Dope by Sax Rohmer (page 6)

was slipping from her; felt herself falling, and shrieked to know herself helpless and alone with Kazmah. She groped for support, but found none; and, moaning, she sank down, and was unconscious of her fall.

A voice awakened her. Someone knelt beside her in the darkness, supporting her; someone who spoke wildly, despairingly, but with a strange, emotional reverence curbing the passion in his voice.

“Rita–my Rita! What have they done to you? Speak to me. . . . Oh God! Spare her to me. . . . Let her hate me for ever, but spare her–spare her. Rita, speak to me! I tried, heaven hear me, to save you little girl. I only want you to be happy!”

She felt herself being lifted gently, tenderly. And as though the man’s passionate entreaty had called her back from the dead, she reentered into life and strove to realize what had happened.

Sir Lucien was supporting her, and she found it hard to credit the fact that it was he, the hard, nonchalant man of the world she knew, who had spoken. She clutched his arm with both hands.

“Oh, Lucy!” she whispered. “I am so frightened–and so ill.”

“Thank God,” he said huskily, “she is alive. Lean against me and try to stand up. We must get away from here.”

Rita managed to stand upright, clinging wildly to Sir Lucien. A square, vaguely luminous opening became visible to her. Against it, silhouetted, she could discern part of the outline of Kazmah’s chair. She drew back, uttering a low, sobbing cry. Sir Lucien supported her, and:

“Don’t be afraid, dear,” he said reassuringly. “Nothing shall hurt you.”

He pushed open a door, and through it shone the same vague light which she had seen in the opening behind the chair. Sir Lucien spoke rapidly in a language which sounded like Spanish. He was answered by a perfect torrent of words in the same tongue.

Fiercely he cried something back at the hidden speaker.

A shriek of rage, of frenzy, came out of the darkness. Rita felt that consciousness was about to leave her again. She swayed forward dizzily, and a figure which seemed to belong to delirium–a lithe shadow out of which gleamed a pair of wild eyes–leapt upon her. A knife glittered. . . .

In order to have repelled the attack, Sir Lucien would have had to release Rita, who was clinging to him, weak and terror-stricken. Instead he threw himself before her. . . . She saw the knife enter his shoulder. . . .

Through absolute darkness she sank down into a land of chaotic nightmare horrors. Great bells clanged maddeningly. Impish hands plucked at her garments, dragged her hair. She was hurried this way and that, bruised, torn, and tossed helpless upon a sea of liquid brass. Through vast avenues lined with yellow, immobile Chinese faces she was borne upon a bier. Oblique eyes looked into hers. Knives which glittered greenly in the light of lamps globular and suspended in immeasurable space, were hurled at her in showers. . . .

Sir Lucien stood before her, supporting her; and all the knives buried themselves in his body. She tried to cry out, but no sound could she utter. Darkness fell again. . . .

A Chinaman was bending over her. His hands were tucked in his loose sleeves. He smiled, and his smile was hideous but friendly. He was strangely like Sin Sin Wa, save that he did not lack an eye.

Rita found herself lying in an untidy bed in a room laden with opium fumes and dimly lighted. On a table beside her were the remains of a meal. She strove to recall having partaken of food, but was unsuccessful. . . .

There came a blank–then a sharp, stabbing pain in her right arm. She thought it was the knife, and shrieked wildly again and again. . . .

Years seemingly elapsed, years of agony spent amid oblique eyes which floated in space unattached to any visible body, amid reeking fumes and sounds of ceaseless conflict. Once she heard the cry of some bird, and thought it must be the parakeet which eternally sat on a branch of a lonely palm in the heart of the Great Sahara. . . . Then, one night, when she lay shrinking from the plucking yellow hands which reached out of the darkness:

“Tell me your dream,” boomed a deep, mocking voice; “and I will read its portent!”

She opened her eyes. She lay in the untidy bed in the room which was laden with the fumes of opium. She stared upward at the low, dirty ceiling.

“Why do you come to me with your stories of desperation?” continued the mocking voice. “You have insisted upon seeing me. I am here.”

Rita managed to move her head so that she could see more of the room.

On a divan at the other end of the place, propped up by a number of garish cushions, Rita beheld Mrs. Sin. The long bamboo pipe had fallen from her listless fingers. Her face wore an expression of mystic rapture, like that characterizing the features of some Chinese Buddhas. . . .

In the other corner of the divan, contemplating her from under heavy brows, sat Kazmah. . . .

CHAPTER XXXVI

SAM TUK MOVES

Chinatown was being watched as Chinatown had never been watched before, even during the most stringent enforcement of the Defence of the Realm Act. K Division was on its mettle, and Scotland Yard had sent to aid Chief Inspector Kerry every man that could be spared to the task. The River Police, too, were aflame with zeal; for every officer in the service whose work lay east of London Bridge had appropriated to himself the stigma implied by the creation of Lord Wrexborough’s commission.

“Corners” in foodstuffs, metals, and other indispensable commodities are appreciated by every man, because every man knows such things to exist; but a corner in drugs was something which the East End police authorities found very difficult to grasp. They could not free their minds of the traditional idea that every second Chinaman in the Causeway was a small importer. They were seeking a hundred lesser stores instead of one greater one. Not all Seton’s quiet explanations nor Kerry’s savage language could wean the higher local officials from their ancient beliefs. They failed to conceive the idea of a wealthy syndicate conducted by an educated Chinaman and backed, covered, and protected by a crooked gentleman and accomplished man of affairs.

Perhaps they knew and perhaps they knew not, that during the period ruled by D.O.R.A. as much as L25 was paid by habitues for one pipe of chandu. The power of gold is often badly estimated by an official whose horizon is marked by a pension. This is mere lack of imagination, and no more reflects discredit upon a man than lack of hair on his crown or of color in his cheeks. Nevertheless, it may prove very annoying.

Towards the close of an afternoon which symbolized the worst that London’s particular climate can do in the matter of drizzling rain and gloom, Chief Inspector Kerry, carrying an irritable toy spaniel, came out of a turning which forms a V with Limehouse Canal, into a narrow street which runs parallel with the Thames. He had arrived at the conclusion that the neighborhood was sown so thickly with detectives that one could not throw a stone without hitting one. Yet Sin Sin Wa had quietly left his abode and had disappeared from official ken.

Three times within the past ten minutes the spaniel had tried to bite Kerry, nor was Kerry blind to the amusement which his burden had occasioned among the men of K Division whom he had met on his travels. Finally, as he came out into the riverside lane, the ill-tempered little animal essayed a fourth, and successful, attempt, burying his wicked white teeth in the Chief Inspector’s wrist.

Kerry hooked his finger into the dog’s collar, swung the yapping animal above his head, and hurled it from him into the gloom and rain mist.

“Hell take the blasted thing!” he shouted. “I’m done with it!”

He tenderly sucked his wounded wrist, and picking up his cane, which he had dropped, he looked about him and swore savagely. Of Seton Pasha he had had news several times during the day, and he was aware that the Home office agent was not idle. But to that old rivalry which had leapt up anew when he had seen Seton near Kennington oval had succeeded a sort of despair; so that now he would have welcomed the information that Seton had triumphed where he had failed. A furious hatred of the one-eyed Chinaman around whom he was convinced the mystery centred had grown up within his mind. At that hour he would gladly have resigned his post and sacrificed his pension to know that Sin Sin Wa was under lock and key. His outlook was official, and accordingly peculiar. He regarded the murder of Sir Lucien Pyne and the flight or abduction of Mrs. Monte Irvin as mere minor incidents in a case wherein Sin Sin Wa figured as the chief culprit. Nothing had acted so powerfully to bring about this conviction in the mind of the Chief Inspector as the inexplicable disappearance of the Chinaman under circumstances which had apparently precluded such a possibility.

A whimpering cry came to Kerry’s ears; and because beneath the mask of ferocity which he wore a humane man was concealed: “Flames!” he snapped; “perhaps I’ve broken the poor little devil’s leg.”

Shaking a cascade of water from the brim of his neat bowler, he set off through the murk towards the spot from whence the cries of the spaniel seemed to proceed. A few paces brought him to the door of a dirty little shop. In a window close beside it appeared the legend:

SAM TUK
BARBER.

The spaniel crouched by the door whining and scratching, and as Kerry came up it raised its beady black eyes to him with a look which, while it was not unfearful, held an unmistakable appeal. Kerry stood watching the dog for a moment, and as he watched he became conscious of an exhilarated pulse.

He tried the door and found it to be open. Thereupon he entered a dirty little shop, which he remembered to have searched in person in the grey dawn of the day which now was entering upon a premature dusk. The dog ran in past him, crossed the gloomy shop, and raced down into a tiny coal cellar, which likewise had been submitted during the early hours of the morning to careful scrutiny under the directions of the Chief Inspector.

A Chinese boy, who had been the only occupant of the place on that occasion and who had given his name as Ah Fung, was surprised by the sudden entrance of man and dog in the act of spreading coal dust with his fingers upon a portion of the paved floor. He came to his feet with a leap and confronted Kerry. The spaniel began to scratch feverishly upon the spot where the coal dust had been artificially spread. Kerry’s eyes gleamed like steel. He shot out his hand and grasped the Chinaman by his long hair. “Open that trap,” he said, “or I’ll break you in half!”

