinguish himself. But as I recalled afterwards, his gaze had rarely left the shrubbery since dusk, saved to seek her face, and now he leaped wildly to his feet, overturning his chair, and dashed across the grass to the trees. Did you see it? He yelled. Did you see it? He evidently carried a revolver. For from the far edge of the shrubbery, a shot sounded, and in the flash we saw Denby with the weapon raised. Grieber, go in and fasten the windows, cried Eltham. Mr. Smith, will you enter the bushes from the west? Dr. Petrie the East. Edwards, Edwards! And he was off across the lawn with the nervous activity of a cat. As I made off in the opposite direction, I heard the gardener's voice from the lower gate, and I saw Eltham's plan. It was to surround the shrubbery. Two more shots and two more flashes from the dense heart of Greenwood, then a loud cry, I thought from Denby, and a second, muffled one. Daring silence, only broken by the howling of the mastiff. I sprinted through the rose-garden, leaped heedlessly over a bed of geranium and heliotrope, and plunged in among the bushes and under the elms. Away on the left I heard Edwards shouting, and Eltham's answering voice, Denby, I cried, and yet louder, Denby! But the silence fell again. Dusk was upon Redmoat now, but from sitting in the twilight my eyes had grown accustomed to the gloom, and I could see fairly well what lay before me. Not daring to think what might lurk above, below, or around me, I pressed on into the midst of the thicket. "'Bernon!' came Eltham's voice from one side. "'Bare more to the right, Edwards!' I heard Nail and Smith cry directly ahead of me. With an eerie and indescribable sensation of impending disaster upon me, I thrust my way through to a grey patch which marked a break in the Elman roof. At the foot of the copper beach I almost fell over Eltham. Then Smith plunged into view. See Edwards at the gardener rounded a big road of dendrum and completed the party. We stood quite still for a moment. A faint breeze whispered through the beach-leaves. "'Where is he?' I cannot remember who put it into words. I was two days with amazement to notice. Then Eltham began shouting, "'Bernon! Vernon! Vernon!' His voice pitched higher upon each repetition. There was something horrible about that vain calling under the whispering beach with the shrubs banked about us, cloaking God alone could know what. From the back of the house came Caesar's faint reply. "'Quick! Lights!' Wrapped Smith. "'Every lamp you have!' Off we went, dodging laurels and privets, and poured out onto the lawn a disordered company. Eltham's face was deathly pale, and his jaws set hard. He met my eye. "'God forgive me,' he said. "'I could do murder to-night.' He was a man composed of strange perplexities. He seemed an age before the lights were found, but at last we returned to the bushes, really after a very brief delay, and ten minutes suffice us to explore the entire shrubbery, for it was not extensive. We found his revolver. But there was no one there—nothing. When we all stood again on the lawn, I thought I had never seen Smith so haggard. "'What in heaven's name can we do?' he muttered. "'What does it mean?' He expected no answer, for there was none to offer one. "'Search—everywhere,' said Eltham hoarsely. He ran off into the rose-garden, and began beating about among the flowers like a madman muttering, "'Vernon, Vernon!' For close upon an hour we all searched. We searched every square yard, I think, within the wire fencing, and found no trace. Miss Eltham slipped out in the confusion, and joined with the rest of us in that frantic hunt. Some of the servants assisted too. It was a group, terrified and awestricken, which came together again on the terrace. One and then another would give up, until only Eltham and Smith were missing. Then they came back together from examining the steps to the lower gate. Eltham dropped onto a rustic seat, and sank his head in his hands. Nail and Smith paced up and down like a newly caged animal, snapping his teeth together and tugging at his ear. Possessed of some sudden idea, or pressed to action by his tumultuous thoughts, he snatched up a lantern and strode silently off across the grass to the shrubbery once more. I followed him. I think his idea was that he might surprise anyone who lurked there. He surprised himself, and all of us. For right at the margin he tripped and fell flat. I ran to him. He had fallen over the body of Denby, which lay there. Denby had not been there a few moments before, and how he came to be there now we dared not conjecture. Mr. Eltham joined us, uttered one short, dry sob, and dropped upon his knees. Then we were carrying Denby back to the house, with the mastiff howling a march fume-bray. We laid him on the grass where it sloped down from the terrace. Nail and Smith's haggard face was terrible. But the stark horror of the thing inspired him to that which conceived earlier had saved Denby. Twisting suddenly to Eltham he roared in a voice audible beyond the river. What happens? We're fools! Loose the dog! But the dog, I began. Smith clapped his hand over my mouth. I know he's crippled, he whispered, but if anything human lurks there the dog will lead us to it. If a man is there he will fly. Why did we not think of it before? Fools! Fools!" He raised his voice again. Keep him on the leash, Edwards. He will lead us. The scheme succeeded. Edwards barely had started on his errand when bells began ringing inside the house. Wait! snapped Eltham, and rushed indoors. A moment later he was out again with his eyes gleaming madly. Above the moat, he panted, and we were off en masse round the edge of the trees. It was dark above the moat, but not so dark as to prevent our seeing a narrow ladder of thin bamboo joints and silk and cord hanging by two hooks from the top of the twelve-foot wire fence. There was no sound. He's out! screamed Eltham. Down the steps! We all ran our best and swiftest, but Eltham out ran us, like a fury he tore at bolts and bars and like a fury sprang out onto the road. Straight and white it showed to the aclivity of the Roman ruin, but no living thing moved upon it. The distant bang of the dog was born to our ears. Curse it, he's crippled, his smith, without him as well as pursuers shallow. A few hours later the shrubbery yielded up its secret, a simple one enough. A big cask sunk in a pit, with a laurel shrub cunningly affixed to its movable lid, which was further disguised with tufts of grass, a slender bamboo-jointed rod lay near the fence. It had a hook on the top, and was evidently used for attaching the ladder. It was the end of this ladder which Miss Eltham saw, said Smith, as he shrouded it behind him into the shrubbery when she interrupted him in her father's room. He and whoever he had with him doubtless slipped in during the daytime whilst Eltham was absent in London, bringing the prepared cask and all necessary implements with them. They concealed themselves somewhere, probably in the shrubbery, and during the night made the cask. The excavated earth would be disposed of on the flower-beds, the dummy bush they probably had ready. You see the problem of getting in was never a big one, but owing to the defences it was impossible whilst Eltham was in residence at any rate, to get out after dark. For Fu Manchu's purposes, then, a working base inside Redmote was essential. His servant, for his needy assistance, must have been in hiding somewhere outside—heaven knows where—during the day they could come and go by the gates, as we have already noted. You think it was the doctor himself? It seems possible. Who else has eyes like those eyes that Miss Eltham saw from the window last night? Then remains to tell the nature of the outrage whereby Fu Manchu had planned to prevent Eltham's leaving England for China. This we learned from Dembi, for Dembi was not dead. It was easy to divine that he had stumbled upon the fiendish visitor at the very entrance to his burrow, had been stunned, judging from the evidence with a sandbag, and dragged down into the cask, to which he must have lain in such dangerous proximity as to render detection of the dummy bush possible in removing him. The quickest expedient, then, had been to draw him beneath. When the search of the shrubbery was concluded his body had been borne to the edge of the bushes and laid where we found it. Why his life had been spared, I cannot conjecture, but provision has been made against his recovering consciousness and revealing the secret of the shrubbery. The ruse of releasing the mastiff alone had terminated the visit of the unbidden guests within Redmote. Dembi made a slow recovery, and even when convalescent, sadly adding not one fact to those we had already collated, his memory had completely deserted him. This in my opinion, as in those of several specialists consulted, was due not to the blow on the head, but to the presence, slightly below and to the right of the first cervical curve of the spine, of a minute puncture, undoubtedly caused by hypodermic syringe. Then unconsciously Port Dembi furnished the last link in the chain. Undoubtedly by means of this operation Fu Manchu had designed to efface from Eltham's mind the plans of return to Ho Nan. The nature of the fluid which could produce such mental symptoms was a mystery, a mystery which defined Western science, one of the many strange secrets of Dr. Fu Manchu. End of Chapter 9 Recording by FNH. Recorded in sunny Anchorage, Alaska. Chapter 10 Since Naelyn Smith's return from Burma, I had rarely taken up a paper without coming upon evidence of that seething which accursed Dr. Fu Manchu. Whether hitherto such items had escaped my attention, or had seen to demand no particular notice, or whether they now became increasingly numerous, I was unable to determine. One evening, some little time after our sejourn in Norfolk, in glancing through a number of