“I don’t blame you!” rapped Nayland Smith. “Suppose we say, then, a thousand pounds if you show us the present hiding-place of Fu-Manchu, the payment to be in no way subject to whether we profit by your information or not?”
Abel Slattin shrugged his shoulders, racially, and returned to the armchair which he had just quitted. He reseated himself, placing his hat and cane upon my writing-table.
“A little agreement in black and white?” he suggested smoothly.
Smith raised himself up out of the white cane chair, and, bending forward over a corner of the table, scribbled busily upon a sheet of notepaper with my fountain-pen.
The while he did so, I covertly studied our visitor. He lay back in the armchair, his heavy eyelids lowered deceptively. He was a thought overdressed—a big man, dark-haired and well groomed, who toyed with a monocle most unsuitable to his type. During the preceding conversation, I had been vaguely surprised to note Mr. Abel Slattin’s marked American accent.
Sometimes, when Slattin moved, a big diamond which he wore upon the third finger of his right hand glittered magnificently. There was a sort of bluish tint underlying the dusky skin, noticeable even in his hands but proclaiming itself significantly in his puffy face and especially under the eyes. I diagnosed a laboring valve somewhere in the heart system.
Nayland Smith’s pen scratched on. My glance strayed from our Semitic caller to his cane, lying upon the red leather before me. It was of most unusual workmanship, apparently Indian, being made of some kind of dark brown, mottled wood, bearing a marked resemblance to a snake’s skin; and the top of the cane was carved in conformity, to represent the head of what I took to be a puff-adder, fragments of stone, or beads, being inserted to represent the eyes, and the whole thing being finished with an artistic realism almost startling.
When Smith had tossed the written page to Slattin, and he, having read it with an appearance of carelessness, had folded it neatly and placed it in his pocket, I said:
“You have a curio here?”
Our visitor, whose dark eyes revealed all the satisfaction which, by his manner, he sought to conceal, nodded and took up the cane in his hand.
“It comes from Australia, Doctor,” he replied; “it’s aboriginal work, and was given to me by a client. You thought it was Indian? Everybody does. It’s my mascot.”
“Really?”
“It is indeed. Its former owner ascribed magical powers to it! In fact, I believe he thought that it was one of those staffs mentioned in biblical history—”
“Aaron’s rod?” suggested Smith, glancing at the cane.
“Something of the sort,” said Slattin, standing up and again preparing to depart.
“You will ‘phone us, then?” asked my friend.
“You will hear from me to-morrow,” was the reply.
Smith returned to the cane armchair, and Slattin, bowing to both of us, made his way to the door as I rang for the girl to show him out.
“Considering the importance of his proposal,” I began, as the door closed, “you hardly received our visitor with cordiality.”
“I hate to have any relations with him,” answered my friend; “but we must not be squeamish respecting our instruments in dealing with Dr. Fu-Manchu. Slattin has a rotten reputation—even for a private inquiry agent. He is little better than a blackmailer—”
“How do you know?”
“Because I called on our friend Weymouth at the Yard yesterday and looked up the man’s record.”
“Whatever for?”
“I knew that he was concerning himself, for some reason, in the case. Beyond doubt he has established some sort of communication with the Chinese group; I am only wondering—”
“You don’t mean—”
“Yes—I do, Petrie! I tell you he is unscrupulous enough to stoop even to that.”
No doubt, Slattin knew that this gaunt, eager-eyed Burmese commissioner was vested with ultimate authority in his quest of the mighty Chinaman who represented things unutterable, whose potentialities for evil were boundless as his genius, who personified a secret danger, the extent and nature of which none of us truly understood. And, learning of these things, with unerring Semitic instinct he had sought an opening in this glittering Rialto. But there were two bidders!
“You think he may have sunk so low as to become a creature of Fu-Manchu?” I asked, aghast.
“Exactly! If it paid him well I do not doubt that he would serve that master as readily as any other. His record is about as black as it well could be. Slattin is of course an assumed name; he was known as Lieutenant Pepley when he belonged to the New York Police, and he was kicked out of the service for complicity in an unsavory Chinatown case.”
“Chinatown!”
“Yes, Petrie, it made me wonder, too; and we must not forget that he is undeniably a clever scoundrel.”
“Shall you keep any appointment which he may suggest?”
“Undoubtedly. But I shall not wait until tomorrow.”
“What!”
“I propose to pay a little informal visit to Mr. Abel Slattin, to-night.”
“At his office?”
“No; at his private residence. If, as I more than suspect, his object is to draw us into some trap, he will probably report his favorable progress to his employer to-night!”
“Then we should have followed him!”