Ah Fung’s oblique eyes regarded him with an expression difficult to analyze, but partly it was murder. He made no attempt to obey the order. Meanwhile the dog, whining and scratching furiously, had exposed the greater part of a stone slab somewhat larger than those adjoining it, and having a large crack or fissure in one end.

“For the last time,” said Kerry, drawing the man’s head back so that his breath began to whistle through his nostrils, “open that trap.”

As he spoke he released Ah Fung, and Ah Fung made one wild leap towards the stairs. Kerry’s fist caught him behind the ear as he sprang, and he went down like a dead man upon a small heap of coal which filled the angle of the cellar.

Breathing rapidly and having his teeth so tightly clenched that his maxillary muscles protruded lumpishly, Kerry stood looking at the fallen man. But Ah Fung did not move. The dog had ceased to scratch, and now stood uttering short staccato barks and looking up at the Chief Inspector. Otherwise there was no sound in the house, above or below.

Kerry stooped, and with his handkerchief scrupulously dusted the stone slab. The spaniel, resentment forgotten, danced excitedly beside him and barked continuously.

“There’s some sort of hook to fit in that crack,” muttered Kerry.

He began to hunt about among the debris which littered one end of the cellar, testing fragment after fragment, but failing to find any piece of scrap to suit his purpose. By sheer perseverance rather than by any process of reasoning, he finally hit upon the piece of bent wire which was the key to this door of Sin Sin Wa’s drug warehouse.

One short exclamation of triumph he muttered at the moment that his glance rested upon it, and five seconds later he had the trapdoor open and was peering down into the narrow pit in which wooden steps rested. The spaniel began to bark wildly, whereupon Kerry grasped him, tucked him under his arm, and ran up to the room above, where he deposited the furiously wriggling animal. He stepped quickly back again and closed the upper door. By this act he plunged the cellar into complete darkness, and accordingly he took out from the pocket of his rain-drenched overall the electric torch which he always carried. Directing its ray downwards into the cellar, he perceived Ah Fung move and toss his hand above his head. He also detected a faint rattling sound.

“Ah!” said Kerry.

He descended, and stooping over the unconscious man extracted from the pocket of his baggy blue trousers four keys upon a ring. At these Kerry stared eagerly. Two of them belonged to yale locks; the third was a simple English barrel-key, which probably fitted a padlock; but the fourth was large and complicated.

“Looks like the key of a jail,” he said aloud.

He spoke with unconscious prescience. This was the key of the door of the vault. Removing his overall, Kerry laid it with his cane upon the scrap-heap, then he climbed down the ladder and found himself in the mouth of that low timbered tunnel, like a trenchwork, which owed its existence to the cunning craftsmanship of Sin Sin Wa. Stooping uncomfortably, he made his way along the passage until the massive door confronted him. He was in no doubt as to which key to employ; his mental condition was such that he was indifferent to the dangers which probably lay before him.

The well-oiled lock operated smoothly. Kerry pushed the door open and stepped briskly into the vault.

His movements, from the moment that he had opened the trap, had been swift and as nearly noiseless as the difficulties of the task had permitted. Nevertheless, they had not been so silent as to escape the attention of the preternaturally acute Sin Sin Wa. Kerry found the place occupied only by the aged Sam Tuk. A bright fire burned in the stove, and a ship’s lantern stood upon the counter. Dense chemical fumes rendered the air difficult to breathe; but the shelves, once laden with the largest illicit collection of drugs in London, were bare.

Kerry’s fierce eyes moved right and left; his jaws worked automatically. Sam Tuk sat motionless, his hands concealed in his sleeves, bending decrepitly forward in his chair. Then:

“Hi! Guy Fawkes!” rapped Kerry, striding forward “Who’s been letting off fire-works?”

Sam Tuk nodded senilely, but spoke not a word.

Kerry stooped and stared into the heart of the fire. A dense coat of white ash lay upon the embers. He grasped the shoulder of the aged Chinaman, and pushed him back so that he could look into the bleared eyes behind the owlish spectacles.

“Been cleaning up the ‘evidence,’ eh?” he shouted. “This joint stinks of opium and a score of other dopes. Where are the gang?” He shook the yielding, ancient frame. “Where’s the smart with one eye?”

But Sam Tuk, merely nodded, and as Kerry released his hold sank forward again, nodding incessantly.

“H’m, you’re a hard case,” said the Chief Inspector. “A couple of witnesses like you and the jury would retire to Bedlam!”

He stood glaring fiercely at the limp frame of the old Chinaman, and as he glared his expression changed. Lying on the dirty floor not a yard from Sam Tuk’s feet was a ball of leaf opium!

“Ha!” exclaimed Kerry, and he stooped to pick it up.

As he did so, with a lightning movement of which the most astute observer could never have supposed him capable, Sam Tuk, whipped a loaded rubber tube from his sleeve and struck Kerry a shrewd blow across the back of the skull.

The Chief Inspector, without word or cry, collapsed upon his knees, and then fell gently forward–forward–and toppled face downwards before his assailant. His bowler fell off and rolled across the dirty floor.

Sam Tuk sank deeply into his chair, and his toothless jaws worked convulsively. The skinny hand which clutched the piece of tubing twitched and shook, so that the primitive deadly weapon fell from its wielder’s grasp.

Silently, that set of empty shelves nearest to the inner wall of the vault slid open, and Sin Sin Wa came out. He, too, carried his hands tucked in his sleeves, and his yellow, pock-marked face wore its eternal smile.

“Well done,” he crooned softly in Chinese. “Well done, bald father of wisdom. The dogs draw near, but the old fox sleeps not.”

CHAPTER XXXVII

SETON PASHA REPORTS

At about the time that the fearless Chief Inspector was entering the establishment of Sam Tuk Seton Pasha was reporting to Lord Wrexborough in Whitehall. His nautical disguise had served its purpose, and he had now finally abandoned it, recognizing that he had to deal with a criminal of genius to whom disguise merely afforded matter for amusement.

In his proper person, as Greville Seton, he afforded a marked contrast to that John Smiles, seaman, who had sat in a top room in Limehouse with Chief Inspector Kerry. And although he had to report failure, the grim, bronzed face and bright grey eyes must have inspired in the heart of any thoughtful observer confidence in ultimate success. Lord Wrexborough, silver-haired, florid and dignified, sat before a vast table laden with neatly arranged dispatch-boxes, books, documents tied with red tape, and the other impressive impedimenta which characterize the table of a Secretary of State. Quentin Gray, unable to conceal his condition of nervous excitement, stared from a window down into Whitehall.

“I take it, then, Seton,” Lord Wrexborough was saying, “that in your opinion–although perhaps it is somewhat hastily formed–there is and has been no connivance between officials and receivers of drugs?”

“That is my opinion, sir. The traffic has gradually and ingeniously been ‘ringed’ by a wealthy group. Smaller dealers have been bought out or driven out, and today I believe it would be difficult, if not impossible, to obtain opium, cocaine, or veronal illicitly anywhere in London. Kazmah and Company had the available stock cornered. Of course, now that they are out of business, no doubt others will step in. It is a trade that can never be suppressed under existing laws.”

“I see, I see,” muttered Lord Wrexborough, adjusting his pince-nez. “You also believe that Kazmah and Company are in hiding within what you term”–he consulted a written page–“the ‘Causeway area’? And you believe that the man called Sin Sin Wa is the head of the organization?”

“I believe the late Sir Lucien Pyne was the actual head of the group,” said Seton bluntly. “But Sin Sin Wa is the acting head. In view of his physical peculiarities, I don’t quite see how he’s going to escape us, either, sir. His wife has a fighting chance, and as for Mohammed el-Kazmah, he might sail for anywhere tomorrow, and we should never know. You see, we have no description of the man.”

“His passports?” murmured Lord Wrexborough.

Seton Pasha smiled grimly.

“Not an insurmountable difficulty, sir,” he replied, “but Sin Sin Wa is a marked man. He has the longest and thickest pigtail which I ever saw on a human scalp. I take it he is a Southerner of the old school; therefore, he won’t cut it off. He has also only one eye, and while there are many one-eyed Chinamen, there are few one-eyed Chinamen who possess pigtails like a battleship’s hawser. Furthermore, he travels with a talking raven, and I’ll swear he won’t leave it behind. On the other hand, he is endowed with an amount of craft which comes very near to genius.”

“And–Mrs. Monte Irvin?”

Quentin Gray turned suddenly, and his boyish face was very pale.

“Seton, Seton!” he said. “For God’s sake tell me the truth! Do you think–“

He stopped, choking emotionally. Seton Pasha watched him with that cool, confident stare which could either soothe or irritate; and:

“She was alive this morning, Gray,” he replied quietly, “we heard her. You may take it from me that they will offer her no violence. I shall say no more.”

Lord Wrexborough cleared his throat and took up a document from the table.

“Your remark raises another point, Quentin,” he said sternly, “which has to be settled today. Your appointment to Cairo was confirmed this morning. You sail on Tuesday.”

Quentin Gray turned again abruptly and stared out of the window.