papers which I had brought in with me, I glanced upon no fewer than four items of news bearing more or less directly upon the grim business which engaged my friend and I. No white man, I honestly believe, appreciates the unemotional cruelty of the Chinese. At the time that Dr. Fu Manchu remained in England, the press preserved a uniform silence upon the subject of his existence. This was due to Naelyn Smith, but as a result I feel assured that my account of the Chinaman's deeds will in many quarters meet with an incredulous reception. I had been at work earlier in the evening upon the opening chapters of this Chronicle, and I had realized how difficult it would be for my reader, amid secure and cosy surroundings, to credit any human being with the callous villainy great enough to conceive and to put into execution such a death-pest as that directed against Sir Crickton Davy. One would expect God's worst man to shrink from employing, against however vile an enemy, such an instrument as the Ziad Kiss. So thinking, my eye was caught by the following. Express Correspondent, New York. Secret servicemen of the United States government are surging the South Sea islands for a certain Hawaiian from the island of Maui, who, it is believed, has been selling poisonous scorpions to Chinese in Honolulu, anxious to get rid of their children. Infanticide by scorpion and otherwise among the Chinese has increased so terribly that the authorities have started a searching inquiry, which has led to the hunt for the scorpion dealer of Maui. Practically all the babies that die mysteriously are unwanted girls, and in nearly every case the parents promptly ascribe the death to the bite of a scorpion and are ready to produce some more or less poisonous insect in support of that statement. The authorities have no doubt that the infanticide by scorpion bite is a growing practice and orders have been given to hunt down the scorpion dealer at any cost. Is it any matter for wonder that such a people had produced Fu Manchu? I pasted the cutting into a scrapbook, determined that if I lived to publish my account of those days I would quote it therein as casting a sidelight upon the Chinese character. A router-message to the globe and a paragraph in The Star also furnished work for my scissors. Here were evidences of the deep-seated unrest, the secret turmoil which manifested itself so far from its centre as peaceful England in the person of the sinister doctor. Hong Kong, Friday. Li Hong-Hung, the Chinaman who fired at the governor yesterday, was charged before the magistrate with shooting at him with intent to kill, which is equivalent to attempted murder. The prisoner who was not defended pleaded guilty. The assistant crown solicitor who prosecuted asked for a remand until Monday which was granted. Snapshots taken by the spectators of the outrage yesterday disclosed the presence of an accomplice, also armed with a revolver. It is reported that this man who was arrested last night is in possession of incriminating documentary evidence. Later. Examination of the documents found on Li Hong-Hung's accomplice has disclosed the fact that both men were well financed by the Canton Triad Society, the directors of which had enjoined the assassination of Sir F.M. or Mr. C.S., the Colonial Secretary. In a report prepared by the accomplice for dispatch to Canton, also found on his person, he expressed regret that the attempt had failed. Router. It is officially reported in St. Petersburg that a force of Chinese soldiers and villagers surrounded the house of a Russian subject named Sayed Effendi, near Khotan, in Chinese Turkestan. They fired at the house and set it in flames. There were in the house about one hundred Russians, many of whom were killed. The Russian government has instructed its minister at P. King to make the most vigorous representations on the subject. Router. Finally in a personal column I found the following. Honan have abandoned visit, Eltham. I had just pasted it into my book when Nailen Smith came in and threw himself into an armchair facing me across the table. I showed him the cutting. I am glad for Eltham's sake and for the girls, was his comment, but it marks another victory for Fu Manchu. Just heaven! Why is retribution delayed? Smith's darkly tanned face had grown leaner than ever since he had begun his fight with the most uncanny opponent, I suppose, against whom a man has ever pitted himself. He stood up and began to restlessly pace the room, furiously stuffing tobacco into his briar. I have seen Sir Lionel Barton, he said abruptly. And to put the whole thing in a nutshell he has laughed at me. During the months that I have been wondering where he had gone to he has been somewhere in Egypt. He certainly bears a charmed life for on the evidence of his letter to the Times he has seen things in Tibet which Fu Manchu would have the West blind to. In fact, I think he has found a new keyhole to the gate of the Indian Empire. Long ago we had placed the name of Sir Lionel Barton upon the list of those whose lives stood between Fu Manchu and the attainment of his end. Orient list and explorer, the fearless traveller who had first penetrated to Lhasa, who thrice as a pilgrim had entered for Bitton Mecca. He had now turned his attention again to Tibet, thereby signing his own death warrant. That he has reached England alive is a hopeful sign, I suggested. Smith shook his head and lighted the blackened briar. England at present is the web, he replied. The spider will be waiting. Petri, I sometimes despair. Sir Lionel is an impossible man to shepherd. You ought to see his house at Finchley, a low squat place completely hemmed in by trees, damp as a swamp, smells like jungle. Think Topsy-Turvy. He only arrived to-day, and he is working and eating and sleeping, I expect, in a study that looks like an earthquake at Southby's auction-rooms. The rest of the house is half a menagerie and half a circus. He has a bed-wing groom, a Chinese body-servant, and heaven only knows what other strange people. Chinese? Yes, I saw him. A squinting Cantonese he calls Kui. I don't like him. So there is a secretary known as Strozer, and he has an unpleasant face. He is a fine linguist, I understand, and he is engaged upon Spanish notes for Barton's forthcoming book on the Mayapan Temples. By the way, Sir Lionel's baggage disappeared from the landing stage, including his Tibetan notes. Significant. Of course. But he argues that he is crossed to Bet from Kun Lun to the Himalayas without being assassinated, and therefore that it is unlikely he will meet with that fate in London. I left him dictating the book from memory, at the rate of about two hundred words a minute. He is wasting no time. Wasting time. In addition to the Yucatan book and the work on Tibet, he has to read a paper at the institute next week about some tomb he is unearthed in Egypt. As I came away a van drove up from the docks and a couple of fellows delivered a sarcophagus as big as a boat. It is unique, according to Sir Lionel, and will go to the British Museum after he has examined it. The man crammed six months' work into six weeks. Then he's off again. What do you propose to do? What can I do? I know that Fu Manchu will make an attempt upon him. I cannot doubt it. Ah! That house gave me the shudders. No sunlight, I'll swear, Petri, can ever penetrate to the rooms, and when I arrived this afternoon clouds of gnats floated like moats whenever a stray beam filtered through the trees of the avenue. There's a steamy smell about the place that is almost malarious, and the whole of the west front is covered with a sort of monkey creeper which he is imported at some time or other. It has a close and exotic perfume that is quite in the picture. I tell you, that place was made for murder. Have you taken any precautions? I called at Scotland Yard and sent a man down to watch the house, but he shrugged his shoulders helplessly. What is Sir Lionel like? A mad man, Petri. A tall, massive man wearing a dirty dressing gown of neutral colour. A man with untidy grey hair and a bristling moustache. Keen blue eyes and a brown skin, who wears a short beard or rarely shaves, I don't know which. I left him striding about among the thousand and one curiosities of that incredible room, picking his way through the antique furniture, works of reference manuscripts, mummies, spears, pottery and what not, sometimes kicking a book from his course or stumbling over a stuffed crocodile or Mexican mask, alternately dictating and conversing. Phew! For some time we were silent. Smith, I said, we're making no headway in this business. With all the forces arrayed against him, Fu Manchu still ludes us, still pursues his devilish, inscrutable way. Nail and Smith nodded. And we don't know all, he said. We mark such and such a man as one alive to the yellow peril, and we warn him if we have time. Perhaps he escapes, perhaps he does not. But what do we know, Petrie, of those others who may die every week from his murderous agency? We cannot know everyone who has read the riddle of China. I never see a report of someone found drowned, of an apparent suicide, of a sudden though seemingly natural death without wondering. I tell you, Fu Manchu is omnipresent, his tentacles embrace everything. I said that Solinall must bear a charmed life. The fact that we are alive is a miracle. He glanced at his watch. Nearly eleven, he said. But sleep seems a waste of time apart from its dangers. We heard a bell ring. A few moments later followed a knock at the room door. Come in, I cried. A girl entered with the telegram addressed to Smith. His jaw looked very square in the lamplight, and his eyes shone like steel as he took it from her and opened the envelope. He glanced at the form, stood up and passed it to me, reaching for his hat which lay up on the writing-table. God help us, Petrie, he said. This was the