Smith started back as though I had struck him.
"Eltham!" he whispered—"Eltham! is Eltham here?"
"I left him ten minutes ago on the common—"
Smith dashed his right fist into the palm of his left hand and
his eyes gleamed almost wildly.
"My God, Petrie!" he said, "am I fated always to come too
late?"
My dreadful fears in that instant were confirmed. I seemed to
feel my legs totter beneath me.
"Smith, you don't mean—"
"I do, Petrie!" His voice sounded very far away. "Fu-Manchu is
here; and Eltham, God help him… is his first victim!"
Smith went racing down the stairs like a man possessed. Heavy
with such a foreboding of calamity as I had not known for two
years, I followed him—along the hall and out into the road. The
very peace and beauty of the night in some way increased my mental
agitation. The sky was lighted almost tropically with such a blaze
of stars as I could not recall to have seen since, my futile search
concluded, I had left Egypt. The glory of the moonlight yellowed
the lamps speckled across the expanse of the common. The night was
as still as night can ever be in London. The dimming pulse of a cab
or car alone disturbed the stillness.
With a quick glance to right and left, Smith ran across on to
the common, and, leaving the door wide open behind me, I followed.
The path which Eltham had pursued terminated almost opposite to my
house. One's gaze might follow it, white and empty, for several
hundred yards past the pond, and further, until it became
overshadowed and was lost amid a clump of trees.
I came up with Smith, and side by side we ran on, whilst
pantingly, I told my tale.
"It was a trick to get you away from him!" cried Smith. "They
meant no doubt to make some attempt at your house, but as he came
out with you, an alternative plan—"
Abreast of the pond, my companion slowed down, and finally
stopped.
"Where did you last see Eltham?" he asked rapidly.
I took his arm, turning him slightly to the right, and pointed
across the moonbathed common.
"You see that clump of bushes on the other side of the road?" I
said. "There's a path to the left of it. I took that path and he
took this. We parted at the point where they meet—"
Smith walked right down to the edge of the water and peered
about over the surface.
What he hoped to find there I could not imagine. Whatever it had
been he was disappointed, and he turned to me again, frowning
perplexedly, and tugging at the lobe of his left ear, an old trick
which reminded me of gruesome things we had lived through in the
past.
"Come on," he jerked. "It may be amongst the trees."
From the tone of his voice I knew that he was tensed up
nervously, and his mood but added to the apprehension of my
own.
"What may be amongst the trees, Smith?" I asked.
He walked on.
"God knows, Petrie; but I fear—"
Behind us, along the highroad, a tramcar went rocking by,
doubtless bearing a few belated workers homeward. The stark
incongruity of the thing was appalling. How little those weary
toilers, hemmed about with the commonplace, suspected that almost
within sight from the car windows, in a place of prosy benches,
iron railings, and unromantic, flickering lamps, two fellow men
moved upon the border of a horror-land!
Beneath the trees a shadow carpet lay, its edges tropically
sharp; and fully ten yards from the first of the group, we two,
hatless both, and sharing a common dread, paused for a moment and
listened.
The car had stopped at the further extremity of the common, and
now with a moan that grew to a shriek was rolling on its way again.
We stood and listened until silence reclaimed the night. Not a
footstep could be heard. Then slowly we walked on. At the edge of
the little coppice we stopped again abruptly.
Smith turned and thrust his pistol into my hand. A white ray of
light pierced the shadows; my companion carried an electric torch.
But no trace of Eltham was discoverable.
There had been a heavy shower of rain during the evening just
before sunset, and although the open paths were dry again, under
the trees the ground was still moist. Ten yards within the coppice
we came upon tracks—the tracks of one running, as the deep imprints
of the toes indicated.
Abruptly the tracks terminated; others, softer, joined them, two
sets converging from left and right. There was a confused patch,
trailing off to the west; then this became indistinct, and was
finally lost upon the hard ground outside the group.
For perhaps a minute, or more, we ran about from tree to tree,
and from bush to bush, searching like hounds for a scent, and
fearful of what we might find. We found nothing; and fully in the
moonlight we stood facing one another. The night was profoundly
still.
Nayland Smith stepped back into the shadows, and began slowly to
turn his head from left to right, taking in the entire visible
expanse of the common. Toward a point where the road bisected it he
stared intently. Then, with a bound, he set off.