“You’re practically kicking me out, sir,” he said. “I don’t know what I’ve done.”

“You have done nothing,” replied Lord Wrexborough “which an honorable man may not do. But in common with many others similarly circumstanced, you seem inclined, now that your military duties are at an end, to regard life as a sort of perpetual ‘leave.’ I speak frankly before Seton because I know that he agrees with me. My friend the Foreign Secretary has generously offered you an appointment which opens up a career that should not–I repeat, that should not prove less successful than his own.”

Gray turned, and his face had flushed deeply.

“I know that Margaret has been scaring you about Rita Irvin,” he said, “but on my word, sir, there was no need to do it.”

He met Seton Pasha’s cool regard, and:

“Margaret’s one of the best,” he added. “I know you agree with me?”

A faint suggestion of added color came into Seton’s tanned cheeks.

“I do, Gray,” he answered quietly. “I believe you are good enough to look upon me as a real friend; therefore allow me to add my advice, for what it is worth, to that of Lord Wrexborough and your cousin: take the Egyptian appointment. I know where it will lead. You can do no good by remaining in London; and when we find Mrs. Irvin your presence would be an embarrassment to the unhappy man who waits for news at Princes Gate. I am frank, but it’s my way.”

He held out his hand, smiling. Quentin Gray’s mercurial complexion was changing again, but:

“Good old Seton!” he said, rather huskily, and gripped the outstretched hand. “For Irvin’s sake, save her!”

He turned to his father.

“Thank you, sir,” he added, “you are always right. I shall be ready on Tuesday. I suppose you are off again, Seton?”

“I am,” was the reply. “Chief Inspector Kerry is moving heaven and earth to find the Kazmah establishment, and I don’t want to come in a poor second.”

Lord Wrexborough cleared his throat and turned in the padded revolving chair.

“Honestly, Seton,” he said, “what do you think of your chance of success?”

Seton Pasha smiled grimly.

“Many ascribe success to wit,” he replied, “and failure to bad luck; but the Arab says ‘Kismet.'”

CHAPTER XXXVIII

THE SONG OF SIN SIN WA

Mrs. Sin, aroused by her husband from the deep opium sleep, came out into the fume-laden vault. Her dyed hair was disarranged, and her dark eyes stared glassily before her; but even in this half-drugged state she bore herself with the lithe carriage of a dancer, swinging her hips lazily and pointing the toes of her high-heeled slippers.

“Awake, my wife,” crooned Sin Sin Wa. “Only a fool seeks the black smoke when the jackals sit in a ring “

Mrs. Sin gave him a glance of smiling contempt–a glance which, passing him, rested finally upon the prone body of Chief Inspector Kerry lying stretched upon the floor before the stove. Her pupils contracted to mere pin-points and then dilated blackly. She recoiled a step, fighting with the stupor which her ill-timed indulgence had left behind.

At this moment Kerry groaned loudly, tossed his arm out with a convulsive movement, and rolled over on to his side, drawing up his knees.

The eye of Sin Sin Wa gleamed strangely, but he did not move, and Sam Tuk who sat huddled in his chair where his feet almost touched the fallen man, stirred never a muscle. But Mrs. Sin, who still moved in a semi-phantasmagoric world, swiftly raised the hem of her kimona, affording a glimpse of a shapely silk-clad limb. From a sheath attached to her garter she drew a thin stilletto. Curiously feline, she crouched, as if about to spring.

Sin Sin Wa extended his hand, grasping his wife’s wrist.

“No, woman of indifferent intelligence,” he said in his queer sibilant language, “since when has murder gone unpunished in these British dominions?”

Mrs. Sin snatched her wrist from his grasp, falling back wild-eyed.

“Yellow ape! yellow ape!” she said hoarsely. “One more does not matter –now.”

“One more?” crooned Sin Sin Wa, glancing curiously at Kerry.

“They are here! We are trapped!”

“No, no,” said Sin Sin Wa. “He is a brave man; he comes alone.”

He paused, and then suddenly resumed in pidgin English:

“You likee killa him, eh?”

Perhaps unconscious that she did so, Mrs. Sin replied also in English:

“No, I am mad. Let me think, old fool!”

She dropped the stiletto and raised her hand dazedly to her brow.

“You gotchee tired of knifee chop, eh?” murmured Sin Sin Wa.

Mrs. Sin clenched her hands, holding them rigidly against her hips; and, nostrils dilated, she stared at the smiling Chinaman.

“What do you mean?” she demanded.

Sin Sin Wa performed his curious oriental shrug.

“You putta topside pidgin on Sir Lucy alla lightee,” he murmured. “Givee him hell alla velly proper.”

The pupils of the woman’s eyes contracted again, and remained so. She laughed hoarsely and tossed her head.

“Who told you that?” she asked contemptuously. “It was the doll-woman who killed him–I have said so.”

“You tella me so–hoi, hoi! But old Sin Sin Wa catchee wonder. Lo!”– he extended a yellow forefinger, pointing at his wife–“Mrs. Sin make him catchee die! No bhobbery, no palaber. Sin Sin Wa gotchee you sized up allee timee.”

Mrs. Sin snapped her fingers under his nose then stooped, picked up the stiletto, and swiftly restored it to its sheath. Her hands resting upon her hips, she came forward, until her dark evil face almost touched the yellow, smiling face of Sin Sin Wa.

“Listen, old fool,” she said in a low, husky voice; “I have done with you, ape-man, for good! Yes! I killed Lucy, I killed him! He belonged to me–until that pink and white thing took him away. I am glad I killed him. If I cannot have him neither can she. But I was mad all the same.”

She glanced down at Kerry, and:

“Tie him up,” she directed, “and send him to sleep. And understand, Sin, we’ve shared out for the last time–You go your way and I go mine. No stinking Yellow River for me. New York is good enough until it’s safe to go to Buenos Ayres.”

“Smartest leg in Buenos Ayres,” croaked the raven from his wicker cage, which was set upon the counter.

Sin Sin Wa regarded him smilingly.

“Yes, yes, my little friend,” he crooned in Chinese, while Tling-a-Ling rattled ghostly castanets. “In Ho-Nan they will say that you are a devil and I am a wizard. That which is unknown is always thought to be magical, my Tling-a-Ling.”

Mrs. Sin, who was rapidly throwing off the effects of opium and recovering her normal self-confident personality, glanced at her husband scornfully.

“Tell me,” she said, “what has happened? How did he come here?”

“Blinga filly doggy,” murmured Sin Sin Wa. “Knockee Ah Fung on him head and comee down here, lo. Ah Fung allee lightee now–topside. Chasee filly doggy. Allee velly proper. No bhobbery.”

“Talk less and act more,” said Mrs. Sin. “Tie him up, and if you must talk, talk Chinese. Tie him up.”

She pointed to Kerry. Sin Sin Wa tucked his hands into his sleeves and shuffled towards the masked door communicating with the inner room.

“Only by intelligent speech are we distinguished from the other animals,” he murmured in Chinese.

Entering the inner room, he began to extricate a long piece of thin rope from amid a tangle of other materials with which it was complicated. Mrs. Sin stood looking down at the fallen man. Neither Kerry nor Sam Tuk gave the slightest evidence of life. And as Sin Sin Wa disentangled yard upon yard of rope from the bundle on the floor by the bed where Rita Irvin lay in her long troubled sleep, he crooned a queer song. It was in the Ho-Nan dialect and intelligible to himself alone.

“Shoa, the evil woman (he chanted), the woman of many strange loves. . . .
Shoa, the ghoul. . . .
Lo, the Yellow River leaps forth from the nostrils of the mountain god. . . .
Shoa, the betrayer of men. . . .
Blood is on her brow.
Lo, the betrayer is betrayed. Death sits at her elbow. See, the Yellow River bears a corpse upon its tide. . . Dead men hear her secret.
Shoa, the ghoul. . . .
Shoa, the evil woman. Death sits at her elbow. Black, the vultures flock about her. . . . Lo, the Yellow River leaps forth from the nostrils of the mountain god.”

Meanwhile Kerry, lying motionless at the feet of Sam Tuk was doing some hard and rapid thinking. He had recovered consciousness a few moments before Mrs. Sin had come into the vault from the inner room. There were those, Seton Pasha among them, who would have regarded the groan and the convulsive movements of Kerry’s body with keen suspicion. And because the Chief Inspector suffered from no illusions respecting the genius of Sin Sin Wa, the apparent failure of the one- eyed Chinaman to recognize these preparations for attack nonplussed the Chief Inspector. His outstanding vice as an investigator was the directness of his own methods and of his mental outlook, so that he frequently experienced great difficulty in penetrating to the motives of a tortuous brain such as that of Sin Sin Wa.

That Sin Sin Wa thought him to be still unconscious he did not believe. He was confident that his tactics had deceived the Jewess, but he entertained an almost superstitious respect for the cleverness of the Chinaman. The trick with the ball of leaf opium was painfully fresh in his memory.

Kerry, in common with many members of the Criminal Investigation Department, rarely carried firearms. He was a man with a profound belief in his bare hands–aided when necessary by his agile feet. At the moment that Sin Sin Wa had checked the woman’s murderous and half insane outburst Kerry had been contemplating attack. The sudden change of language on the part of the Chinaman had arrested him in the act; and, realizing that he was listening to a confession which placed the hangman’s rope about the neck of Mrs. Sin, he lay still and wondered.