message. Solinall Bartram murdered. Meet me at his house at once, Weymouth, Inspector. End of CHAPTER X Although we avoided all unnecessary delay, it was close upon midnight when our cab swung round into a darkly shadowed avenue at the farther end of which, as seen through a tunnel, the moonlight glittered upon the windows of Rowan House, Solinall Bartram's home. Stepping out before the porch of the long squat building, I saw that it was banked in, as Smith had said, by trees and shrubs. The façade showed mantled in the strange exotic creeper which he had mentioned, and the air was pungent with an odour of decaying vegetation, with which mingled the heavy perfume of the little nocturnal red flowers which bloomed luxuriously upon the creeper. The place looked a veritable wilderness, and when we were admitted to the hall by Inspector Weymouth, I saw that the interior was in keeping with the exterior, for the hall was constructed from the model of some apartment in an Assyrian temple, and the squat columns and low seats and hangings were all eloquent of neglect, being thickly dust-coated. The musty smell, too, was almost as pronounced here as outside beneath the trees. Through a library whose contents overflowed in many literary torrents upon the floor the detective conducted us. "'Good heavens!' I cried. "'What's that?' Something leaped from the top of the bookcase, ambled silently across the littered carpet, and passed from the library like a golden street. I looked after it with startled eyes. Inspector Weymouth laughed, dryly. "'It's a young puma or civic cat or something, doctor,' he said. This house is full of surprises and mysteries. His voice was not quite steady, I thought, and he carefully closed the door air-proceeding further. "'Where is he?' asked Naylen Smith harshly, and how was it done?' Weymouth sat down and lighted a cigar which I offered him. "'I thought you would like to hear what led up to it, so far as we know, before seeing him.'" Smith nodded. "'Well,' continued the Inspector. "'The man you arranged to send down from the yard got here all right, and took up a post in the road outside, where he could command a good view of the gates. He saw and heard nothing, until going on for half-past ten, when a young lady turned up and went in. A young lady?' Miss Edmunds, Solinal shorthand typist. She had found after getting home that her bag with her purse in was missing, and she came back to see if she had left it here. She gave the alarm. My man heard the rail from up the road and came in, and she ran out and rang us up. I immediately wired for you." "'He heard the rail, you say? What rail?' Miss Edmunds went into violent hysterics. Smith was pacing the room now in tense excitement. Describe what he saw when he came in." He saw a negro footman. There isn't an Englishman in the house, trying to pacify the girl out in the hall yonder, and a Malay and another coloured man beating their foreheads and howling. There was no sense to be got out of any of them, so he started to investigate for himself. He had taken the bearings of the place earlier in the evening, and from the light in a window on the ground floor had located the study. So he set out to look for the door. When he found it, it was locked from the inside. Well... He went out round to the window. There's no blind, and from the shrubbery you can see into the lumber room known as the study. He looked in, as apparently Miss Edmunds had done before him. What he saw accounted for her hysterics. Both Smith and I were hanging upon his words. All amongst the rubbish on the floor, a big Egyptian mummy-case was lying on its side and faced downwards. With his arms thrown across it lay Sir Lionel Barton. My God! Yes, go on! There was only a shaded reading lamp alight, and it stood on a chair shining right down on him. It was a patch of light on the floor, you understand? The inspector indicated his extent with his hands. Well, as the man smashed the glass and got the window open and was just climbing in, he saw something else, so he says. He paused. What did he see? Demanded Smith shortly. A sort of green mist, Sir. He says it seemed to be alive. It moved over the floor about a foot from the ground, going away from him and towards a curtain at the other end of the study. Layland Smith fixed his eyes upon the speaker. Where did he first see this green mist? He says, Mr. Smith, that he thinks it came from the mummy-case. Yes. Go on. It is to his credit that he climbed into the room after seeing a thing like that. He did. He turned the body over and Solinol looked horrible. He was quite dead. Then Croxted, that's the man's name, went over to this curtain. There was a glass door shut. He opened it, and it gave on to a conservatory a place stacked from the tiled floor to the glass roof with more rubbish. It was dark inside, but enough light came in from the study. It's really a drawing-room, by the way, as he turned all the lamps on to give him another glimpse of this green-crawling mist. There are three steps to go down. On the steps lay a dead Chinaman—a dead Chinaman—a dead Chinaman! Doctor seen them? Wrapped Smith. Yes, a local man. He was out of his depth, I could see, contradicted himself three times. But there's no need for another opinion, until we get the coroners. And Croxted? Croxted was taken ill, Mr. Smith, and had to be sent home in a cab. He details him. Detective Inspector Weymouth raised his eyebrows and carefully knocked the ash from his cigar. He held out till I came, gave me the story, and then fainted right away. He said that something in the conservatory seemed to get him by the throat. Did he mean that literally? I couldn't say. We had to send the girl home, too, of course. Nailin Smith was pulling thoughtfully at the lobe of his left ear. Got any theory, he jerked? Weymouth shrugged his shoulders. Not one that includes the green mist, he said. Shall we go in now? We crossed the Assyrian Hall, where the members of that strange household were gathered in a panic-stricken group. They numbered four. Two of them were Negroes, and two Easterners of some kind. I missed the Chinaman, Qui, of whom Smith had spoken, and the Italian secretary, and from the way in which my friend peered about in the shadows of the hall I defined that he, too, wandered at their absence. He entered Solinal's study, an apartment which I despair of describing. Nailin Smith's words, an earthquake at Sotheby's auction-rooms, leaped to my mind at once, for the place was simply stacked with curious litter, loot of Africa, Mexico, and Persia. In a clearing by the half a gas-stove stood upon a packing case and about it lay a number of utensils for camp cookery. The odour of rotting vegetation mingled with the insistent perfume of the strange night-blooming flowers was borne in through the open window. In the centre of the floor beside an overturned sarcophagus lay a figure in a neutral-coloured dressing-gown, face downwards, and arms thrust forward and over the side of the ancient Egyptian mummy-case. My friend advanced and knelt beside the dead man. Good God! Smith sprang upright and turned with an extraordinary expression to Inspector Weymouth. Do you know Sir Lionel Barden by sight, he rapped? No, began Weymouth, but— This is not Sir Lionel. This is Strozer, the secretary. What? shouted Weymouth. Where is the other—the Chinaman, quick! cried Smith. I have had him left where he was found on the conservatory steps, said the Inspector. Smith ran across the room to where, beyond the open door, a glimpse might be obtained of stacked-up curiosities. Holding back the curtain to allow more light to penetrate, he bent forward over a crumpled-up figure which lay upon the steps below. It is, he cried aloud, it is Sir Lionel's servant-quee. Weymouth and I looked at one another across the body of the Italian. Then our eyes turned together to where my friend Grimm faced, stood over the dead Chinaman. A breeze whispered through the leaves, a great wave of exotic perfume swept from the open window towards the curtain doorway. It was a breath of the yeast that stretched out a yellow hand to the west. With a symbolic of the subtle, intangible power manifested in Dr. Fu Manchu, as Nailen Smith, lean, agile, bronzed with the sons of Burma, was symbolic of the clean British efficiency which sought to combat the insidious enemy. "'One thing is evident,' said Smith. No one in the house, Strozer accepted, knew that Sir Lionel was absent. "'How do you arrive at that?' asked Weymouth. "'The servants in the hall are bewailing him as dead. If they had seen him go out they would know that it must be someone else who lies here. What about the Chinaman? Since there is no other means of entrance than a conservatory saved through the study, Queen must have hidden himself there at some time when his master was absent from the room. Croxted found the communicating door closed. What killed the Chinaman? Both Miss Edmonds and Croxted found the study door locked from the inside. What killed Strozer?' retorted Smith. "'You will have noted,' continued the Inspector, that the secretary is wearing Sir Lionel's dressing-gown. He was seeing him in that as she looked in at the window which led Miss Edmonds to mistake him for her employer, and consequently to put us on the wrong scent. He wore it in that order that anybody looking in at the window would be sure to make that mistake,' rapped Smith. "'Why?' I asked. "'Because he came here for a phelonious purpose, see?' Smith stopped and took up several tools from the litter on the floor. There lies the lid. He came to open the sarcophagus. It contained the mummy of some notable person who flourished under Memtahf II, and Sir Lionel told me that a number of valuable ornaments and jewels were probably secreted amongst the wrappings. He proposed to open the thing and to submit the entire contents to examination to-night. He evidently changed