"Come on, Petrie!" he cried. "There they are!"
Vaulting a railing he went away over a field like a madman.
Recovering from the shock of surprise, I followed him, but he was
well ahead of me, and making for some vaguely seen object moving
against the lights of the roadway.
Another railing was vaulted, and the corner of a second,
triangular grass patch crossed at a hot sprint. We were twenty
yards from the road when the sound of a starting motor broke the
silence. We gained the graveled footpath only to see the taillight
of the car dwindling to the north!
Smith leaned dizzily against a tree.
"Eltham is in that car!" he gasped. "Just God! are we to stand
here and see him taken away to—"
He beat his fist upon the tree, in a sort of tragic despair. The
nearest cab-rank was no great distance away, but, excluding the
possibility of no cab being there, it might, for all practical
purposes, as well have been a mile off.
The beat of the retreating motor was scarcely audible; the
lights might but just be distinguished. Then, coming in an opposite
direction, appeared the headlamp of another car, of a car that
raced nearer and nearer to us, so that, within a few seconds of its
first appearance, we found ourselves bathed in the beam of its
headlights.
Smith bounded out into the road, and stood, a weird silhouette,
with upraised arms, fully in its course!
The brakes were applied hurriedly. It was a big limousine, and
its driver swerved perilously in avoiding Smith and nearly ran into
me. But, the breathless moment past, the car was pulled up, head on
to the railings; and a man in evening clothes was demanding
excitedly what had happened. Smith, a hatless, disheveled figure,
stepped up to the door.
"My name is Nayland Smith," he said rapidly—"Burmese
Commissioner." He snatched a letter from his pocket and thrust it
into the hands of the bewildered man. "Read that. It is signed by
another Commissioner—the Commissioner of Police."
With amazement written all over him, the other obeyed.
"You see," continued my friend, tersely—"it is carte blanche. I
wish to commandeer your car, sir, on a matter of life and
death!".
The other returned the letter.
"Allow me to offer it!" he said, descending. "My man will take
your orders. I can finish my journey by cab. I am—"
But Smith did not wait to learn whom he might be.
"Quick!" he cried to the stupefied chauffeur—"You passed a car a
minute ago—yonder. Can you overtake it?"
"I can try, sir, if I don't lose her track."
Smith leaped in, pulling me after him.
"Do it!" he snapped. "There are no speed limits for me. Thanks!
Goodnight, sir!"
We were off! The car swung around and the chase commenced.
One last glimpse I had of the man we had dispossessed, standing
alone by the roadside, and at ever increasing speed, we leaped away
in the track of Eltham's captors.
Smith was too highly excited for ordinary conversation, but he
threw out short, staccato remarks.
"I have followed Fu-Manchu from Hongkong," he jerked. "Lost him
at Suez. He got here a boat ahead of me. Eltham has been
corresponding with some mandarin up-country. Knew that. Came
straight to you. Only got in this evening. He—Fu-Manchu—has been
sent here to get Eltham. My God! and he has him! He will question
him! The interior of China—a seething pot, Petrie! They had to stop
the leakage of information. He is here for that."
The car pulled up with a jerk that pitched me out of my seat,
and the chauffeur leaped to the road and ran ahead. Smith was out
in a trice, as the man, who had run up to a constable, came racing
back.
"Jump in, sir—jump in!" he cried, his eyes bright with the lust
of the chase; "they are making for Battersea!"
And we were off again.
Through the empty streets we roared on. A place of gasometers
and desolate waste lots slipped behind and we were in a narrow way
where gates of yards and a few lowly houses faced upon a prospect
of high blank wall.
"Thames on our right," said Smith, peering ahead. "His rathole
is by the river as usual. Hi!"—he grabbed up the
speaking-tube—"Stop! Stop!"
The limousine swung in to the narrow sidewalk, and pulled up
close by a yard gate. I, too, had seen our quarry—a long, low
bodied car, showing no inside lights. It had turned the next
corner, where a street lamp shone greenly, not a hundred yards
ahead.
Smith leaped out, and I followed him.
"That must be a cul de sac," he said, and turned to the
eager-eyed chauffeur. "Run back to that last turning," he ordered,
"and wait there, out of sight. Bring the car up when you hear a
police-whistle."