Why had Sin Sin Wa forced his wife to betray herself? To clear Mareno? To clear Mrs. Irvin–or to save his own skin?

It was a frightful puzzle for Kerry. Then–where was Kazmah? That Mrs. Irvin, probably in a drugged condition, lay somewhere in that mysterious inner room Kerry felt fairly sure. His maltreated skull was humming like a bee-hive and aching intensely, but the man was tough as men are made, and he could not only think clearly, but was capable of swift and dangerous action.

He believed that he could tackle the Chinaman with fair prospects of success; and women, however murderous, he habitually disregarded as adversaries. But the mummy-like, deceptive Sam Tuk was not negligible, and Kazmah remained an unknown quantity.

From under that protective arm, cast across his face, Kerry’s fierce eyes peered out across the dirty floor. Then quickly he shut his eyes again.

Sin Sin Wa, crooning his strange song, came in carrying a coil of rope –and a Mauser pistol!

“P’licemanee gotchee catchee sleepee,” he murmured, “or maybe he catchee die!”

He tossed the rope to his wife, who stood silent tapping the floor with one slim restless foot.

“Number one top-side tie up,” he crooned. “Sin Sin Wa watchee withum gun!”

Kerry lay like a dead man; for in the Chinaman’s voice were menace and warning.

CHAPTER XXXIX

THE EMPTY WHARF

The suspected area of Limehouse was closely invested as any fortress of old when Seton Pasha once more found himself approaching that painfully familiar neighborhood. He had spoken to several pickets, and had gathered no news of interest, except that none of them had seen Chief Inspector Kerry since some time shortly before dusk. Seton, newly from more genial climes, shivered as he contemplated the misty, rain-swept streets, deserted and but dimly lighted by an occasional lamp. The hooting of a steam siren on the river seemed to be in harmony with the prevailing gloom, and the most confirmed optimist must have suffered depression amid those surroundings.

He had no definite plan of action. Every line of inquiry hitherto followed had led to nothing but disappointment. With most of the details concerning the elaborate organization of the Kazmah group either gathered or in sight, the whereabouts of the surviving members remained a profound mystery. From the Chinese no information could be obtained. Distrust of the police resides deep within the Chinese heart; for the Chinaman, and not unjustly, regards the police as ever ready to accuse him and ever unwilling to defend him; knows himself for a pariah capable of the worst crimes, and who may therefore be robbed, beaten and even murdered by his white neighbors with impunity. But when the police seek information from Chinatown, Chinatown takes its revenge–and is silent.

Out on the river, above and below Limehouse, patrols watched for signals from the Asiatic quarter, and from a carefully selected spot on the Surrey side George Martin watched also. Not even the lure of a neighboring tavern could draw him from his post. Hour after hour he waited patiently–for Sin Sin Wa paid fair prices, and tonight he bought neither opium nor cocaine, but liberty.

Seton Pasha, passing from point to point, and nowhere receiving news of Kerry, began to experience a certain anxiety respecting the safety of the intrepid Chief Inspector. His mind filled with troubled conjectures, he passed the house formerly occupied by the one-eyed Chinaman–where he found Detective-Sergeant Coombes on duty and very much on the alert–and followed the bank of the Thames in the direction of Limehouse Basin. The narrow, ill-lighted street was quite deserted. Bad weather and the presence of many police had driven the Asiatic inhabitants indoors. But from the river and the docks arose the incessant din of industry. Whistles shrieked and machinery clanked, and sometimes remotely came the sound of human voices.

Musing upon the sordid mystery which seems to underlie the whole of this dingy quarter, Seton pursued his way, crossing inlets and circling around basins dimly divined, turning to the right into a lane flanked by high eyeless walls, and again to the left, finally to emerge nearly opposite a dilapidated gateway giving access to a small wharf.

All unconsciously, he was traversing the same route as that recently pursued by the fugitive Sin Sin Wa; but now he paused, staring at the empty wharf. The annexed building, a mere shell, had not escaped examination by the search party, and it was with no very definite purpose in view that Seton pushed open the rickety gate. Doubtless Kismet, of which the Arabs speak, dictated that he should do so.

The tide was high, and the water whispered ghostly under the pile- supported structure. Seton experienced a new sense of chill which did not seem to be entirely physical as he stared out at the gloomy river prospect and listened to the uncanny whisperings of the tide. He was about to turn back when another sound attracted his attention. A dog was whimpering somewhere near him.

At first he was disposed to believe that the sound was due to some other cause, for the deserted wharf was not a likely spot in which to find a dog, but when to the faint whimpering there was added a scratching sound, Seton’s last doubts vanished.

“It’s a dog,” he said, “a small dog.”

Like Kerry, he always carried an electric pocket-lamp, and now he directed its rays into the interior of the building.

A tiny spaniel, whining excitedly, was engaged in scratching with its paws upon the dirty floor as though determined to dig its way through. As the light shone upon it the dog crouched affrightedly, and, glancing in Seton’s direction, revealed its teeth. He saw that it was covered with mud from head to tail, presenting a most woe-begone appearance, and the mystery of its presence there came home to him forcibly.

It was a toy spaniel of a breed very popular among ladies of fashion, and to its collar was still attached a tattered and muddy fragment of ribbon.

The little animal crouched in a manner which unmistakably pointed to the fact that it apprehended ill-treatment, but these personal fears had only a secondary place in its mind, and with one eye on the intruder it continued to scratch madly at the floor.

Seton acted promptly. He snapped off the light, and, replacing the lamp in his pocket, stepped into the building and dropped down upon his knees beside the dog. He next lay prone, and having rapidly cleared a space with his sleeve of some of the dirt which coated it, he applied his ear to the floor.

In spite of that iron control which habitually he imposed upon himself, he became aware of the fact that his heart was beating rapidly. He had learned at Leman Street that Kerry had brought Mrs. Irvin’s dog from Prince’s Gate to aid in the search for the missing woman. He did not doubt that this was the dog which snarled and scratched excitedly beside him. Dimly he divined something of the truth. Kerry had fallen into the hands of the gang, but the dog, evidently not without difficulty, had escaped. What lay below the wharf?

Holding his breath, he crouched, listening; but not a sound could he detect.

“There’s nothing here, old chap,” he said to the dog.

Responsive to the friendly tone, the little animal began barking loudly with high staccato notes, which must have been audible on the Surrey shore.

Seton was profoundly mystified by the animal’s behavior. He had personally searched every foot of this particular building, and was confident that it afforded no hiding-place. The behavior of the dog, however, was susceptible of only one explanation; and Seton recognizing that the clue to the mystery lay somewhere within this ramshackle building, became seized with a conviction that he was being watched.

Standing upright, he paused for a moment, irresolute, thinking that he had detected a muffled shriek. But the riverside noises were misleading and his imagination was on fire.

That almost superstitious respect for the powers of Sin Sin Wa, which had led Chief Inspector Kerry to look upon the Chinaman as a being more than humanly endowed, began to take possession of Seton Pasha. He regretted having entered the place so overtly, he regretted having shown a light. Keen eyes, vigilant, regarded him. It was perhaps a delusion, bred of the mournful night sounds, the gloom, and the uncanny resourcefulness, already proven, of the Kazmah group. But it operated powerfully.

Theories, wild, improbable, flocked to his mind. The great dope cache lay beneath his feet–and there must be some hidden entrance to it which had escaped the attention of the search-party. This in itself was not improbable, since they had devoted no more time to this building than to any other in the vicinity. That wild cry in the night which had struck so mournful a chill to the hearts of the watchers on the river had seemed to come out of the void of the blackness, had given but slight clue to the location of the place of captivity. Indeed, they could only surmise that it had been uttered by the missing woman. Yet in their hearts neither had doubted it.

He determined to cause the place to be searched again, as secretly as possible; he determined to set so close a guard over it and over its approaches that none could enter or leave unobserved.

Yet Kismet, in whose omnipotence he more than half believed, had ordained otherwise; for man is merely an instrument in the hand of Fate.

CHAPTER XL

COIL OF THE PIGTAIL

The inner room was in darkness and the fume-laden air almost unbreathable. A dull and regular moaning sound proceeded from the corner where the bed was situated, but of the contents of the place and of its other occupant or occupants Kerry had no more than a hazy idea. His imagination supplied those details which he had failed to observe. Mrs. Monte Irvin, in a dying condition, lay upon the bed, and someone or some thing crouched on the divan behind Kerry as he lay stretched upon the matting-covered floor. His wrists, tied behind him, gave him great pain; and since his ankles were also fastened and the end of the rope drawn taut and attached to that binding his wrists, he was rendered absolutely helpless. For one of his fiery temperament this physical impotence was maddening, and because his own handkerchief had been tied tightly around his head so as to secure between his teeth a wooden stopper of considerable size which possessed an unpleasant chemical taste and smell, even speech was denied him.