his mind, fortunately for himself. I ran my fingers through my hair in perplexity. "'Then what has become of the mummy?' Naylen Smith laughed dryly. It is vanished in the form of a green vapor, apparently,' he said. Look at Strozer's face. He turned the body over, and used as I was to suspect, of course, the contorted features of the Italian filled me with horror. So suggestive were they of a death more than ordinarily violent. I pulled aside the dressing-gown and searched the body for marks, but failed to find any. Naylen Smith crossed the room and, assisted by the detective, buried Quy, the Chinaman, into the study and laid him fully in the light. His puckered yellow face presented a sight even more awful than the other, and his blue lips were drawn back exposing both upper and lower teeth. There were no marks of violence, but his limbs, like Strozer's, had been tortured during his mortal struggles into unnatural postures. The breeze was growing higher, and pungent odor waves from the damp shrubbery bearing to the oppressive sweetness of the creeping plant swept constantly through the open window. Inspector Weymouth carefully relighted his cigar. I'm with you this far, Mr. Smith, he said. Strozer, knowing Solinal to be absent, locked himself in here to rifle the mummy-case, for Croxter, entering by way of the window, found the key on the inside. Strozer didn't know that the Chinaman was hidden in the conservatory. And Quy did not dare to show himself, because he, too, was there for some mysterious reason of his own, interrupted Smith. Having got the lid off—something, some body—suppose we say the mummy? Weymouth laughed uneasily. Well, sir, something that vanished from a locked room without opening the door or the window killed Strozer. And something which, having killed Strozer, next killed the Chinaman, apparently, without troubling to open the door behind which he lay concealed, Smith continued. For once in a way, Inspector, Dr. Fu Manchu has employed an ally which even his giant will was incapable entirely to subjugate, what blind force, what terrific agent of death had he confined in that sarcophagus. You think this is the work of Fu Manchu, I said. If you are correct, his power indeed is more than human. Something in my voice, I suppose, brought Smith right about. He surveyed me curiously. Can you doubt it? The presence of a concealed Chinaman surely is sufficient. Kui, I feel assured, was one of the murder group, though probably he had only recently entered that mysterious service. He is unarmed. For I should feel disposed to think that his power was to assassinate Sir Lionel whilst unsuspecting the presence of a hidden enemy. He was at work here. Strozer's opening sarcophagus clearly spoiled the scheme, and led to the death of a servant of Fu Manchu, yes, I am at a loss to account for that. Do you think that the sarcophagus centered into the scheme, Smith? My friend looked at me in evident perplexity. You mean that its arrival at the time when a creature of the doctor, Kui, was concealed here may have been a coincidence? I nodded. And Smith bent over the sarcophagus, curiously examining the garish paintings with which it was decorated inside and out. It lay sideways upon the floor, and seizing it by its edge, he turned it over. Heavy, he muttered. But Strozer must have capsized it as he fell, he would not have laid it on its side to remove the lid. Hello! He bent further forward, catching it a piece of twine, and out of the mummy-case, called a rubber stopper or cork. This was stuck in a hole level with the floor of the thing, he said. Ugh! Has a disgusting smell. I took it from his hands, and was about to examine it, when a loud voice sounded outside in the hall. The door was thrown open, and a big man, who, despite the warmth of the weather, wore a fur-lined overcoat, rushed impetuously into the room. Salinal, cried Smith eagerly, I warned you, and see you have had a very narrow escape. Salinal Barton glanced at what lay upon the floor, then from Smith to myself, and from me to Inspector Weymouth. He dropped into one of the few chairs unstacked with books. Mr. Smith, he said, with emotion. What does this mean? Tell me quickly." In brief terms, Smith detailed the happenings of the night, or so much as he knew of them. Salinal Barton listened, sitting quite still a while, an unusual repose in a man of such evidently tremendous nervous activity. He came for the jewels, he said slowly when Smith had finished, and his eyes turned to the body of the dead Italian. I was wrong to submit him to temptation. God knows what Quy was doing in hiding. Perhaps he had come to murder me as you surmise, Mr. Smith. Oh, I find it hard to believe. But I don't think this is the handy work of your Chinese doctor. He fixed his gaze upon the sarcophagus. Smith stared at him in surprise. What do you mean, Salinal? The famous traveller continued to look towards the sarcophagus with something in his blue eyes that might have been dread. I received a wire from Professor Remboldt tonight, he continued. You were correct in supposing that no one but Strozer knew of my absence. I dressed hurriedly and met the professor at the travellers. He knew that I was to read a paper next week upon. Again he looked towards the mummy-case, the tomb of Mechara, and he knew that the sarcophagus had been brought untouched to England. He begged me not to open it. Nailin Smith was studying the speaker's face. What reason did he give for so extraordinary a request? he asked. Salinal Barton hesitated. One, he replied at last, which amused me at the time. I must inform you that Mechara, whose tomb my agent had discovered during my absence in Tibet, and to end to it, which I broke my return journey to Alexandria, was a high priest and first prophet of our men, under the pharaoh of the Exodus, in short one of the magicians who contested in magic arts with Moses. I thought the discovery unique until Professor Rimbold furnished me with some curious particulars respecting the death of M. Page LaRoy, the French Egyptologist, particulars new to me. We listened in growing surprise, scarcely knowing what this tended. M. LaRoy continued Barton, discovered but kept secret the tomb of Amenti, another of this particular brotherhood. It appears that he opened the mummy-case on the spot. These priests were of royal line, and are buried in the valley of Bibanl Moloch. His fellow and our observance deserted him for some reason, on seeing the mummy-case, and he was found dead, apparently strangled beside it. The matter was hushed up by the Egyptian government. Rimbold could not explain why, but he begged me not to open the sarcophagus of Mechara. A silence fell. The strange facts regarding the sudden death of Page LaRoy, which I now heard for the first time, had impressed me, unpleasantly, coming from a man of Sir Lionel Barton's experience and reputation. How long had it lain in the docks? Jerk Smith. For two days, I believe. I am not a superstitious man, Mr. Smith, but neither is Professor Rimbold, and now that I know the facts respecting Page LaRoy, I can find it in my heart to thank God that I did not see, whatever came out of that sarcophagus. Nailan Smith stared him hard in the face. I am glad you did not, Sir Lionel, he said, for whatever the priest Mechara has to do with the first matter by means of his sarcophagus. Dr. Fu Manchu has made his first attempt upon your life. He has failed. But I hope you will accompany me from here to a hotel. He will not fail twice. CHAPTER XII. It was the night following that of the double tragedy at Rowan House. Nailan Smith, with Inspector Weymouth, was engaged in some mysterious inquiry at the docks, and I had remained at home to resume my strange chronicle. And why should I not confess it? My memories had frightened me. I was arranging my notes respecting the case of Sir Lionel Barton. They were hopelessly incomplete. For instance, I had jotted down that the following inquiries, one, did any true parallel exist between the death of M. Page LaRoy and the death of Kui, the Chinaman, and of Stroza, two, what had become of the mummy Mechara, three, how had the murderer escaped from a locked room? Four, what was the purpose of the rubber stopper? Five, why was Kui hiding in the conservatory? Six, was the Green Mist a mere subjective hallucination, a figment of Croxdidd's imagination, or had he actually seen it? Until these questions were satisfactorily answered further progress was impossible. Nailan Smith frankly admitted that he was out of his depth. He looks on the face of it more like a case for the physical research people than for a plain civil servant lately of Mandalay, he said only that morning. Sir Lionel Barton really believes that supernatural agencies were brought into operation by the opening of the High Priest's Coffin. For my part, even if I believed the same, I should still maintain that Dr. Fu Manchu controlled those manifestations. But reason it out for yourself, and see if we arrive at any common centre, don't work so much upon the datum of the Green Mist but keep to the facts which are established. I commenced to knock out my pipe in the ashtray, then paused pipe in hand. The house was quite still, for my landlady and all the small household were out. Above the noise of the passing tram-car, I thought I heard the hall-door open. In the ensuing silence I sat and listened. Not a sound. Stay. I slipped my hand into the table-draw, took out my revolver, and stood up. There was a sound. Some one or some thing was creeping up stairs in the dark. Familiar with the ghastly media employed by the Chinaman, I was seized with an impulse to leap to the door, shut it and lock it. But the rustling sound proceeded. Now from immediately outside my partially open door. I had not the time to close it. Knowing somewhat of the horrors at the command of Fu Manchu, I had not the courage to open it. My