Nayland Smith stood up and divested himself of the old shooting-jacket.
“He has been followed, Petrie,” he replied, with one of his rare smiles. “Two C.I.D. men have been watching the house all night!”
This was entirely characteristic of my friend’s farseeing methods.
“By the way,” I said, “you saw Eltham this morning. He will soon be convalescent. Where, in heaven’s name, can he—”
“Don’t be alarmed on his behalf, Petrie,” interrupted Smith. “His life is no longer in danger.”
I stared, stupidly.
“No longer in danger!”
“He received, some time yesterday, a letter, written in Chinese, upon Chinese paper, and enclosed in an ordinary business envelope, having a typewritten address and bearing a London postmark.”
“Well?”
“As nearly as I can render the message in English, it reads: ‘Although, because you are a brave man, you would not betray your correspondent in China, he has been discovered. He was a mandarin, and as I cannot write the name of a traitor, I may not name him. He was executed four days ago. I salute you and pray for your speedy recovery. Fu-Manchu.’”
“Fu-Manchu! But it is almost certainly a trap.”
“On the contrary, Petrie—Fu-Manchu would not have written in Chinese unless he were sincere; and, to clear all doubt, I received a cable this morning reporting that the Mandarin Yen-Sun-Yat was assassinated in his own garden, in Nan-Yang, one day last week.”
Together we marched down the slope of the quiet, suburban avenue; to take pause before a small, detached house displaying the hatchet boards of the Estate Agent. Here we found unkempt laurel bushes and acacias run riot, from which arboreal tangle protruded the notice—“To be Let or Sold.”
Smith, with an alert glance to right and left, pushed open the wooden gate and drew me in upon the gravel path. Darkness mantled all; for the nearest street lamp was fully twenty yards beyond.
From the miniature jungle bordering the path, a soft whistle sounded.
“Is that Carter?” called Smith, sharply.
A shadowy figure uprose, and vaguely I made it out for that of a man in the unobtrusive blue serge which is the undress uniform of the Force.
“Well?” rapped my companion.
“Mr. Slattin returned ten minutes ago, sir,” reported the constable. “He came in a cab which he dismissed—”
“He has not left again?”
“A few minutes after his return,” the man continued, “another cab came up, and a lady alighted.”
“A lady!”
“The same, sir, that has called upon him before.”
“Smith!” I whispered, plucking at his arm—“is it—”
He half turned, nodding his head; and my heart began to throb foolishly. For now the manner of Slattin’s campaign suddenly was revealed to me. In our operations against the Chinese murder-group two years before, we had had an ally in the enemy’s camp—Karamaneh the beautiful slave, whose presence in those happenings of the past had colored the sometimes sordid drama with the opulence of old Arabia; who had seemed a fitting figure for the romances of Bagdad during the Caliphate—Karamaneh, whom I had thought sincere, whose inscrutable Eastern soul I had presumed, fatuously, to have laid bare and analyzed.
Now, once again she was plying her old trade of go-between; professing to reveal the secrets of Dr. Fu-Manchu, and all the time—I could not doubt it—inveigling men into the net of this awful fisher.
Yesterday, I had been her dupe; yesterday, I had rejoiced in my captivity. To-day, I was not the favored one; to-day I had not been selected recipient of her confidences—confidences sweet, seductive, deadly: but Abel Slattin, a plausible rogue, who, in justice, should be immured in Sing Sing, was chosen out, was enslaved by those lovely mysterious eyes, was taking to his soul the lies which fell from those perfect lips, triumphant in a conquest that must end in his undoing; deeming, poor fool, that for love of him this pearl of the Orient was about to betray her master, to resign herself a prize to the victor!
Companioned by these bitter reflections, I had lost the remainder of the conversation between Nayland Smith and the police officer; now, casting off the succubus memory which threatened to obsess me, I put forth a giant mental effort to purge my mind of this uncleanness, and became again an active participant in the campaign against the Master—the director of all things noxious.
Our plans being evidently complete, Smith seized my arm, and I found myself again out upon the avenue. He led me across the road and into the gate of a house almost opposite. From the fact that two upper windows were illuminated, I adduced that the servants were retiring; the other windows were in darkness, except for one on the ground floor to the extreme left of the building, through the lowered venetian blinds whereof streaks of light shone out.
“Slattin’s study!” whispered Smith. “He does not anticipate surveillance, and you will note that the window is wide open!”
With that my friend crossed the strip of lawn, and careless of the fact that his silhouette must have been visible to any one passing the gate, climbed carefully up the artificial rockery intervening, and crouched upon the window-ledge peering into the room.