The man looked disappointed, but did not question the order. As
he began to back away, Smith grasped me by the arm and drew me
forward.
"We must get to that corner," he said, "and see where the car
stands, without showing ourselves."
I suppose we were not more than a dozen paces from the lamp when
we heard the thudding of the motor. The car was backing out!
It was a desperate moment, for it seemed that we could not fail
to be discovered. Nayland Smith began to look about him,
feverishly, for a hiding-place, a quest in which I seconded with
equal anxiety. And Fate was kind to us—doubly kind as after events
revealed. A wooden gate broke the expanse of wall hard by upon the
right, and, as the result of some recent accident, a ragged gap had
been torn in the panels close to the top.
The chain of the padlock hung loosely; and in a second Smith was
up, with his foot in this as in a stirrup. He threw his arm over
the top and drew himself upright. A second later he was astride the
broken gate.
"Up you come, Petrie!" he said, and reached down his hand to aid
me.
I got my foot into the loop of chain, grasped at a projection in
the gatepost and found myself up.
"There is a crossbar on this side to stand on," said Smith.
He climbed over and vanished in the darkness. I was still
astride the broken gate when the car turned the corner, slowly, for
there was scanty room; but I was standing upon the bar on the
inside and had my head below the gap ere the driver could possibly
have seen me.
"Stay where you are until he passes," hissed my companion,
below. "There is a row of kegs under you."
The sound of the motor passing outside grew loud—louder—then
began to die away. I felt about with my left foot; discerned the
top of a keg, and dropped, panting, beside Smith.
"Phew!" I said—"that was a close thing! Smith—how do we
know—"
"That we have followed the right car?" he interrupted. "Ask
yourself the question: what would any ordinary man be doing
motoring in a place like this at two o'clock in the morning?"
"You are right, Smith," I agreed. "Shall we get out again?"
"Not yet. I have an idea. Look yonder."
He grasped my arm, turning me in the desired direction.
Beyond a great expanse of unbroken darkness a ray of moonlight
slanted into the place wherein we stood, spilling its cold radiance
upon rows of kegs.
"That's another door," continued my friend—I now began dimly to
perceive him beside me. "If my calculations are not entirely wrong,
it opens on a wharf gate—"
A steam siren hooted dismally, apparently from quite close at
hand.
"I'm right!" snapped Smith. "That turning leads down to the
gate. Come on, Petrie!"
He directed the light of the electric torch upon a narrow path
through the ranks of casks, and led the way to the further door. A
good two feet of moonlight showed along the top. I heard Smith
straining; then—
"These kegs are all loaded with grease!" he said, "and I want to
reconnoiter over that door."
"I am leaning on a crate which seems easy to move," I reported.
"Yes, it's empty. Lend a hand."
We grasped the empty crate, and between us, set it up on a solid
pedestal of casks. Then Smith mounted to this observation platform
and I scrambled up beside him, and looked down upon the lane
outside.
It terminated as Smith had foreseen at a wharf gate some six
feet to the right of our post. Piled up in the lane beneath us,
against the warehouse door, was a stack of empty casks. Beyond,
over the way, was a kind of ramshackle building that had possibly
been a dwelling-house at some time. Bills were stuck in the
ground-floor window indicating that the three floors were to let as
offices; so much was discernible in that reflected moonlight.
I could hear the tide, lapping upon the wharf, could feel the
chill from the river and hear the vague noises which, night nor
day, never cease upon the great commercial waterway.
"Down!" whispered Smith. "Make no noise! I suspected it. They
heard the car following!"
I obeyed, clutching at him for support; for I was suddenly
dizzy, and my heart was leaping wildly—furiously.
"You saw her?" he whispered.
Saw her! yes, I had seen her! And my poor dream-world was
toppling about me, its cities, ashes and its fairness, dust.
Peering from the window, her great eyes wondrous in the
moonlight and her red lips parted, hair gleaming like burnished
foam and her anxious gaze set upon the corner of the lane—was
Karamaneh… Karamaneh whom once we had rescued from the house of
this fiendish Chinese doctor; Karamaneh who had been our ally; in
fruitless quest of whom,—when, too late, I realized how empty my
life was become—I had wasted what little of the world's goods I
possessed;—Karamaneh!