How long he had lain thus he had no means of judging accurately; but hours–long, maddening hours–seemed to have passed since, with the muzzle of Sin Sin Wa’s Mauser pressed coldly to his ear, he had submitted willy-nilly to the adroit manipulations of Mrs. Sin. At first he had believed, in his confirmed masculine vanity, that it would be a simple matter to extricate himself from the fastenings made by a woman; but when, rolling him sideways, she had drawn back his heels and run the loose end of the line through the loop formed by the lashing of his wrists behind him, he had recognized a Chinese training, and had resigned himself to the inevitable. The wooden gag was a sore trial, and if it had not broken his spirit it had nearly caused him to break an artery in his impotent fury.

Into the darkened inner chamber Sin Sin Wa had dragged him, and there Kerry had lain ever since, listening to the various sounds of the place, to the coarse voice, often raised in anger, of the Cuban- Jewess, to the crooning tones of the imperturbable Chinaman. The incessant moaning of the woman on the bed sometimes became mingled with another sound more remote, which Kerry for long failed to identify; but ultimately he concluded it to be occasioned by the tide flowing under the wharf. The raven was silent, because, imprisoned in his wicker cage, he had been placed in some dark spot below the counter. Very dimly from time to time a steam siren might be heard upon the river, and once the thudding of a screw-propeller told of the passage of a large vessel along Limehouse Reach.

In the eyes of Mrs. Sin Kerry had read menace, and for all their dark beauty they had reminded him of the eyes of a cornered rat. Beneath the contemptuous nonchalance which she flaunted he read terror and remorse, and a foreboding of doom–panic ill repressed, which made her dangerous as any beast at bay. The attitude of the Chinaman was more puzzling. He seemed to bear the Chief Inspector no personal animosity, and indeed, in his glittering eye, Kerry had detected a sort of mysterious light of understanding which was almost mirthful, but which bore no relation to Sin Sin Wa’s perpetual smile. Kerry’s respect for the one-eyed Chinaman had increased rather than diminished upon closer acquaintance. Underlying his urbanity he failed to trace any symptom of apprehension. This Sin Sin Wa, accomplice of a murderess self- confessed, evident head of a drug syndicate which had led to the establishment of a Home office inquiry–this badly “wanted” man, whose last hiding-place, whose keep, was closely invested by the agents of the law, was the same Sin Sin Wa who had smilingly extended his wrists, inviting the manacles, when Kerry had first made his acquaintance under circumstances legally very different.

Sometimes Kerry could hear him singing his weird crooning song, and twice Mrs. Sin had shrieked blasphemous execrations at him because of it. But why should Sin Sin Wa sing? What hope had he of escape? In the case of any other criminal Kerry would have answered “None,” but the ease with which this one-eyed singing Chinaman had departed from his abode under the very noses of four detectives had shaken the Chief Inspector’s confidence in the efficiency of ordinary police methods where this Chinese conjurer was concerned. A man who could convert an elaborate opium house into a dirty ruin in so short a time, too, was capable of other miraculous feats, and it would not have surprised Kerry to learn that Sin Sin Wa, at a moment’s notice, could disguise himself as a chest of tea, or pass invisible through solid walls.

For evidence that Seton Pasha or any of the men from Scotland Yard had penetrated to the secret of Sam Tuk’s cellar Kerry listened in vain. What was about to happen he could not imagine, nor if his life was to be spared. In the confession so curiously extorted from Mrs. Sin by her husband he perceived a clue to this and other mysteries, but strove in vain to disentangle it from the many maddening complexities of the case.

So he mused, wearily, listening to the moaning of his fellow captive, and wondering, since no sign of life came thence, why he imagined another presence in the stuffy room or the presence of someone or of some thing on the divan behind him. And in upon these dreary musings broke an altercation between Mrs. Sin and her husband.

“Keep the blasted thing covered up!” she cried hoarsely.

“Tling-a-Ling wantchee catchee bleathee sometime,” crooned Sin Sin Wa.

“Hello, hello!” croaked the raven drowsily. “Smartest–smartest– smartest leg”

“You catchee sleepee, Tling-a-Ling,” murmured the Chinaman. “Mrs. Sin no likee you palaber, lo!”

“Burn it!” cried the woman, “burn the one-eyed horror!”

But when, carrying a lighted lantern, Sin Sin Wa presently came into the inner room, he smiled as imperturbably as ever, and was unmoved so far as external evidence showed.

Sin Sin Wa set the lantern upon a Moorish coffee-table which once had stood beside the divan in Mrs. Sin’s sanctum at the House of a Hundred Raptures. A significant glance–its significance an acute puzzle to the recipient–he cast upon Chief Inspector Kerry. His hands tucked in the loose sleeves of his blouse, he stood looking down at the woman who lay moaning on the bed; and:

“Tchee, tchee,” he crooned softly, “you hate no catchee die, my beautiful. You sniffee plenty too muchee ‘white snow,’ hoi, hoi! Velly bad woman tly makee you catchee die, but Sin Sin Wa no hate got for killee chop. Topside pidgin no good enough, lo!”

His thick, extraordinary long pigtail hanging down his back and gleaming in the rays of the lantern, he stood, head bowed, watching Rita Irvin. Because of his position on the floor, Mrs. Irvin was invisible from Kerry’s point of view, but she continued to moan incessantly, and he knew that she must be unconscious of the Chinaman’s scrutiny.

“Hurry, old fool!” came Mrs. Sin’s harsh voice from the outer room. “In ten minutes Ah Fung will give the signal. Is she dead yet–the doll-woman?”

“She hate no catchee die,” murmured Sin Sin Wa, “She still vella beautiful–tchee!”

It was at the moment that he spoke these words that Seton Pasha entered the empty building above and found the spaniel scratching at the paved floor. So that, as Sin Sin Wa stood looking down at the wan face of the unfortunate woman who refused to die, the dog above, excited by Seton’s presence, ceased to whine and scratch and began to bark.

Faintly to the vault the sound of the high-pitched barking penetrated.

Kerry tensed his muscles and groaned impotently feeling his heart beating like a hammer in his breast. Complete silence reigned in the outer room. Sin Sin Wa never stirred. Again the dog barked, then:

“Hello, hello!” shrieked the raven shrilly. “Number one p’lice chop, lo! Sin Sin Wa! Sin Sin Wa!”

There came a fierce exclamation, the sound of something being hastily overturned, of a scuffle, and:

“Sin–Sin–Wa!” croaked the raven feebly.

The words ended in a screeching cry, which was followed by a sound of wildly beating wings. Sin Sin Wa, hands tucked in sleeves, turned and walked from the inner room, closing the sliding door behind him with a movement of his shoulder.

Resting against the empty shelves, he stood and surveyed the scene in the vault.

Mrs. Sin, who had been kneeling beside the wicker cage, which was upset, was in the act of standing upright. At her feet, and not far from the motionless form of old Sam Tuk who sat like a dummy figure in his chair before the stove, lay a palpitating mass of black feathers. Other detached feathers were sprinkled about the floor. Feebly the raven’s wings beat the ground once, twice–and were still.

Sin Sin Wa uttered one sibilant word, withdrew his hands from his sleeves, and, stepping around the end of the counter, dropped upon his knees beside the raven. He touched it with long yellow fingers, then raised it and stared into the solitary eye, now glazed and sightless as its fellow. The smile had gone from the face of Sin Sin Wa.

“My Tling-a-Ling!” he moaned in his native mandarin tongue. “Speak to me, my little black friend!”

A bead of blood, like a ruby, dropped from the raven’s beak. Sin Sin Wa bowed his head and knelt awhile in silence; then, standing up, he reverently laid the poor bedraggled body upon a chest. He turned and looked at his wife.

Hands on hips, she confronted him, breathing rapidly, and her glance of contempt swept him up and down.

“I’ve often threatened to do it,” she said in English. “Now I’ve done it. They’re on the wharf. We’re trapped–thanks to that black, squalling horror!”

“Tchee, tchee!” hissed Sin Sin Wa.

His gleaming eye fixed upon the woman unblinkingly, he began very deliberately to roll up his loose sleeves. She watched him, contempt in her glance, but her expression changed subtly, and her dark eyes grew narrowed. She looked rapidly towards Sam Tuk but Sam Tuk never stirred.

“Old fool!” she cried at Sin Sin Wa. “What are you doing?”

But Sin Sin Wa, his sleeves rolled up above his yellow, sinewy forearms, now tossed his pigtail, serpentine, across his shoulder and touched it with his fingers, an odd, caressing movement.

“Ho!” laughed Mrs. Sin in her deep scoffing fashion, “it is for me you make all this bhobbery, eh? It is me you are going to chastise, my dear?”

She flung back her head, snapping her fingers before the silent Chinaman. He watched her, and slowly–slowly–he began to crouch, lower and lower, but always that unblinking regard remained fixed upon the face of Mrs. Sin.

The woman laughed again, more loudly. Bending her lithe body forward in mocking mimicry, she snapped her fingers, once–again–and again under Sin Sin Wa’s nose. Then:

“Do you think, you blasted yellow ape, that you can frighten me?” she screamed, a swift flame of wrath lighting up her dark face.

In a flash she had raised the kimona and had the stiletto in her hand. But, even swifter than she, Sin Sin Wa sprang. . .