A moment I hesitated, fearful that if I followed, I should stumble or dislodge some of the larva blocks of which the rockery was composed.
Then I heard that which summoned me to the attempt, whatever the cost.
Through the open window came the sound of a musical voice—a voice possessing a haunting accent, possessing a quality which struck upon my heart and set it quivering as though it were a gong hung in my bosom.
Karamaneh was speaking.
Upon hands and knees, heedless of damage to my garments, I crawled up beside Smith. One of the laths was slightly displaced and over this my friend was peering in. Crouching close beside him, I peered in also.
I saw the study of a business man, with its files, neatly arranged works of reference, roll-top desk, and Milner safe. Before the desk, in a revolving chair, sat Slattin. He sat half turned toward the window, leaning back and smiling; so that I could note the gold crown which preserved the lower left molar. In an armchair by the window, close, very close, and sitting with her back to me, was Karamaneh!
She, who, in my dreams, I always saw, was ever seeing, in an Eastern dress, with gold bands about her white ankles, with jewel-laden fingers, with jewels in her hair, wore now a fashionable costume and a hat that could only have been produced in Paris. Karamaneh was the one Oriental woman I had ever known who could wear European clothes; and as I watched that exquisite profile, I thought that Delilah must have been just such another as this, that, excepting the Empress Poppaea, history has record of no woman, who, looking so innocent, was yet so utterly vile.
“Yes, my dear,” Slattin was saying, and through his monocle ogling his beautiful visitor, “I shall be ready for you to-morrow night.”
I felt Smith start at the words.
“There will be a sufficient number of men?”
Karamaneh put the question in a strangely listless way.
“My dear little girl,” replied Slattin, rising and standing looking down at her, with his gold tooth twinkling in the lamplight, “there will be a whole division, if a whole division is necessary.”
He sought to take her white gloved hand, which rested upon the chair arm; but she evaded the attempt with seeming artlessness, and stood up. Slattin fixed his bold gaze upon her.
“So now, give me my orders,” he said.
“I am not prepared to do so, yet,” replied the girl, composedly; “but now that I know you are ready, I can make my plans.”
She glided past him to the door, avoiding his outstretched arm with an artless art which made me writhe; for once I had been the willing victim of all these wiles.
“But—” began Slattin.
“I will ring you up in less than half an hour,” said Karamaneh and without further ceremony, she opened the door.
I still had my eyes glued to the aperture in the blind, when Smith began tugging at my arm.
“Down! you fool!” he hissed harshly—“if she sees us, all is lost!”
Realizing this, and none too soon, I turned, and rather clumsily followed my friend. I dislodged a piece of granite in my descent; but, fortunately, Slattin had gone out into the hall and could not well have heard it.
We were crouching around an angle of the house, when a flood of light poured down the steps, and Karamaneh rapidly descended. I had a glimpse of a dark-faced man who evidently had opened the door for her, then all my thoughts were centered upon that graceful figure receding from me in the direction of the avenue. She wore a loose cloak, and I saw this fluttering for a moment against the white gate posts; then she was gone.
Yet Smith did not move. Detaining me with his hand he crouched there against a quick-set hedge; until, from a spot lower down the hill, we heard the start of the cab which had been waiting. Twenty seconds elapsed, and from some other distant spot a second cab started.
“That’s Weymouth!” snapped Smith. “With decent luck, we should know Fu-Manchu’s hiding-place before Slattin tells us!”
“But—”
“Oh! as it happens, he’s apparently playing the game.”—In the half-light, Smith stared at me significantly—“Which makes it all the more important,” he concluded, “that we should not rely upon his aid!”
Those grim words were prophetic.
My companion made no attempt to communicate with the detective (or detectives) who shared our vigil; we took up a position close under the lighted study window and waited—waited.
Once, a taxi-cab labored hideously up the steep gradient of the avenue ... It was gone. The lights at the upper windows above us became extinguished. A policeman tramped past the gateway, casually flashing his lamp in at the opening. One by one the illuminated windows in other houses visible to us became dull; then lived again as mirrors for the pallid moon. In the silence, words spoken within the study were clearly audible; and we heard someone—presumably the man who had opened the door—inquire if his services would be wanted again that night.
Smith inclined his head and hung over me in a tense attitude, in order to catch Slattin’s reply.
“Yes, Burke,” it came—“I want you to sit up until I return; I shall be going out shortly.”
Evidently the man withdrew at that; for a complete silence followed which prevailed for fully half an hour. I sought cautiously to move my cramped limbs, unlike Smith, who seeming to have sinews of piano-wire, crouched beside me immovable, untiringly. Then loud upon the stillness, broke the strident note of the telephone bell.