"Poor old Petrie," murmured Smith—"I knew, but I hadn't the
heart—He has her again—God knows by what chains he holds her. But
she's only a woman, old boy, and women are very much alike—very
much alike from Charing Cross to Pagoda Road."
He rested his hand on my shoulder for a moment; I am ashamed to
confess that I was trembling; then, clenching my teeth with that
mechanical physical effort which often accompanies a mental one, I
swallowed the bitter draught of Nayland Smith's philosophy. He was
raising himself, to peer, cautiously, over the top of the door. I
did likewise.
The window from which the girl had looked was nearly on a level
with our eyes, and as I raised my head above the woodwork, I quite
distinctly saw her go out of the room. The door, as she opened it,
admitted a dull light, against which her figure showed silhouetted
for a moment. Then the door was reclosed.
"We must risk the other windows," rapped Smith.
Before I had grasped the nature of his plan he was over and had
dropped almost noiselessly upon the casks outside. Again I followed
his lead.
"You are not going to attempt anything, singlehanded—against
him?" I asked.
"Petrie—Eltham is in that house. He has been brought here to be
put to the question, in the medieval, and Chinese, sense! Is there
time to summon assistance?"
I shuddered. This had been in my mind, certainly, but so
expressed it was definitely horrible—revolting, yet
stimulating.
"You have the pistol," added Smith—"follow closely, and
quietly."
He walked across the tops of the casks and leaped down, pointing
to that nearest to the closed door of the house. I helped him place
it under the open window. A second we set beside it, and, not
without some noise, got a third on top.
Smith mounted.
His jaw muscles were very prominent and his eyes shone like
steel; but he was as cool as though he were about to enter a
theater and not the den of the most stupendous genius who ever
worked for evil. I would forgive any man who, knowing Dr.
Fu-Manchu, feared him; I feared him myself—feared him as one fears
a scorpion; but when Nayland Smith hauled himself up on the wooden
ledge above the door and swung thence into the darkened room, I
followed and was in close upon his heels. But I admired him, for he
had every ampere of his self-possession in hand; my own case was
different.
He spoke close to my ear.
"Is your hand steady? We may have to shoot."
I thought of Karamaneh, of lovely dark-eyed Karamaneh whom this
wonderful, evil product of secret China had stolen from me—for so I
now adjudged it.
"Rely upon me!" I said grimly. "I… "
The words ceased—frozen on my tongue.
There are things that one seeks to forget, but it is my lot
often to remember the sound which at that moment literally struck
me rigid with horror. Yet it was only a groan; but, merciful God! I
pray that it may never be my lot to listen to such a groan
again.
Smith drew a sibilant breath.
"It's Eltham!" he whispered hoarsely—"they're torturing—"
"No, no!" screamed a woman's voice—a voice that thrilled me
anew, but with another emotion—
"Not that, not—"
I distinctly heard the sound of a blow. Followed a sort of vague
scuffling. A door somewhere at the back of the house opened—and
shut again. Some one was coming along the passage toward us!
"Stand back!" Smith's voice was low, but perfectly steady.
"Leave it to me!"
Nearer came the footsteps and nearer. I could hear suppressed
sobs. The door opened, admitting again the faint light—and
Karamaneh came in. The place was quite unfurnished, offering no
possibility of hiding; but to hide was unnecessary.
Her slim figure had not crossed the threshold ere Smith had his
arm about the girl's waist and one hand clapped to her mouth. A
stifled gasp she uttered, and he lifted her into the room.
I stepped forward and closed the door. A faint perfume stole to
my nostrils—a vague, elusive breath of the East, reminiscent of
strange days that, now, seemed to belong to a remote past.
Karamaneh! that faint, indefinable perfume was part of her dainty
personality; it may appear absurd—impossible—but many and many a
time I had dreamt of it.
"In my breast pocket," rapped Smith; "the light."
I bent over the girl as he held her. She was quite still, but I
could have wished that I had had more certain mastery of myself. I
took the torch from Smith's pocket, and, mechanically, directed it
upon the captive.