Once, twice she struck at him, and blood streamed from his left shoulder. But the pigtail, like an executioner’s rope, was about the woman’s throat. She uttered one smothered shriek, dropping the knife, and then was silent. . .

Her dyed hair escaped from its fastenings and descended, a ruddy torrent, about her as she writhed, silent, horrible, in the death-coil of the pigtail.

Rigidly, at arms-length, he held her, moment after moment, immovable, implacable; and when he read death in her empurpled face, a miraculous thing happened.

The “blind” eye of Sin Sin Wa opened!

A husky rattle told of the end, and he dropped the woman’s body from his steely grip, disengaging the pigtail with a swift movement of his head. Opening and closing his yellow fingers to restore circulation, he stood looking down at her. He spat upon the floor at her feet.

Then, turning, he held out his arms and confronted Sam Tuk.

“Was it well done, bald father of wisdom?” he demanded hoarsely.

But old Sam Tuk seated lumpish in his chair like some grotesque idol before whom a human sacrifice has been offered up, stirred not. The length of loaded tubing with which he had struck Kerry lay beside him where it had fallen from his nerveless hand. And the two oblique, beady eyes of Sin Sin Wa, watching, grew dim. Step by step he approached the old Chinaman, stooped, touched him, then knelt and laid his head upon the thin knees.

“Old father,” he murmured, “Old bald father who knew so much. Tonight you know all.”

For Sam Tuk was no more. At what moment he had died, whether in the excitement of striking Kerry or later, no man could have presumed to say, since, save by an occasional nod of his head, he had often simulated death in life–he who was so old that he was known as “The Father of Chinatown.”

Standing upright, Sin Sin Wa looked from the dead man to the dead raven. Then, tenderly raising poor Tling-a-Ling, he laid the great dishevelled bird–a weird offering–upon the knees of Sam Tuk.

“Take him with you where you travel tonight, my father,” he said. “He, too, was faithful.”

A cheap German clock commenced a muted clangor, for the little hammer was muffled.

Sin Sin Wa walked slowly across to the counter. Taking up the gleaming joss, he unscrewed its pedestal. Then, returning to the spot where Mrs. Sin lay, he coolly detached a leather wallet which she wore beneath her dress fastened to a girdle. Next he removed her rings, her bangles and other ornaments. He secreted all in the interior of the joss–his treasure-chest. He raised his hands and began to unplait his long pigtail, which, like his “blind” eye, was camouflage–a false queue attached to his own hair, which he wore but slightly longer than some Europeans and many Americans. With a small pair of scissors he clipped off his long, snake-like moustaches. . . .

CHAPTER XLI

THE FINDING OF KAZMAH

At a point just above the sweep of Limehouse Reach a watchful river police patrol observed a moving speck of light on the right bank of the Thames. As if in answer to the signal there came a few moments later a second moving speck at a point not far above the district once notorious in its possession of Ratcliff Highway. A third light answered from the Surrey bank, and a fourth shone out yet higher up and on the opposite side of the Thames.

The tide had just turned. As Chief Inspector Kerry had once observed, “there are no pleasure parties punting about that stretch,” and, consequently, when George Martin tumbled into his skiff on the Surrey shore and began lustily to pull up stream, he was observed almost immediately by the River Police.

Pulling hard against the stream, it took him a long time to reach his destination–stone stairs near the point from which the second light had been shown. Rain had ceased and the mist had cleared shortly after dusk, as often happens at this time of year, and because the night was comparatively clear the pursuing boats had to be handled with care.

George did not disembark at the stone steps, but after waiting there for some time he began to drop down on the tide, keeping close inshore.

“He knows we’ve spotted him,” said Sergeant Coombes, who was in one of the River Police boats. “It was at the stairs that he had to pick up his man.”

Certainly, the tactics of George suggested that he had recognized surveillance, and, his purpose abandoned, now sought to efface himself without delay. Taking advantage of every shadow, he resigned his boat to the gentle current. He had actually come to the entrance of Greenwich Reach when a dock light, shining out across the river, outlined the boat yellowly.

“He’s got a passenger!” said Coombes amazedly.

Inspector White, who was in charge of the cutter, rested his arm on Coombes’ shoulder and stared across the moving tide.

“I can see no one,” he replied. “You’re over anxious, Detective- Sergeant–and I can understand it!”

Coombes smiled heroically.

“I may be over anxious, Inspector,” he replied, “but if I lost Sin Sin Wa, the River Police had never even heard of him till the C.I.D. put ’em wise.”

“H’m!” muttered the Inspector. “D’you suggest we board him?”

“No,” said Coombes, “let him land, but don’t trouble to hide any more. Show him we’re in pursuit.”

No longer drifting with the outgoing tide, George Martin had now boldly taken to the oars. The River Police boat close in his wake, he headed for the blunt promontory of the Isle of Dogs. The grim pursuit went on until:

“I bet I know where he’s for,” said Coombes.

“So do I,” declared Inspector White; “Dougal’s!”

Their anticipations were realized. To the wooden stairs which served as a water-gate for the establishment on the Isle of Dogs, George Martin ran in openly; the police boat followed, and:

“You were right!” cried the Inspector, “he has somebody with him!”

A furtive figure, bearing a burden upon its shoulder, moved up the slope and disappeared. A moment later the police were leaping ashore. George deserted his boat and went running heavily after his passenger.

“After them!” cried Coombes. “That’s Sin Sin Wa!”

Around the mazey, rubbish-strewn paths the pursuit went hotly. In sight of Dougal’s Coombes saw the swing door open and a silhouette– that of a man who carried a bag on his shoulder–pass in. George Martin followed, but the Scotland Yard man had his hand upon his shoulder.

“Police!” he said sharply. “Who’s your friend?”

George turned, red and truculent, with clenched fists.

“Mind your own bloody business!” he roared.

“Mind yours, my lad!” retorted Coombes warningly. “You’re no Thames waterman. Who’s your friend?”

“Wotcher mean?” shouted George. “You’re up the pole or canned you are!”

“Grab him!” said Coombes, and he kicked open the door and entered the saloon, followed by Inspector White and the boat’s crew.

As they appeared, the Inspector conspicuous in his uniform, backed by the group of River Police, one of whom grasped George Martin by his coat collar:

“Splits!” bellowed Dougal in a voice like a fog-horn.

Twenty cups of tea, coffee and cocoa, too hot for speedy assimilation, were spilled upon the floor.

The place as usual was crowded, more particularly in the neighborhood of the two stoves. Here were dock laborers, seamen and riverside loafers, lascars, Chinese, Arabs, negroes and dagoes. Mrs. Dougal, defiant and red, brawny arms folded and her pose as that of one contemplating a physical contest, glared from behind the “solid” counter. Dougal rested his hairy hands upon the “wet” counter and revealed his defective teeth in a vicious snarl. Many of the patrons carried light baggage, since a P and O boat, an oriental, and the S. S. Mahratta, were sailing that night or in the early morning, and Dougal’s was the favorite house of call for a doch-an-dorrich for sailormen, particularly for sailormen of color.

Upon the police group became focussed the glances of light eyes and dark eyes, round eyes, almond-shaped eyes, and oblique eyes. Silence fell.

“We are police officers,” called Coombes formally. “All papers, please.”

Thereupon, without disturbance, the inspection began, and among the papers scrutinized were those of one, Chung Chow, an able-bodied Chinese seaman. But since his papers were in order, and since he possessed two eyes and wore no pigtail, he excited no more interest in the mind of Detective-Sergeant Coombes than did any one of the other Chinamen in the place.

A careful search of the premises led to no better result, and George Martin accounted for his possession of a considerable sum of money found upon him by explaining that he had recently been paid off after a long voyage and had been lucky at cards.

The result of the night’s traffic, then, spelled failure for British justice, the S.S. Mahratta sailed one stewardess short of her complement; but among the Chinese crew of another steamer Eastward bound was one, Chung Chow, formerly known as Sin Sin Wa. And sometimes in the night watches there arose before him the picture of a black bird resting upon the knees of an aged Chinaman. Beyond these figures dimly he perceived the paddy-fields of Ho-Nan and the sweeping valley of the Yellow River, where the opium poppy grows.

It was about an hour before the sailing of the ship which numbered Chung Chow among the yellow members of its crew that Seton Pasha returned once more to the deserted wharf whereon he had found Mrs. Monte Irvin’s spaniel. Afterwards, in the light of ascertained facts, he condemned himself for a stupidity passing the ordinary. For while he had conducted a careful search of the wharf and adjoining premises, convinced that there was a cellar of some kind below, he had omitted to look for a water-gate to this hypothetical cache.

Perhaps his self-condemnation was deserved, but in justice to the agent selected by Lord Wrexborough, it should be added that Chief Inspector Kerry had no more idea of the existence of such an entrance, and exit, than had Seton Pasha.

Leaving the dog at Leman Street then, and learning that there was no news of the missing Chief Inspector, Seton had set out once more. He had been informed of the mysterious signals flashed from side to side of the Lower Pool, and was hourly expecting a report to the effect that Sin Sin Wa had been apprehended in the act of escaping. That Sin Sin Wa had dropped into the turgid tide from his underground hiding- place, and pushing his property–which was floatable–before him, encased in a waterproof bag, had swum out and clung to the stern of George Martin’s boat as it passed close to the empty wharf, neither Seton Pasha nor any other man knew–except George Martin and Sin Sin Wa.