I started, nervously, clutching at Smith’s arm. It felt hard as iron to my grip.
“Hullo!” I heard Slattin call—“who is speaking?... Yes, yes! This is Mr. A. S.... I am to come at once?... I know where—yes I ... you will meet me there?... Good!—I shall be with you in half an hour.... Good-by!”
Distinctly I heard the creak of the revolving office-chair as Slattin rose; then Smith had me by the arm, and we were flying swiftly away from the door to take up our former post around the angle of the building. This gained:
“He’s going to his death!” rapped Smith beside me; “but Carter has a cab from the Yard waiting in the nearest rank. We shall follow to see where he goes—for it is possible that Weymouth may have been thrown off the scent; then, when we are sure of his destination, we can take a hand in the game! We...”
The end of the sentence was lost to me—drowned in such a frightful wave of sound as I despair to describe. It began with a high, thin scream, which was choked off staccato fashion; upon it followed a loud and dreadful cry uttered with all the strength of Slattin’s lungs—
“Oh, God!” he cried, and again—“Oh, God!”
This in turn merged into a sort of hysterical sobbing.
I was on my feet now, and automatically making for the door. I had a vague impression of Nayland Smith’s face beside me, the eyes glassy with a fearful apprehension. Then the door was flung open, and, in the bright light of the hall-way, I saw Slattin standing—swaying and seemingly fighting with the empty air.
“What is it? For God’s sake, what has happened!” reached my ears dimly—and the man Burke showed behind his master. White-faced I saw him to be; for now Smith and I were racing up the steps.
Ere we could reach him, Slattin, uttering another choking cry, pitched forward and lay half across the threshold.
We burst into the hall, where Burke stood with both his hands raised dazedly to his head. I could hear the sound of running feet upon the gravel, and knew that Carter was coming to join us.
Burke, a heavy man with a lowering, bull-dog type of face, collapsed onto his knees beside Slattin, and began softly to laugh in little rising peals.
“Drop that!” snapped Smith, and grasping him by the shoulders, he sent him spinning along the hallway, where he sank upon the bottom step of the stairs, to sit with his outstretched fingers extended before his face, and peering at us grotesquely through the crevices.
There were rustlings and subdued cries from the upper part of the house. Carter came in out of the darkness, carefully stepping over the recumbent figure; and the three of us stood there in the lighted hall looking down at Slattin.
“Help us to move him back,” directed Smith, tensely; “far enough to close the door.”
Between us we accomplished this, and Carter fastened the door. We were alone with the shadow of Fu-Manchu’s vengeance; for as I knelt beside the body on the floor, a look and a touch sufficed to tell me that this was but clay from which the spirit had fled!
Smith met my glance as I raised my head, and his teeth came together with a loud snap; the jaw muscles stood out prominently beneath the dark skin; and his face was grimly set in that odd, half-despairful expression which I knew so well but which boded so ill for whomsoever occasioned it.
“Dead, Petrie!—already?”
“Lightning could have done the work no better. Can I turn him over?”
Smith nodded.
Together we stooped and rolled the heavy body on its back. A flood of whispers came sibilantly from the stairway. Smith spun around rapidly, and glared upon the group of half-dressed servants.
“Return to your rooms!” he rapped, imperiously; “let no one come into the hall without my orders.”
The masterful voice had its usual result; there was a hurried retreat to the upper landing. Burke, shaking like a man with an ague, sat on the lower step, pathetically drumming his palms upon his uplifted knees.
“I warned him, I warned him!” he mumbled monotonously, “I warned him, oh, I warned him!”
“Stand up!” shouted Smith—“stand up and come here!”
The man, with his frightened eyes turning to right and left, and seeming to search for something in the shadows about him, advanced obediently.
“Have you a flask?” demanded Smith of Carter.
The detective silently administered to Burke a stiff restorative.
“Now,” continued Smith, “you, Petrie, will want to examine him, I suppose?” He pointed to the body. “And in the meantime I have some questions to put to you, my man.”
He clapped his hand upon Burke’s shoulder.
“My God!” Burke broke out, “I was ten yards from him when it happened!”
“No one is accusing you,” said Smith, less harshly; “but since you were the only witness, it is by your aid that we hope to clear the matter up.”
Exerting a gigantic effort to regain control of himself, Burke nodded, watching my friend with a childlike eagerness. During the ensuing conversation, I examined Slattin for marks of violence; and of what I found, more anon.
“In the first place,” said Smith, “you say that you warned him. When did you warn him and of what?”
“I warned him, sir, that it would come to this—”
“That what would come to this?”’
“His dealings with the Chinaman!”