heart leaping wildly and my eyes upon that bar of darkness with its gruesome potentialities. I waited. Waited for whatever was to come. Perhaps twelve seconds passed in silence. Who's there? I cried. Answer, or I fire. Ah! No! came a soft voice, thrillingly musical. Put it down, that pistol, quick! I must speak to you. The door was pushed open, and there entered a slim figure wrapped in a hooded cloak. My hand fell, and I stood, stricken to silence, looking into the beautiful dark eyes of Dr. Fu Manchu's messenger. If her own statement could be credited, slave. On two occasions this girl whose association with the doctor was one of the most profound mysteries of the case, had risked, I cannot say what, unnameable punishment perhaps, to save me from death, in both cases from a terrible death. For what was she come now? Her lip slightly parted. She stood holding her cloak about her, and watching me with great, passionate eyes. How? I began, but she shook her head impatiently. He has a duplicate key of the house-door, was her amazing statement. I've never betrayed a secret of my master before, but you must arrange to replace the lock. She came forward, and rested her slim hands confidingly upon my shoulders. I've come again to ask you to take me away from him, she said simply. And she lifted her face to me. Her words struck a chord in my heart, which sang with strange music, with music so barbaric that, frankly, I blushed to find it harmony. Have I said that she was beautiful? It can convey no faint conception of her. With her pure, fair skin, eyes like the velvet darkness of the East, and red lips so tremolously near to mine, she was the most seductively lovely creature I have ever looked upon. In that electric moment my heart went out in sympathy to every man who had bartered on a country all for a woman's kiss. I will see that you are placed under proper protection, I said, firmly. But my voice was not quite my own. It is quite absurd to talk of slavery here in England. You are a free agent, or you could not be here now. Dr. Fu Manchu cannot control your actions. Ah! She cried, casting back her head schoolfully, and releasing a cloud of hair through whose softness gleamed jeweled headdress. No, he cannot. Do you know what it means to have been a slave? Here in your free England, do you know what it means? Do we aser the desert journey, the whips of the drivers, the house of the dealer, the shame? Bah! How beautiful she was in her indignation! Slavery is put down, you imagine, perhaps? You do not believe that today—today—twenty-five English sovereigns will buy a gala-girl who is brown and whisper two hundred and fifty a Caucasian who is white. No, there is no slavery, so then what am I? She threw open her cloak, and it is a little fact that I rub my eyes half believing that I dreamed. For beneath she was a raiding gossamer silk which more than indicated the perfect lines of her slim shape, wore a jeweled girl and barbaric ornaments, was a figure fit for the walled gardens of Stambul, a figure amazing, incomprehensible, in the prosaic setting of my rooms. Tonight I had no time to make myself an English miss, she said, wrapping her cloak quickly about her. You see me as I am. Her garments exiled a faint perfume, and it reminded me of another meeting I had had with her. I looked into the challenging eyes. Your request is but a pretense, I said. Why do you keep the secrets of that man when they mean death to so many? Death? I have seen my own sister die of fever in the desert, seen her throne like carrion into a hole in the sand. I have seen men flogged until they prayed for death as a boon. I have known the lash myself. Death? What does it matter? She shocked me inexpressibly, enveloped in a cloak again, and with only a slight accent to portray her, it was dreadful to hear such words from a girl who, say, for a singular type of beauty, might have been a cultured European. Prove, then, that you really wish to leave this man's service. Tell me what killed Strozer in the Chinaman, I said. She shrugged her shoulders. I do not know that. But if you will carry me off, she clutched me nervously, so that I am helpless. Lock me up so that I cannot escape. Beat me, if you like. I will tell you all I do know. While he is my master, I will never betray him. Tell me from him by force. Do you understand by force? And my lips will be sealed no longer. Ah! But you do not understand with your proper authorities your police, police! Ah! I have said enough. A clock across the common began to strike. The girl started, and laid her hands upon my shoulders again. There were tears glistening among the curved black lashes. You do not understand," she whispered. Oh! Will you never understand and release me from him? I must go. Already I have remained too long. Listen! Go out without delay. Remain out at a hotel where you will. But do not stay here. And Nalyn Smith? What is he to me, this Nalyn Smith? Ah! Why will you not unseal my lips? You are in danger. You hear me? In danger! Go away from here to-night!" She dropped her hands and ran from the room. In the open doorway she turned, stamping her foot passionately. You have hands and arms, she cried. And yet you let me go. She warned then, fly from here. She broke off with something that sounded like a sob. I made no move to stay her, this beautiful accomplice of the arch-murderer Fu Man Chu. I heard her light footsteps pattering down the stairs. I heard her open and close the door, the door of which Dr. Fu Man Chu held the key. Still I stood where she had parted from me, and was so standing when a key grated in the lock, and Nalyn Smith came running up. Did you see her? I began. But his face shewed that he had not done so, and rapidly I told him of my strange visitor, of her words, of her warning. How could she have passed through London in that costume, I cried in bewilderment. Where can she have come from? Smith shrugged his shoulders, and began to stuff broad-cut mixture into the familiar-cracked briar. She might have travelled in a car or in a cab, he said, and undoubtedly she came direct from the house of Dr. Fu Man Chu. You should have detained her, Petrie. It is the third time we have had that woman in our power, the third time we have let her go free." Smith, I replied. I couldn't. She came of her own free will to give me a warning. She disarms me. "'Because you can see she is in love with you,' he suggested, and burst into one of his rare laughs when the angry flush rose to my cheek. She is, Petrie. Why pretend to be blind to it? You don't know the oriental mind as I do, but I quite understand the girl's position. She fears the English authorities, who would submit to capture by you. If you would only seize her by the hair, drag her to some cellar, hurl her down and stand over her with a whip, she would tell you everything she knows and solve her strange eastern conscience with the reflection that speech was forced from her. I am not joking, it is so, I assure you, and she would adore you for your savagery, deeming you forceful and strong." "'Myth,' I said, be serious, you know what a warning meant before." "'I can guess what it means now,' he rapped. "'Hello?' Someone was furiously ringing the bell. "'No one at home,' said my friend. "'I will go. I think I know what it is.' A few minutes later he returned, carrying a large square package. "'From Weymouth,' he explained, by district messenger. I left him behind at the docks, and he arranged to forward any evidence which subsequently you found. This will be fragments of the mummy.' "'What? You think the mummy was abstracted?' "'Yes, at the docks, I'm sure of it. And somebody else was in the sarcophagus when it reached Rowan House. A sarcophagus, I find, is practically airtight, so that the use of the rubber-stopper become evident—ventilation. How this person killed Strozer, I have yet to learn.' "'Also, how he escaped from a locked room, and what about the green mist?' Nayland Smith spread his hands in a characteristic gesture. The green mist, Petrie, can be explained in several ways. Remember we have only one man's word that it existed. It is at best a confusing datum to which we must not attach a fictitious importance.' He threw the wrappings on the floor, and tugged at a twine loop in the lid of the square box, which now stood upon the table. Suddenly the lid came away, bringing with it a lead lining, such as usual in tea-chest. His lining was partially attached to one side of the box, so that the action of removing the lid at once raised and tilted it. Then happened a singular thing. Out over the table billowed a sort of yellowish-green cloud, an oily vapour, and an inspiration. It was nothing less, born of a memory and of some words of my beautiful visitor came to me. "'Run, Smith!' I cried. "'The door! The door for your life! Fu Manchu sent that box!' I threw my arms round him, as he bent forwards the moving vapour rose almost to his nostrils. I dragged him back, and all but pitched him out onto the landing. We entered my bedroom, and there as I turned on the light, I saw that Smith's tanned face was unusually drawn, and touched with pallor. "'It is a poisonous gas,' I said hoarsely, in many respects identical with chlorine, but having unique properties which prove it to be something else. God and Fu Manchu alone know what. It is the fumes of chlorine that kill the men in the bleaching powder-works. "'We've been blind, I particularly, don't you see? There was no one in the sarcophagus, Smith, but there was enough of that fearful stuff to have suffocated a regiment!' Smith clenched his fists convulsively. "'My God!' he said. "'How can I hope to deal with the author of such a scheme? I see the whole plan. He did not reckon on the mummy-case being overturned, and queezed part was to remove the plug with the aid of the string after Solano had been suffocated. The gas I take it is heavier than