At a suitably dark spot the Chinaman had boarded the little craft, not without difficulty, for his wounded shoulder pained him, and had changed his sodden attire for a dry outfit which awaited him in the locker at the stern of the skiff. The cunning of the Chinese has the simplicity of true genius.

Not two paces had Seton taken on to the mystifying wharf when:

“Sam Tuk barber! Entrance in cellar!” rapped a ghostly, muffled voice from beneath his feet. “Sam Tuk barber! Entrance in cellar!”

Seton Pasha stood still, temporarily bereft of speech. Then, “Kerry!” he cried. “Kerry! Where are you?”

But apparently his voice failed to reach the invisible speaker, for:

“Sam Tuk barber! Entrance in cellar!” repeated the voice.

Seton Pasha wasted no more time. He ran out into the narrow street. A man was on duty there.

“Call assistance!” ordered Seton briskly, “Send four men to join me at the barber’s shop called Sam Tuk’s! You know it?”

“Yes, sir; I searched it with Chief Inspector Kerry.”

The note of a police whistle followed.

Ten minutes later the secret of Sam Tuk’s cellar was unmasked. The place was empty, and the subterranean door locked; but it succumbed to the persistent attacks of axe and crowbar, and Seton Pasha was the first of the party to enter the vault. It was laden with chemical fumes. . . .

He found there an aged Chinaman, dead, seated by a stove in which the fire had burned very low. Sprawling across the old man’s knees was the body of a raven. Lying at his feet was a woman, lithe, contorted, the face half hidden in masses of bright red hair.

“End case near the door!” rapped the voice of Kerry. “Slides to the left!”

Seton Pasha vaulted over the counter, drew the shelves aside, and entered the inner room.

By the dim light of a lantern burning upon a moorish coffee-table he discerned an untidy bed, upon which a second woman lay, pallid.

“God!” he muttered; “this place is a morgue!”

“It certainly isn’t healthy!” said an irritable voice from the floor. “But I think I might survive it if you could spare a second to untie me.”

Kerry’s extensive practice in chewing and the enormous development of his maxillary muscles had stood him in good stead. His keen, strong teeth had bitten through the extemporized gag, and as a result the tension of the handkerchief which had held it in place had become relaxed, enabling him to rid himself of it and to spit out the fragments of filthy-tasting wood which the biting operation had left in his mouth.

Seton turned, stooped on one knee to release the captive . . . and found himself looking into the face of someone who sat crouched upon the divan behind the Chief Inspector. The figure was that of an oriental, richly robed. Long, slim, ivory hands rested upon his knees, and on the first finger of the right hand gleamed a big talismanic ring. But the face, surmounted by a white turban, was wonderful, arresting in its immobile intellectual beauty; and from under the heavy brows a pair of abnormally large eyes looked out hypnotically.

“My God!” whispered Seton, then:

“If you’ve finished your short prayer,” rapped Kerry, “set about my little job.”

“But, Kerry–Kerry, behind you!”

“I haven’t any eyes in my back hair!”

Mechanically, half fearfully, Seton touched the hands of the crouching oriental. A low moan came from the woman in the bed, and:

“It’s Kazmah!” gasped Seton. “Kerry . . . Kazmah is–a wax figure!”

“Hell!” said Chief Inspector Kerry.

CHAPTER XLII

A YEAR LATER

Beneath an awning spread above the balcony of one of those modern elegant flats, which today characterize Heliopolis, the City of the Sun, site of perhaps the most ancient seat of learning in the known world, a party of four was gathered, awaiting the unique spectacle which is afforded when the sun’s dying rays fade from the Libyan sands and the violet wonder of the afterglow conjures up old magical Egypt from the ashes of the desert.

“Yes,” Monte Irvin was saying, “only a year ago; but, thank God, it seems more like ten! Merciful time effaces sadness but spares joy.”

He turned to his wife, whose flower-like face peeped out from a nest of white fur. Covertly he squeezed her hand, and was rewarded with a swift, half coquettish glance, in which he read trust and contentment. The dreadful ordeal through which she had passed had accomplished that which no physician in Europe could have hoped for, since no physician would have dared to adopt such drastic measures. Actuated by deliberate cruelty, and with the design of bringing about her death from apparently natural causes, the Kazmah group had deprived her of cocaine for so long a period that sanity, life itself, had barely survived; but for so long a period that, surviving, she had outlived the drug craving. Kazmah had cured her!

Monte Irvin turned to the tall fair girl who sat upon the arm of a cane rest-chair beside Rita.

“But nothing can ever efface the memory of all you have done for Rita, and for me,” he said, “nothing, Mrs. Seton.”

“Oh,” said Margaret, “my mind was away back, and that sounded–so odd.”

Seton Pasha, who occupied the lounge-chair upon the broad arm of which his wife was seated, looked up, smiling into the suddenly flushed face. They were but newly returned from their honeymoon, and had just taken possession of their home, for Seton was now stationed in Cairo. He flicked a cone of ash from his cheroot.

“It seems to me that we are all more or less indebted to one another,” he declared. “For instance, I might never have met you, Margaret, if I had not run into your cousin that eventful night at Princes; and Gray would not have been gazing abstractedly out of the doorway if Mrs. Irvin had joined him for dinner as arranged. One can trace almost every episode in life right back, and ultimately come–“

“To Kismet!” cried his wife, laughing merrily. “So before we begin dinner tonight–which is a night of reunion–I am going to propose a toast to Kismet!”

“Good!” said Seton, “we shall all drink it gladly. Eh, Irvin?”

“Gladly, indeed,” agreed Monte Irvin. “You know, Seton,” he continued, “we have been wandering, Rita and I; and ever since your wife handed her patient over to me as cured we have covered some territory. I don’t know if you or Chief Inspector Kerry has been responsible, but the press accounts of the Kazmah affair have been scanty to baldness. One stray bit of news reached us–in Colorado, I think.”

“What was that, Mr. Irvin?” asked Margaret, leaning towards the speaker.

“It was about Mollie Gretna. Someone wrote and told me that she had eloped with a billiard marker–a married man with five children!”

Seton laughed heartily, and so did Margaret and Rita.

“Right!” cried Seton. “She did. When last heard of she was acting as barmaid in a Portsmouth tavern!”

But Monte Irvin did not laugh.

“Poor, foolish girl!” he said gravely. “Her life might have been so different–so useful and happy.”

“I agree,” replied Seton, “if she had had a husband like Kerry.”

“Oh, please don’t!” said Margaret. “I almost fell in love with Chief Inspector Kerry myself.”

“A grand fellow!” declared her husband warmly. “The Kazmah inquiry was the triumph of his career.”

Monte Irvin turned to him.

“You did your bit, Seton,” he said quietly. “The last words Inspector Kerry spoke to me before I left England were in the nature of a splendid tribute to yourself, but I will spare your blushes.”

“Kerry is as white as they’re made,” replied Seton, “but we should never have known for certain who killed Sir Lucien if he had not risked his life in that filthy cellar as he did.”

Rita Irvin shuddered slightly and drew her furs more closely about her shoulders.

“Shall we change the conversation, dear?” whispered Margaret.

“No, please,” said Rita. “You cannot imagine how curious I am to learn the true details–for, as Monte says, we have been out of touch with things, and although we were so intimately concerned, neither of us really knows the inner history of the affair to this day. Of course, we know that Kazmah was a dummy figure, posed in the big ebony chair. He never moved, except to raise his hand, and this was done by someone seated in the inner room behind the figure. But who was seated there?”

Seton glanced inquiringly at his wife, and she nodded, smiling.

“Right-o!” he said. “If you will excuse me for a moment I will get my notes. Hello, here’s Gray!”

A little two-seater came bowling along the road from Cairo, and drew up beneath the balcony. It was the car which had belonged to Margaret when in practice in Dover Street. Quentin Gray jumped out, waving his hand cheerily to the quartette above, and went in at the doorway. Seton walked through the flat and admitted him.

“Sorry I’m late!” cried Gray, impetuous and boyish as ever, although he looked older and had grown very bronzed. “The chief detained me.”

“Go through to them,” said Seton informally. “I’m getting my notes; we’re going to read the thrilling story of the Kazmah mystery before dinner.”

“Good enough!” cried Gray. “I’m in the dark on many points.”

He had outlived his youthful infatuation, although it was probable enough that had Rita been free he would have presented himself as a suitor without delay. But the old relationship he had no desire to renew. A generous self-effacing regard had supplanted the madness of his earlier passion. Rita had changed too; she had learned to know herself and to know her husband.

So that when Seton Pasha presently rejoined his guests, he found the most complete harmony to prevail among them. He carried a bulky notebook, and, tapping his teeth with his monocle:

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began whimsically, “I will bore you with a brief account of the extraordinary facts concerning the Kazmah case.”

Margaret was seated in the rest-chair which her husband had vacated, and Seton took up a position upon the ledge formed by one of the wide arms. Everyone prepared to listen, with interest undisguised.

“There were three outstanding personalities dominating what we may term the Kazmah group,” continued Seton. “In order of importance they were: Sin Sin Wa, Sir Lucien Pyne and Mrs. Sin.”