“He had dealings with Chinamen?”
“He accidentally met a Chinaman at an East End gaming-house, a man he had known in Frisco—a man called Singapore Charlie—”
“What! Singapore Charlie!”
“Yes, sir, the same man that had a dope-shop, two years ago, down Ratcliffe way—”
“There was a fire—”
“But Singapore Charlie escaped, sir.”
“And he is one of the gang?”
“He is one of what we used to call in New York, the Seven Group.”
Smith began to tug at the lobe of his left ear, reflectively, as I saw out of the corner of my eye.
“The Seven Group!” he mused. “That is significant. I always suspected that Dr. Fu-Manchu and the notorious Seven Group were one and the same. Go on, Burke.”
“Well, sir,” the man continued, more calmly, “the lieutenant—”
“The lieutenant!” began Smith; then: “Oh! of course; Slattin used to be a police lieutenant!”
“Well, sir, he—Mr. Slattin—had a sort of hold on this Singapore Charlie, and two years ago, when he first met him, he thought that with his aid he was going to pull off the biggest thing of his life—”
“Forestall me, in fact?”
“Yes, sir; but you got in first, with the big raid and spoiled it.”
Smith nodded grimly, glancing at the Scotland Yard man, who returned his nod with equal grimness.
“A couple of months ago,” resumed Burke, “he met Charlie again down East, and the Chinaman introduced him to a girl—some sort of an Egyptian girl.”
“Go on!” snapped Smith—“I know her.”
“He saw her a good many times—and she came here once or twice. She made out that she and Singapore Charlie were prepared to give away the boss of the Yellow gang—”
“For a price, of course?”
“I suppose so,” said Burke; “but I don’t know. I only know that I warned him.”
“H’m!” muttered Smith. “And now, what took place to-night?”
“He had an appointment here with the girl,” began Burke
“I know all that,” interrupted Smith. “I merely want to know, what took place after the telephone call?”
“Well, he told me to wait up, and I was dozing in the next room to the study—the dining-room—when the ‘phone bell aroused me. I heard the lieutenant—Mr. Slattin, coming out, and I ran out too, but only in time to see him taking his hat from the rack—”
“But he wears no hat!”
“He never got it off the peg! Just as he reached up to take it, he gave a most frightful scream, and turned around like lightning as though some one had attacked him from behind!”
“There was no one else in the hall?”
“No one at all. I was standing down there outside the dining-room just by the stairs, but he didn’t turn in my direction, he turned and looked right behind him—where there was no one—nothing. His cries were frightful.” Burke’s voice broke, and he shuddered feverishly. “Then he made a rush for the front door. It seemed as though he had not seen me. He stood there screaming; but, before I could reach him, he fell....”
Nayland Smith fixed a piercing gaze upon Burke.
“Is that all you know?” he demanded slowly.
“As God is my judge, sir, that’s all I know, and all I saw. There was no living thing near him when he met his death.”
“We shall see,” muttered Smith. He turned to me—“What killed him?” he asked, shortly.
“Apparently, a minute wound on the left wrist,” I replied, and, stooping, I raised the already cold hand in mine.
A tiny, inflamed wound showed on the wrist; and a certain puffiness was becoming observable in the injured hand and arm. Smith bent down and drew a quick, sibilant breath.
“You know what this is, Petrie?” he cried.
“Certainly. It was too late to employ a ligature and useless to inject ammonia. Death was practically instantaneous. His heart...”
There came a loud knocking and ringing.
“Carter!” cried Smith, turning to the detective, “open that door to no one—no one. Explain who I am—”
“But if it is the inspector?—”
“I said, open the door to no one!” snapped Smith.
“Burke, stand exactly where you are! Carter, you can speak to whoever knocks, through the letter-box. Petrie, don’t move for your life! It may be here, in the hallway!—”
Our search of the house of Abel Slattin ceased only with the coming of the dawn, and yielded nothing but disappointment. Failure followed upon failure; for, in the gray light of the morning, our own quest concluded, Inspector Weymouth returned to report that the girl, Karamaneh, had thrown him off the scent.
Again he stood before me, the big, burly friend of old and dreadful days, a little grayer above the temples, which I set down for a record of former horrors, but deliberate, stoical, thorough, as ever. His blue eyes melted in the old generous way as he saw me, and he gripped my hand in greeting.
“Once again,” he said, “your dark-eyed friend has been too clever for me, Doctor. But the track as far as I could follow, leads to the old spot. In fact,”—he turned to Smith, who, grim-faced and haggard, looked thoroughly ill in that gray light—“I believe Fu-Manchu’s lair is somewhere near the former opium-den of Shen-Yan—‘Singapore Charlie.’”