She was dressed very plainly, wearing a simple blue skirt, and
white blouse. It was easy to divine that it was she whom Eltham had
mistaken for a French maid. A brooch set with a ruby was pinned at
the point where the blouse opened—gleaming fierily and harshly
against the soft skin. Her face was pale and her eyes wide with
fear.
"There is some cord in my right-hand pocket," said Smith; "I
came provided. Tie her wrists."
I obeyed him, silently. The girl offered no resistance, but I
think I never essayed a less congenial task than that of binding
her white wrists. The jeweled fingers lay quite listlessly in my
own.
"Make a good job of it!" rapped Smith, significantly.
A flush rose to my cheeks, for I knew well enough what he
meant.
"She is fastened," I said, and I turned the ray of the torch
upon her again.
Smith removed his hand from her mouth but did not relax his grip
of her. She looked up at me with eyes in which I could have sworn
there was no recognition. But a flush momentarily swept over her
face, and left it pale again.
"We shall have to—gag her—"
"Smith, I can't do it!"
The girl's eyes filled with tears and she looked up at my
companion pitifully.
"Please don't be cruel to me," she whispered, with that soft
accent which always played havoc with my composure. "Every
one—every one-is cruel to me. I will promise—indeed I will swear,
to be quiet. Oh, believe me, if you can save him I will do nothing
to hinder you." Her beautiful head drooped. "Have some pity for me
as well."
"Karamaneh" I said. "We would have believed you once. We cannot,
now."
She started violently.
"You know my name!" Her voice was barely audible. "Yet I have
never seen you in my life—"
"See if the door locks," interrupted Smith harshly.
Dazed by the apparent sincerity in the voice of our lovely
captive—vacant from wonder of it all—I opened the door, felt for,
and found, a key.
We left Karamaneh crouching against the wall; her great eyes
were turned towards me fascinatedly. Smith locked the door with
much care. We began a tip-toed progress along the dimly lighted
passage.
From beneath a door on the left, and near the end, a brighter
light shone. Beyond that again was another door. A voice was
speaking in the lighted room; yet I could have sworn that Karamaneh
had come, not from there but from the room beyond—from the far end
of the passage.
But the voice!—who, having once heard it, could ever mistake
that singular voice, alternately guttural and sibilant!
Dr. Fu-Manchu was speaking!
"I have asked you," came with ever-increasing clearness (Smith
had begun to turn the knob), "to reveal to me the name of your
correspondent in Nan-Yang. I have suggested that he may be the
Mandarin Yen-Sun-Yat, but you have declined to confirm me. Yet I
know" (Smith had the door open a good three inches and was peering
in) "that some official, some high official, is a traitor. Am I to
resort again to the question to learn his name?"
Ice seemed to enter my veins at the unseen inquisitor's
intonation of the words "the question." This was the Twentieth
Century, yet there, in that damnable room…
Smith threw the door open.
Through a sort of haze, born mostly of horror, but not entirely,
I saw Eltham, stripped to the waist and tied, with his arms
upstretched, to a rafter in the ancient ceiling. A Chinaman who
wore a slop-shop blue suit and who held an open knife in his hand,
stood beside him. Eltham was ghastly white. The appearance of his
chest puzzled me momentarily, then I realized that a sort of
tourniquet of wire-netting was screwed so tightly about him that
the flesh swelled out in knobs through the mesh. There was
blood—
"God in heaven!" screamed Smith frenziedly—"they have the
wire-jacket on him! Shoot down that damned Chinaman, Petrie! Shoot!
Shoot!"
Lithely as a cat the man with the knife leaped around—but I
raised the Browning, and deliberately—with a cool deliberation that
came to me suddenly—shot him through the head. I saw his oblique
eyes turn up to the whites; I saw the mark squarely between his
brows; and with no word nor cry he sank to his knees and toppled
forward with one yellow hand beneath him and one outstretched,
clutching—clutching—convulsively. His pigtail came unfastened and
began to uncoil, slowly, like a snake.
I handed the pistol to Smith; I was perfectly cool, now; and I
leaped forward, took up the bloody knife from the floor and cut
Eltham's lashings. He sank into my arms.
"Praise God," he murmured, weakly. "He is more merciful to me
than perhaps I deserve. Unscrew… the jacket, Petrie… I think …
I was very near to… . weakening. Praise the good God, Who… gave me…
fortitude… "