air. The chlorine gas has a specific gravity of 2.470,' I said. "'Two-and-a-half times heavier than air. You can pour it from jar to jar like a liquid, if you are wearing a chemist-mask. In these respects this stuff appears to be similar. The points of difference would not interest you. The sarcophagus would have emptied through the vent, and the gas have dispersed, with no clue remaining, except the smell.' "'I did smell it, Petrie, on the stopper. But of course was unfamiliar with it. You may remember that you were prevented from doing so by the arrival of Solano. The scent of those infernal flowers must have partially drowned it, too.' Poor misguided Stroza inhaled the stuff, capsized the case in his fall, and all the gas went pouring under the conservatory door and down the steps where Quy was crouching. Croxted's break in the window creates sufficient draught to disperse what little remained. It will have settled on the floor now. I will go and open both windows.' He raised his haggard face. He evidently made more than was necessary to dispatch Solano Barton, he said, and contemptuously. He note the attitude, Petrie, contemptuously devoted the surplus to me. His contempt is justified. I am a child striving to cope with a mental giant. It is by no witt of mine that Dr. Fu Manchu scores a double failure. CHAPTER XIII. I will tell you now of a strange dream which I dreamed, and of stranger things to which I awakened. Once out of a blank, her void, this vision burst in upon my mind. I cannot do better than relate it without preamble. It was thus. I dreamed that I lay writhing on the floor in agony indescribable. My veins were filled with liquid fire. But that stignian darkness was about me. I told myself that I must have seen the smoke arising from my burning body. This, I thought, was death. Then a cooling shower descended upon me, soaked through the skin and tissue to the tortured arteries and quenched the fire within. Panting but free from pain, I lay exhausted. Strength gradually returned to me. I tried to rise, but the carpet felt so singularly soft that it offered me no foothold. I waded, plunged like a swimmer treading water, and all about me rose in penetrable walls of darkness—darkness all but palpable. I wondered why I could not see the windows. The horrible idea flashed to my mind that I was become blind. Somehow I got to my feet and stood swaying dizzily. I became aware of a heavy perfume and knew it for some kind of incense. Then a dim light was born at an immeasurable distance away. It grew steadily in brilliance. It spread like a bluish-red stain, like a liquid. It lapped up the darkness and spread throughout the room. This was not my room, nor was it any room known to me. It was an apartment of such size that its dimensions filled me with a kind of oar such as I have never known, the oar of walled vastness. Its immense extent produced a sensation of sound. Its hugeness had a distinct note. Tapestries covered the four walls. There was no door visible. These tapestries were magnificently figured with golden dragons, and as the serpentine bodies gleamed and shimmered in the increasing radiance, each dragon, I thought, intertwined with its glittering coils more closely with those of another. The carpet was of such richness that I stood knee-deep in its pile, and this, too, was fashioned all over with golden dragons, and they seemed to glide about amid the shadows of the design, stealthily. At the farther end of the hall, for all it was, a huge table with dragons' legs stood solitary amid the luxuriance of the carpet. It bore scintillating globes and tubes that held living organisms, and books of a size and in such bindings as I have never imagined, with instruments of a type unknown to Western science, a heterogeneous litter quite indescribable, which overflowed onto the floor forming an amazing oasis in a dragon-haunted desert of carpet. A lamp hung above this table, suspended by golden chains from the ceiling, which was so lofty that, following the chains upward, my gaze lost itself in the purple shadows above. In a chair piled high with dragon-covered cushions, a man sat behind this table, the light from the swinging lamp fell fully upon one side of his face, as he leaned forward amid the jumble of weird objects, and left the other side in a purplish shadow. From a plain brass bowl upon the corner of the huge table smoke thrived aloft, and at times partially obscured that dreadful face. From the instant that my eyes were drawn to the table, and to the man who sat there, neither the incredible extent of the room nor the nightmare fashion of its mural decorations could reclaim my attention. I had eyes only for him, for it was Dr. Fu Manchu. Something of the delirium which had seemed to fill my veins with fire, to peeple the walls with dragons and to plunge me knee-deep in the carpet, left me. Those dreadful, filmed, green eyes acted somewhat like a cold douche. I knew without removing my gaze from the still face that the walls no longer lived, but were merely draped in exquisite Chinese dragon tapestry. The rich carpet beneath my feet ceased to be as a jungle and became a normal carpet, extraordinarily rich but merely a carpet. But the sense of vastness nevertheless remained, with the uncomfortable knowledge that the things upon the table and overflowing about it were all, or nearly all, of a fashion strange to me. Then and almost instantaneously, the comparative sanity which I temporarily experienced began to slip from me again, for the smoke faintly penciled through the air, from the burning perfume on the table grew in volume, thickened, and wafted towards me in a cloud of gray horror, it enveloped me clamily. Dimly through its oily wreaths I saw an immobile yellow face of Fu Manchu, and my stupefied brain acclaimed him a sorcerer against whom unwittingly we had pitted our poor human wits. The green eyes showed filmy through the fog. An intense pain shot through my lower limbs, and catching my breath I looked down, as I did so the points of the red slippers which I dreamed that I wore increased in length, curled sinuously upwards, twined about my throat and choked the breath from my body. Dream an interval, and then adorning like consciousness. But it was a false consciousness, since it brought with it the idea that my head lay softly pillowed, and that a woman's hand caress my throbbing forehead. Confusedly, as though in the remote past, I recalled a kiss, and the recollection thrilled me strangely. Dreamily content I lay, and a voice stole to my ears. They are killing him. They are killing him. Oh, do you not understand? In my day's condition, I thought that with XI who had died, and that this musical girl voice was communicating to me the fact of my own dissolution. But I was conscious of no interest in the matter. For hours and hours I thought that soothing hand caress me. I never once raised my heavy lids until there came a resounding crash that seemed to set my very bones vibrating, a metallic jangling crash as the fall of heavy chains. I thought that, then, I half opened my eyes, and that in the dimness I had a fleeting glimpse of a figure cladding gossamer silk with arms covered with barbaric bangles and slim ankles surrounded by gold bands. The girl was gone, even as I told myself that she was an hour e, and that I, though a Christian, had been consigned by some error to the paradise of Muhammad. Then a complete blank. My head throbbed madly. My brain seemed to be clogged, inert, and though my first feeble movement was followed by the rattle of a chain, some moments more elapsed ere I realised that the chain was fastened to a steel collar, that the steel collar was clasped about my neck. I moaned weakly. "'Smith,' I muttered. "'Where are you, Smith?' "'On to my knees,' I struggled, and the pain on the top of my skull grew all but insupportable. It was coming back to me now, how Nalyn Smith and I had started for the hotel to warn Graham Guthrie, how as we passed on the steps of the embankment and into the Essex Street we saw a big motor standing before the door of one of the offices. I could recall coming up level with a car, a modern limousine, but my mind retained no impression of our having passed it, only a vague memory of a rush of footsteps, a blow. Then my vision of the Hall of Dragons, and now this awakening to a worse reality. Jumping in the darkness my hands touched a body that laid close beside me. My fingers sawed and found the throat, sawed and found the steel collar about it. "'Smith,' I groaned, and I shook with a still form. "'Smith, old man, speak to me, Smith.' "'Could he be dead? Was this the end of his gallant fight with Dr. Fu Manchu and the murder-group? If so, what did the future hold for me? What had I to face?' He stirred beneath my trembling hands. "'Thank God!' I muttered. But I cannot deny that my joy was tainted with selfishness. For waking in that impenetrable darkness and yet obsessed with the dream I had dreamed, I had known what fear meant at the realisation that alone chained I must face the dreadful Chinese doctor in the flesh. Smith began incoherent mutterings. "'San-bagged.' "'Look out, Petrie. He has us at last. Oh heavens!' He struggled on to his knees, clutching at my hand. "'All right, old man,' I said. We're both alive, so let's be thankful. A moment's silence. I groaned, then. "'Petrie, I have dragged you into this. God forgive me.' "'Dry up, Smith,' I said slowly. "'I'm not a child. There is no question of being dragged into the matter. I'm here, and if I can be of any use I'm glad I'm here.' He grasped my hand. There were two Chinese in European clothes. "'Lord help my head, throbs. In that office. They San-bagged us, Petrie. Think of it, in broad daylight, with inhale of the strand. We were rushed into the car, and it was all over before—' His voice grew faint. God, that gave me an awful knock. "'Why have we