Smith nodded.
“We will turn our attention in that direction,” he replied, “at a very early date.”
Inspector Weymouth looked down at the body of Abel Slattin.
“How was it done?” he asked softly.
“Clumsily for Fu-Manchu,” I replied. “A snake was introduced into the house by some means—”
“By Karamaneh!” rapped Smith.
“Very possibly by Karamaneh,” I continued firmly. “The thing has escaped us.”
“My own idea,” said Smith, “is that it was concealed about his clothing. When he fell by the open door it glided out of the house. We must have the garden searched thoroughly by daylight.”
“He”—Weymouth glanced at that which lay upon the floor—“must be moved; but otherwise we can leave the place untouched, clear out the servants, and lock the house up.”
“I have already given orders to that effect,” answered Smith. He spoke wearily and with a note of conscious defeat in his voice. “Nothing has been disturbed;”—he swept his arm around comprehensively—“papers and so forth you can examine at leisure.”
Presently we quitted that house upon which the fateful Chinaman had set his seal, as the suburb was awakening to a new day. The clank of milk-cans was my final impression of the avenue to which a dreadful minister of death had come at the bidding of the death lord. We left Inspector Weymouth in charge and returned to my rooms, scarcely exchanging a word upon the way.
Nayland Smith, ignoring my entreaties, composed himself for slumber in the white cane chair in my study. About noon he retired to the bathroom, and returning, made a pretense of breakfast; then resumed his seat in the cane armchair. Carter reported in the afternoon, but his report was merely formal. Returning from my round of professional visits at half past five, I found Nayland Smith in the same position; and so the day waned into evening, and dusk fell uneventfully.
In the corner of the big room by the empty fireplace, Nayland Smith lay, with his long, lean frame extended in the white cane chair. A tumbler, from which two straws protruded, stood by his right elbow, and a perfect continent of tobacco smoke lay between us, wafted toward the door by the draught from an open window. He had littered the hearth with matches and tobacco ash, being the most untidy smoker I have ever met; and save for his frequent rapping-out of his pipe bowl and perpetual striking of matches, he had shown no sign of activity for the past hour. Collarless and wearing an old tweed jacket, he had spent the evening, as he had spent the day, in the cane chair, only quitting it for some ten minutes, or less, to toy with dinner.
My several attempts at conversation had elicited nothing but growls; therefore, as dusk descended, having dismissed my few patients, I busied myself collating my notes upon the renewed activity of the Yellow Doctor, and was thus engaged when the ‘phone bell disturbed me. It was Smith who was wanted, however; and he went out eagerly, leaving me to my task.
At the end of a lengthy conversation, he returned from the ‘phone and began, restlessly, to pace the room. I made a pretense of continuing my labors, but covertly I was watching him. He was twitching at the lobe of his left ear, and his face was a study in perplexity. Abruptly he burst out:
“I shall throw the thing up, Petrie! Either I am growing too old to cope with such an adversary as Fu-Manchu, or else my intellect has become dull. I cannot seem to think clearly or consistently. For the Doctor, this crime, this removal of Slattin, is clumsy—unfinished. There are two explanations. Either he, too, is losing his old cunning or he has been interrupted!”
“Interrupted!”
“Take the facts, Petrie,”—Smith clapped his hands upon my table and bent down, peering into my eyes—“is it characteristic of Fu-Manchu to kill a man by the direct agency of a snake and to implicate one of his own damnable servants in this way?”
“But we have found no snake!”
“Karamaneh introduced one in some way. Do you doubt it?”
“Certainly Karamaneh visited him on the evening of his death, but you must be perfectly well aware that even if she had been arrested, no jury could convict her.”
Smith resumed his restless pacings up and down.
“You are very useful to me, Petrie,” he replied; “as a counsel for the defense you constantly rectify my errors of prejudice. Yet I am convinced that our presence at Slattin’s house last night prevented Fu-Manchu from finishing off this little matter as he had designed to do.”
“What has given you this idea?”
“Weymouth is responsible. He has rung me up from the Yard. The constable on duty at the house where the murder was committed, reports that some one, less than an hour ago, attempted to break in.”
“Break in!”
“Ah! you are interested? I thought the circumstance illuminating, also!”
“Did the officer see this person?”
“No; he only heard him. It was some one who endeavored to enter by the bathroom window, which, I am told, may be reached fairly easily by an agile climber.”
“The attempt did not succeed?”
“No; the constable interrupted, but failed to make a capture or even to secure a glimpse of the man.”
We were both silent for some moments; then:
“What do you propose to do?” I asked.
“We must not let Fu-Manchu’s servants know,” replied Smith, “but to-night I shall conceal myself in Slattin’s house and remain there for a week or a day—it matters not how long—until that attempt is repeated. Quite obviously, Petrie, we have overlooked something which implicates the murderer with the murder! In short, either by accident, by reason of our superior vigilance, or by the clumsiness of his plans, Fu-Manchu for once in an otherwise blameless career, has left a clue!”
In utter darkness we groped our way through into the hallway of Slattin’s house, having entered, stealthily, from the rear; for Smith had selected the study as a suitable base of operations. We reached it without mishap, and presently I found myself seated in the very chair which Karamaneh had occupied; my companion took up a post just within the widely opened door.
So we commenced our ghostly business in the house of the murdered man—a house from which, but a few hours since, his body had been removed. This was such a vigil as I had endured once before, when, with Nayland Smith and another, I had waited for the coming of one of Fu-Manchu’s death agents.
Of all the sounds which, one by one, now began to detach themselves from the silence, there was a particular sound, homely enough at another time, which spoke to me more dreadfully than the rest. It was the ticking of the clock upon the mantelpiece; and I thought how this sound must have been familiar to Abel Slattin, how it must have formed part and parcel of his life, as it were, and how it went on now—tick-tick-tick-tick—whilst he, for whom it had ticked, lay unheeding—would never heed it more.
As I grew more accustomed to the gloom, I found myself staring at his office chair; once I found myself expecting Abel Slattin to enter the room and occupy it. There was a little China Buddha upon the bureau in one corner, with a gilded cap upon its head, and as some reflection of the moonlight sought out this little cap, my thoughts grotesquely turned upon the murdered man’s gold tooth.
Vague creakings from within the house, sounds as though of stealthy footsteps upon the stair, set my nerves tingling; but Nayland Smith gave no sign, and I knew that my imagination was magnifying these ordinary night sounds out of all proportion to their actual significance. Leaves rustled faintly outside the window at my back: I construed their sibilant whispers into the dreaded name—Fu-Manchu-Fu-Manchu—Fu-Manchu!
So wore on the night; and, when the ticking clock hollowly boomed the hour of one, I almost leaped out of my chair, so highly strung were my nerves, and so appallingly did the sudden clangor beat upon them. Smith, like a man of stone, showed no sign. He was capable of so subduing his constitutionally high-strung temperament, at times, that temporarily he became immune from human dreads. On such occasions he would be icily cool amid universal panic; but, his object accomplished, I have seen him in such a state of collapse, that utter nervous exhaustion is the only term by which I can describe it.
Tick-tick-tick-tick went the clock, and, with my heart still thumping noisily in my breast, I began to count the tickings; one, two, three, four, five, and so on to a hundred, and from one hundred to many hundreds.
Then, out from the confusion of minor noises, a new, arresting sound detached itself. I ceased my counting; no longer I noted the tick-tick of the clock, nor the vague creakings, rustlings and whispers. I saw Smith, shadowly, raise his hand in warning—in needless warning, for I was almost holding my breath in an effort of acute listening.
From high up in the house this new sound came from above the topmost room, it seemed, up under the roof; a regular squeaking, oddly familiar, yet elusive. Upon it followed a very soft and muffled thud; then a metallic sound as of a rusty hinge in motion; then a new silence, pregnant with a thousand possibilities more eerie than any clamor.
My mind was rapidly at work. Lighting the topmost landing of the house was a sort of glazed trap, evidently set in the floor of a loft-like place extending over the entire building. Somewhere in the red-tiled roof above, there presumably existed a corresponding skylight or lantern.
So I argued; and, ere I had come to any proper decision, another sound, more intimate, came to interrupt me.
This time I could be in no doubt; some one was lifting the trap above the stairhead—slowly, cautiously, and all but silently. Yet to my ears, attuned to trifling disturbances, the trap creaked and groaned noisily.
Nayland Smith waved to me to take a stand on the other side of the opened door—behind it, in fact, where I should be concealed from the view of any one descending the stair.
I stood up and crossed the floor to my new post.
A dull thud told of the trap fully raised and resting upon some supporting joist. A faint rustling (of discarded garments, I told myself) spoke to my newly awakened, acute perceptions, of the visitor preparing to lower himself to the landing. Followed a groan of woodwork submitted to sudden strain—and the unmistakable pad of bare feet upon the linoleum of the top corridor.
I knew now that one of Dr. Fu-Manchu’s uncanny servants had gained the roof of the house by some means, had broken through the skylight and had descended by means of the trap beneath on to the landing.
In such a tensed-up state as I cannot describe, nor, at this hour mentally reconstruct, I waited for the creaking of the stairs which should tell of the creature’s descent.