been spared, Smith? Do you think he is saving us for—' "'Don't, Petrie. If you had been in China, if you had seen what I had seen.' Footsteps sounded on the flagged passage. A blade of light crept across the floor towards us. My brain was growing clearer. The place had a damp, earthen smell. It was slimy, some noisome cellar. A door was thrown open, and a man entered carrying a lantern. Its light showed my sub-eyes to be accurate, showed the slime-coated walls of a dungeon some fifteen feet square, shun upon the long yellow robe of a man who stood watching us, upon the malignant, intellectual countenance. It was Dr. Fu Manchu. At last they were face to face, the head of the great yellow movement, and the man who fought on behalf of the entire white race. How can I paint the face of the individual who now stood before us, perhaps the greatest genius of modern times? Of him it had been fitly said that he had a brow like Shakespeare, and a face like Satan. Something serpentine, hypnotic, was in his very presence. Smith drew one sharp breath, and was silent. Together chained to the wall two medieval captives living mockeries of our boasted modern security. We crouched before Dr. Fu Manchu. He came forward with an indescribable gait, cat-like, yet awkward, carrying his eye shoulders almost hunched. He placed the lantern in a niche in the wall, never turning away the reptilian gaze of those eyes which must haunt my dreams forever. They possessed a viridescence which hitherto I had supposed possible only in the eye of a cat, and the film intermittently clouded their brightness. But I can speak of them no more. I had never supposed prior to meeting Dr. Fu Manchu that so intense a force of malignancy could radiate from any human being. He spoke. His English was perfect, though at times his words were oddly chosen, his delivery alternately was guttural and sibilant. Mr. Smith and Dr. Petrie, your interference with my plans has gone too far. I have seriously turned my attention to you. He displayed his teeth, small and evenly separated, but discoloured in a way that was familiar to me. I studied his eyes with a now professional interest, which even the extremity of her danger could not wholly banish. Their greenness seemed to be of the iris. The pupil was oddly contracted, a pin-point. Smith leaned back against the wall and assumed indifference. You have presumed, continued Fu Manchu, to meddle with a world change. Poor spiders caught in the wills of the inevitable. You have linked my name with the futility of the young China movement. The name of Fu Manchu. Mr. Smith, you are an incompetent meddler, I despise you. Dr. Petrie, you are a fool, and I am sorry for you. He rested one bony hand on his hip, narrowing in the long eyes as he looked down on us. The purposeful cruelty of the man was inherent. It was entirely untheatrical. Still Smith remained silent. So I am determined to remove you from the scene of your blunders, added Fu Manchu. Opium will very shortly do the same for you, I raptor him savagely. Without emotion he turned the narrowed eyes upon me. That is a matter of opinion, doctor, he said. You may have lacked the opportunities which have been mine for studying that subject, and in any event I shall not be privileged to enjoy your advice in the future. You will not long outlive me, I replied, and our deaths will not profit you incidentally, because Smith's foot touched mine. Because, inquired Fu Manchu softly. Ah, Mr. Smith is so prudent, he is thinking that I have files. He pronounced the word in a way that made me shudder. Mr. Smith has seen a wire jacket. Have you ever seen a wire jacket, as a surgeon its functions would interest you? I stifled a cry that rose to my lips, for, with a shrill whistling sound, a small shape came bounding into the dimly lip-vault, then shot upward. A marmoset landed on the shoulder of Dr. Fu Manchu, and peered grotesquely into the dreadful yellow face. The doctor raised his bony hand, and fondled the little creature, crooning to it. One of my pets, Mr. Smith, he said, suddenly opening his eyes fully, so that they blaze like green lamps. I have others, equally useful. My scorpions. Have you met my scorpions? No. My pythons and hammer-driots? Then there are my fungi, and my tiny allies, the bacilli. I have a collection in my laboratory quite unique. Have you ever visited Molokai, the Lepper Island doctor? No. But Mr. Nailand Smith will be familiar with the asylum at Rangoon. And we must not forget my black spiders, with their diamond eyes, my spiders that sit in the dark and watch, then leap. He raised his hands, so that the sleeve of the robe fell back to the elbow, and the ape dropped, chattering to the floor, and ran from the cellar. O God of Cathay! he cried. By what death shall these, these miserable ones who would bind thy empire, which is boundless? Like some priest of Tezcat, he stood with his eyes upraised to the roof, his lean body quivering, a sight to shock the most unimpressionable mind. He's mad, I whispered to Smith. God help us, the mad is a dangerous homicidal maniac! Nailand Smith's tanned face was very drawn, but he shook his head grimly. Dangerous, yes, I agree, he muttered. His existence is a danger to the entire white race. Which now we are powerless to avert. Dr. Fu Manchu recovered himself, took up the lantern, and turning abruptly, walked to the door with his awkward yet feline gate, at the threshold he looked back. You would have warned Mr. Graham Guthrie, he said in a soft voice. Tonight, at half-past twelve, Mr. Graham Guthrie dies. Smith sat silent and motionless, his eyes fixed upon the speaker. You were in Rangoon in 1908, continued Dr. Fu Manchu. You remember the call? From somewhere above us, I could not determine the exact direction, came a low wailing cry, an uncanny thing of falling cadences, which in that dismal vault with the sinister yellow robed figure at the door seemed to pour ice into my veins. Its effect upon Smith was truly extraordinary. His face showed grayly in the faint light, and I heard him draw a hissing breath through clenched teeth. It calls for you, said Dr. Fu Manchu, at half-past twelve. It calls for Graham Guthrie. The door closed, and darkness mandalled us again. Smith, I said, what was that? The horrors about us were playing havoc with my nerves. It was the call of Sylvia, replied Smith hoarsely. What is it? Who uttered it? What does it mean? I don't know what it is, Petrie, nor who utters it. But it means death. End of CHAPTER XIII. Recording by F.N.H. in sunny Anchorage, Alaska. CHAPTER XIV of the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by F.N.H. The insidious Dr. Fu Manchu by Sax Roma. CHAPTER XIV There may be some who could have lain chained to that noisome cell and felt no fear, no dread of what the blackness might hold. I confess that I am not one of these. I knew that Naylen Smith and I stood in the path of the most stupendous genius who in the world's history had devoted his intellect to crime. I knew that the enormous wealth of the political group backing Dr. Fu Manchu rendered him a menace to Europe and to America greater than that of the plague. He was a scientist trained at the great university, an explorer of nature's secrets who had gone further into the unknown, I suppose, than any living man. His mission was to remove all obstacles—human obstacles—from the path of that secret movement which was progressing in the Far East. Smith and I were two such obstacles, and of all the horrible devices at his command, I wandered and my tortured brain refused to leave the subject by which of them we would doom to be dispatched. Even at that very moment some venomous centipede might be wriggling towards me over the slime of the stones, some poisonous spider be preparing to drop from the roof. Fu Manchu might have released a serpent in the cellar, or the air be alive with microbes of a loathsome disease. Smith, I said, scarcely recognising my own voice. I can't bear the suspense. He intends to kill us—that is certain, but—don't worry, came the reply. He intends to learn our plans first. You mean? You heard him speak of his files and of his wire jacket. Oh, my God! I groaned. Can this be England? Smith laughed dryly, and I heard him fumbling with the still collar about his neck. I have one great hope, he said. Since you share my captivity, but we must neglect no minor chance. Try with your pocket-knife if you can force the lock. I am trying to break this one. Truth to tell, the idea had not ended my half-dazed mind, but I immediately acted upon my friend's suggestion, setting to work with the small blade of my knife. I was so engaged, and having snapped one blade was about to open another, when a sound arrested me. It came from beneath my feet. Smith, I whispered, Listen! The scraping and clicking which told of Smith's efforts ceased. Motionless, we sat in that humid darkness and listened. Something was moving beneath the stones of the cellar. I held my breath. Every nerve in my body was strung up. A line of light showed a few feet from where we lay. It widened, became an oblong. A trap was lifted, and within a yard of me there rose a dimly-seen head. Horror, I had expected, and death, or worse. Instead I saw a lovely face crowned with a disordered mass of curling hair. I saw a white arm upholding the stone slab, a shapely arm clasped about the elbow by a broad gold bangle. The girl climbed into the cellar and placed a lantern on the stone floor. In the dim light she was unreal, a figure of an opium vision, with her clinging silk draperies and garish jewellery, with her feet encased in little red slippers. In short, this was the hoary of my vision, materialised. It was difficult to believe that we were in a modern up-to-date England, easy to dream that we were the captives of a caliph in a dungeon in Old Baghdad. My prayers are answered, said Smith softly. She has come to save