I was disappointed. Removed scarce a yard from me as he was, I could hear Nayland Smith’s soft, staccato breathing; but my eyes were all for the darkened hallway, for the smudgy outline of the stair-rail with the faint patterning in the background which, alone, indicated the wall.
It was amid an utter silence, unheralded by even so slight a sound as those which I had acquired the power of detecting—that I saw the continuity of the smudgy line of stair-rail to be interrupted.
A dark patch showed upon it, just within my line of sight, invisible to Smith on the other side of the doorway, and some ten or twelve stairs up.
No sound reached me, but the dark patch vanished and reappeared three feet lower down.
Still I knew that this phantom approach must be unknown to my companion—and I knew that it was impossible for me to advise him of it unseen by the dreaded visitor.
A third time the dark patch—the hand of one who, ghostly, silent, was creeping down into the hallway—vanished and reappeared on a level with my eyes. Then a vague shape became visible; no more than a blur upon the dim design of the wall-paper... and Nayland Smith got his first sight of the stranger.
The clock on the mantelpiece boomed out the half-hour.
At that, such was my state (I blush to relate it) I uttered a faint cry!
It ended all secrecy—that hysterical weakness of mine. It might have frustrated our hopes; that it did not do so was in no measure due to me. But in a sort of passionate whirl, the ensuing events moved swiftly.
Smith hesitated not one instant. With a panther-like leap he hurled himself into the hall.
“The lights, Petrie!” he cried—“the lights! The switch is near the street-door!”
I clenched my fists in a swift effort to regain control of my treacherous nerves, and, bounding past Smith, and past the foot of the stair, I reached out my hand to the switch, the situation of which, fortunately, I knew.
Around I came, in response to a shrill cry from behind me—an inhuman cry, less a cry than the shriek of some enraged animal....
With his left foot upon the first stair, Nayland Smith stood, his lean body bent perilously backward, his arms rigidly thrust out, and his sinewy fingers gripping the throat of an almost naked man—a man whose brown body glistened unctuously, whose shaven head was apish low, whose bloodshot eyes were the eyes of a mad dog! His teeth, upper and lower, were bared; they glistened, they gnashed, and a froth was on his lips. With both his hands, he clutched a heavy stick, and once—twice, he brought it down upon Nayland Smith’s head!
I leaped forward to my friend’s aid; but as though the blows had been those of a feather, he stood like some figure of archaic statuary, nor for an instant relaxed the death grip which he had upon his adversary’s throat.
Thrusting my way up the stairs, I wrenched the stick from the hand of the dacoit—for in this glistening brown man, I recognized one of that deadly brotherhood who hailed Dr. Fu-Manchu their Lord and Master.
I cannot dwell upon the end of that encounter; I cannot hope to make acceptable to my readers an account of how Nayland Smith, glassy-eyed, and with consciousness ebbing from him instant by instant, stood there, a realization of Leighton’s “Athlete,” his arms rigid as iron bars even after Fu-Manchu’s servant hung limply in that frightful grip.
In his last moments of consciousness, with the blood from his wounded head trickling down into his eyes, he pointed to the stick which I had torn from the grip of the dacoit, and which I still held in my hand.
“Not Aaron’s rod, Petrie!” he gasped hoarsely—“the rod of Moses!—Slattin’s stick!”
Even in upon my anxiety for my friend, amazement intruded.
“But,” I began—and turned to the rack in which Slattin’s favorite cane at that moment reposed—had reposed at the time of his death.
Yes!—there stood Slattin’s cane; we had not moved it; we had disturbed nothing in that stricken house; there it stood, in company with an umbrella and a malacca.
I glanced at the cane in my hand. Surely there could not be two such in the world?
Smith collapsed on the floor at my feet.
“Examine the one in the rack, Petrie,” he whispered, almost inaudibly, “but do not touch it. It may not be yet....”
I propped him up against the foot of the stairs, and as the constable began knocking violently at the street door, crossed to the rack and lifted out the replica of the cane which I held in my hand.
A faint cry from Smith—and as if it had been a leprous thing, I dropped the cane instantly.
“Merciful God!” I groaned.
Although, in every other particular, it corresponded with that which I held—which I had taken from the dacoit—which he had come to substitute for the cane now lying upon the floor—in one dreadful particular it differed.
Up to the snake’s head it was an accurate copy; but the head lived!
Either from pain, fear or starvation, the thing confined in the hollow tube of this awful duplicate was become torpid. Otherwise, no power on earth could have saved me from the fate of Abel Slattin; for the creature was an Australian death-adder.