you. Sh! warned the girl, and her wonderful eyes opened widely, fearfully. A sound, and he will kill us all. She bent over me. A keyed yard in the lock which had broken my penknife, and the collar was off. As I rose to my feet the girl turned and released Smith. She raised the lantern above the trap, and signed to us to descend the wooden steps which its light revealed. Your knife, she whispered to me. Leave it on the floor. You will think you've forced the locks. Down! Quickly! Nail and Smith, stepping gingerly, disappeared into the darkness. I rapidly followed. Last of all came her mysterious friend, a gold band about one of her ankles gleaming in the rays of the lantern which she carried. We stood in a low-arched passage. Tie your handkerchiefs over your eyes, and do exactly as I tell you, she ordered. Neither of us hesitated to obey her. Blindfolded, I allowed her to lead me, and Smith rested his hand upon my shoulder. In that order we proceeded, and came to stone steps which we ascended. Keep to the wall on the left, came a whisper. There is danger on the right. With my free hand I fell for and found the wall, and we pressed forward. The atmosphere of the place through which we were passing was steamy, and loaded with an odour like that of exotic plant life. But a faint animal scent crept to my nostrils too, and there was a subdued stir about me, infinitely suggestive, mysterious. Now my feet sank in a soft carpet, and a curtain brushed my shoulder. A gong sounded. We stopped. The din of distant drumming came to my ears. Where in heaven's name are we, is Smith in my ear. That's a tom-tom. The little hand grasping mine quivered nervously. We were near a door or a window, for a breath of perfume was wafted through the air, and it reminded me of my other meetings with the beautiful woman who was now leading us from the house of Fu Manchu, who, with her own lips, had told me that she was his slave. Through the horrible phantasmagoria she flitted, a seductive vision, a pecan's loveliness standing out richly in its black setting of murder and devoury. Not once, but a thousand times, I had tried to reason out the nature of the tie which bound her to the sinister doctor. Silence fell. Quick! This way! Down a thickly carpeted stair we went. Our guide opened a door and led us along a passage. Another door was opened, and we were in the open air. But the girl never tarried, pulling me along a graveled path with a fresh breeze blowing in my face and along until unmistakably I stood upon the river bank. Now planking creaked to our tread, and looking downward beneath the handkerchief, I saw the gleam of water beneath my feet. Be careful, I was warned, and found myself stepping into a narrow boat, a punt. Naelyn Smith followed, and the girl pushed the punt off and pulled out into the stream. Don't speak, she directed. My brain was fevered. I scarce knew if I dreamed and was waking, or if the reality ended with my imprisonment in the clammy cellar in this silent escape, blindfolded upon the river with a girl for our guide who might have stepped out of the pages of the Arabian Nights. Were fantasy the mockery of sleep? Indeed. I began seriously to doubt if this stream whereon we floated, whose waters plashed and tingled about us were the Thames, the tight wrists, or the sticks. The punt touched a bank. You will hear a clock strike in a few minutes, said the girl with her soft charming accent. But I rely upon your honour not to remove the handkerchiefs until then. You owe me this. We do, said Smith fervently. I heard him scrambling to the bank, and a moment later a soft hand was placed in mine, and I too was guided on to terra firma. Arrived at the bank, I still held the girl's hand drawing her towards me. You must not go back, I pleaded. We will take care of you. You must not return to that place. Let me go, she said. When once I asked you to take me from him, you spoke of police protection. That was your answer. Police protection! You would let them lock me up, imprison me, and make me betray him. For what? For what? She wrenched herself free. How little you understand me! Never mind. Perhaps one day you will know. Until the clock strikes, she was gone. I heard the creak of the punt, the drip of the water from the pole. Fainter it grew, and fainter. What is her secret? muttered Smith beside me. Why does she cling to that monster? The distant sound died away entirely. A clock began to strike. It struck the half-hour. In an instant my handkerchief was off, and so was Smith's. We stood upon a towing-path, away to the left the moon shone upon the towers and battlements of an ancient fortress. It was Windsor Castle. Half-past ten! cried Smith. Two hours to save Graham Guthrie! We had exactly fourteen minutes in which to catch the last train to Waterloo, and we caught it. But I sank into a corner of the compartment in a state bordering upon collapse. Neither of us, I think, could have managed another twenty yards. With a lesser stake than a human life at issue, I doubt if we should have attempted that dash to the Windsor Station. Due at Waterloo at eleven-fifty-one, panned Smith, that giveth us thirty-nine minutes to get to the other side of the river and reach his hotel. Where in heaven's name is that house situated? Did we come up or downstream? I couldn't determine. But at any rate, it stands close to the river side. It should be merely a question of time to identify it. I shall set Scotland yard to work immediately, but I'm hoping for nothing. Our escape will warn him. I said no more for a time. Sitting, wiping the perspiration from my forehead, I'm watching my friend load his cracked briar with broad-cut Latakia mixture. Smith, I said at last. What was that horrible wailing we heard? What did Fu Manchu mean when he referred to Rangoon? I noticed how it affected you. My friend nodded, and lighted his pipe. There was a ghastly business there in 1908 or early 1909, he replied, a nuttily mysterious epidemic, and this beastly wailing was associated with it. What way? And what do you mean by an epidemic? It began, I believe, at the Palace Mansions Hotel in the Cantomance. A young American whose name I cannot recall was staying there on business connected with some new iron buildings. One night he went to his room, locked his door, jumped out the window into the courtyard, broke his neck, of course. Suicide? Apparently. But there were singular features in this case. For instance, his revolver lay beside him, fully loaded. In the courtyard? In the courtyard. Was it murdered by any chance? Smith shrugged his shoulders. His door was found locked from the inside, had to be broken in. But the wailing business? I had began later, or was only noticed later. A French doctor named Lafitte died in exactly the same way, at the same place, at the same hotel, but he occupied a different room. He's the extraordinary part of the affair. A friend shared the room with him, and actually saw him go. Saw him leap from the window? Yes. The friend, an Englishman, was aroused by the uncanny wailing. I was in Rangoon at the time, so that I know more of the case of Lafitte than that of the American. I spoke to the man about it personally. He was an electrical engineer, Edward Martin, and he told me that the cry seemed to come from above him. It seemed to come from above when we heard it at Fu Manchu's house. Martin sat up in bed. It was a clear moonlight night, the sort of moonlight night you get in Burma. Lafitte, for some reason, had just gone to the window. His friends saw him look out. The next moment, with a dreadful scream, he threw himself forward and crashed down into the courtyard. What then? Martin ran to the window and looked down. Lafitte screamed and aroused the place, of course, but there was absolutely nothing to account for the occurrence. There was no balcony, no ledge, no means by which anyone could reach the window. Hmm. But how did you come to recognize the cry? I stopped at the palace mansions for some time. One night this uncanny howling aroused me. I heard it quite distinctly, and am never likely to forget it. He was followed by a horse yell. The man in the next room, an orchid hunter, had gone the same way as the others. Did you change your quarters? No. Fortunately for the reputation of the hotel, the first class establishment, several similar cases occur elsewhere, both in Rangoon, in Prom, and in Mulmaine. A story got about the native quarter, and was fostered by some mad fakir, that the god Sylvia was reborn, and that the cry was his call for victims, ghastly story, which led to an outbreak of decoyty, and gave the district superintendent no end of trouble. Was there anything unusual about the bodies? They all developed marks after death, as though they had been strangled. The marks were said all to possess a peculiar form, though it was not appreciable to my eye, and this, again, was declared to be of the five heads of Sylvia. Were the deaths confined to Europeans? Oh, no. Several Bermans and others died in the same way. At first there was a theory that the victims had contracted leprosy and committed suicide as a result, but the medical evidence disproved that. The call of Sylvia became a perfect nightmare throughout Burma. Did you ever hear it again, before this evening? Yes, I heard it on the Upper Irawaddy one clear moonlit night, and a Colassia, deckhand, led from the top deck of the steamer aboard which I was travelling. My God, to think that the fiend Fu Manchu has brought that to England! But brought what, Smith? I cried in perplexity. What has he brought? An evil spirit? A mental disease? What is it? What can it be? A new agent of death, Petrie. Something born in a plague spot of Burma, the home of much that is unclean and much that is inexplicable. Heaven grant that we be in time, and are able to save Guthrie. End of Chapter 14. Recording by FNH. Recorded in Sunny Anchorage, Alaska.