Rita Irvin inhaled deeply, but did not interrupt the speaker.

“I shall begin with Sir Lucien,” Seton went on. “For some years before his father’s death he seems to have lived a very shady life in many parts of the world. He was a confirmed gambler, and was also somewhat unduly fond of the ladies’ society. In Buenos Ayres–the exact date does not matter–he made the acquaintance of a variety artiste known as La Belle Lola, a Cuban-Jewess, good-looking and unscrupulous. I cannot say if Sir Lucien was aware from the outset of his affair with La Belle that she was a married woman. But it is certain that her husband, Sin Sin Wa, very early learned of the intrigue, and condoned it.

“How Sir Lucien came to get into the clutches of the pair I do not know. But that he did so we have ascertained beyond doubt. I think, personally, that his third vice–opium–was probably responsible. For Sin Sin Wa appears throughout in the character of a drug dealer.

“These three people really become interesting from the time that La Belle Lola quitted the stage and joined her husband in the conducting of a concern in Buenos Ayres, which was the parent, if I may use the term, of the Kazmah business later established in Bond Street. From a music-hall illusionist, who came to grief during a South American tour, they acquired the oriental waxwork figure which subsequently mystified so many thousands of dupes. It was the work of a famous French artist in wax, and had originally been made to represent the Pharaoh, Rameses II., for a Paris exhibition. Attired in Eastern robes, and worked by a simple device which raised and lowered the right hand, it was used, firstly, in a stage performance, and secondly, in the character of ‘Kazmah the Dream-reader.’

“Even at this time Sir Lucien had access to good society, or to the best society which Buenos Ayres could offer, and he was the source of the surprising revelations made to patrons by the ‘dream-reader.’ At first, apparently, the drug business was conducted independently of the Kazmah concern, but the facilities offered by the latter for masking the former soon became apparent to the wily Sin Sin Wa. Thereupon the affair was reorganized on the lines later adopted in Bond Street. Kazmah’s became a secret dope-shop, and annexed to it was an elaborate chandu-khan, conducted by the Chinaman. Mrs. Sin was the go-between.

“You are all waiting to hear–or, to be exact, two are waiting to hear, Gray and Margaret already know–who spoke as Kazmah through the little window behind the chair. The deep-voiced speaker was Juan Mareno, Mrs. Sin’s brother! Mrs. Sin’s maiden name was Lola Mareno.

“Many of these details were provided by Mareno, who, after the death of his sister, to whom he was deeply attached, volunteered to give crown evidence. Most of them we have confirmed from other sources.

“Behold ‘Kazmah the dream-reader,’ then, established in Buenos Ayres. The partners in the enterprise speedily acquired considerable wealth. Sir Lucien–at this time plain Mr. Pyne–several times came home and lived in London and elsewhere like a millionaire. There is no doubt, I think, that he was seeking a suitable opportunity to establish a London branch of the business.”

“My God!” said Monte Irvin. “How horrible it seems!”

“Horrible, indeed!” agreed Seton. “But there are two features of the case which, in justice to Sir Lucien, we should not overlook. He, who had been a poor man, had become a wealthy one and had tasted the sweets of wealth; also he was now hopelessly in the toils of the woman Lola.

“With the ingenious financial details of the concern, which were conducted in the style of the ‘Jose Santos Company,’ I need not trouble you now. We come to the second period, when the flat in Albemarle Street and the two offices in old Bond Street became vacant and were promptly leased by Mareno, acting on Sir Lucien’s behalf, and calling himself sometimes Mr. Isaacs, sometimes Mr. Jacobs, and at other times merely posing as a representative of the Jose Santos Company in some other name.

“All went well. The concern had ample capital, and was organized by clever people. Sin Sin Wa took up new quarters in Limehouse; they had actually bought half the houses in one entire street as well as a wharf! And Sin Sin Wa brought with him the good-will of an illicit drug business which already had almost assumed the dimensions of a control.

“Sir Lucien’s household was a mere bluff. He rarely entertained at home, and lived himself entirely at restaurants and clubs. The private entrance to the Kazmah house of business was the back window of the Cubanis Cigarette Company’s office. From thence down the back stair to Kazmah’s door it was a simple matter for Mareno to pass unobserved. Sir Lucien resumed his role of private inquiry agent, and Mareno recited the ‘revelations’ from notes supplied to him.

“But the ‘dream reading’ part of the business was merely carried on to mask the really profitable side of the concern. We have recently learned that drugs were distributed from that one office alone to the amount of thirty thousand pounds’ worth annually! This is excluding the profits of the House of a Hundred Raptures and of the private chandu orgies organized by Mrs. Sin.

“The Kazmah group gradually acquired control of the entire market, and we know for a fact that at one period during the war they were actually supplying smuggled cocaine, indirectly, to no fewer than twelve R.A.M.C. hospitals! The complete ramifications of the system we shall never know.

“I come, now, to the tragedy, or series of tragedies, which brought about the collapse of the most ingenious criminal organization which has ever flourished, probably, in any community. I will dare to be frank. Sir Lucien was the victim of a woman’s jealousy. Am I to proceed?”

Seton paused, glancing at his audience; and:

“If you please,” whispered Rita. “Monte knows and I know–why–she killed him. But we don’t know–“

“The nasty details,” said Quentin Gray. “Carry on, Seton. Are you agreeable, Irvin?”

“I am anxious to know,” replied Irvin, “for I believe Sir Lucien deserved well of me, bad as he was.”

Seton clapped his hands, and an Egyptian servant appeared, silently and mysteriously as is the way of his class.

“Cocktails, Mahmoud!”

The Egyptian disappeared.

“There’s just time,” declared Margaret, gazing out across the prospect, “before sunset.”

CHAPTER XLIII

THE STORY OF THE CRIME

“You are all aware,” Seton continued, “that Sir Lucien Pyne was an admirer of Mrs. Irvin. God knows, I hold no brief for the man, but this love of his was the one redeeming feature of a bad life. How and when it began I don’t profess to know, but it became the only pure thing which he possessed. That he was instrumental in introducing you, Mrs. Irvin, to the unfortunately prevalent drug habit, you will not deny; but that he afterwards tried sincerely to redeem you from it I can positively affirm. In seeking your redemption he found his own, for I know that he was engaged at the time of his death in extricating himself from the group. You may say that he had made a fortune, and was satisfied; that is your view, Gray. I prefer to think that he was anxious to begin a new life and to make himself more worthy of the respect of those he loved.

“There was one obstacle which proved too great for him–Mrs. Sin. Although Juan Mareno was the spokesman of the group, Lola Mareno was the prompter. All Sir Lucien’s plans for weaning Mrs. Irvin from the habits which she had acquired were deliberately and malignantly foiled by this woman. She endeavored to inveigle Mrs. Irvin into indebtedness to you, Gray, as you know now. Failing in this, she endeavored to kill her by depriving her of that which had at the time become practically indispensable. A venomous jealousy led her to almost suicidal measures. She risked exposure and ruin in her endeavors to dispose of one whom she looked upon as a rival.

“During Sir Lucien’s several absences from London she was particularly active, and this brings me to the closing scene of the drama. On the night that you determined, in desperation, Mrs. Irvin, to see Kazmah personally, you will recall that Sir Lucien went out to telephone to him?”

Rita nodded but did not speak.

“Actually,” Seton explained, “he instructed Mareno to go across the leads to Kazmah’s directly you had left the flat, and to give you a certain message as ‘Kazmah.’ He also instructed Mareno to telephone certain orders to Rashid, the Egyptian attendant. In spite of the unforeseen meeting with Gray, all would have gone well, no doubt, if Mrs. Sin had not chanced to be on the Kazmah premises at the time that the message was received!

“I need not say that Mrs. Sin was a remarkable woman, possessing many accomplishments, among them that of mimicry. She had often amused herself by taking Mareno’s place at the table behind Kazmah, and, speaking in her brother’s oracular voice, had delivered the ‘revelations.’ Mareno was like wax in his sister’s hands, and on this fateful night, when he arrived at the place–which he did a few minutes before Mrs. Irvin, Gray and Sir Lucien–Mrs. Sin peremptorily ordered him to wait upstairs in the Cubanis office, and she took her seat in the room from which the Kazmah illusions were controlled.

“So carefully arranged was every detail of the business that Rashid, the Egyptian, was ignorant of Sir Lucien’s official connection with the Kazmah concern. He had been ordered–by Mareno speaking from Sir Lucien’s flat–to admit Mrs. Irvin to the room of seance and then to go home. He obeyed and departed, leaving Sir Lucien in the waiting- room.

“Driven to desperation by ‘Kazmah’s’ taunting words, we know that Mrs. Irvin penetrated to the inner room. I must slur over the details of the scene which ensued. Hearing her cry out, Sir Lucien ran to her assistance. Mrs. Sin, enraged by his manner, lost all control of her insane passion. She attempted Mrs. Irvin’s life with a stiletto which habitually she carried–and Sir Lucien died like a gentleman who had lived like a blackguard. He shielded her–“

Seton paused. Margaret was biting her lip hard, and Rita was looking down so that her face could not be seen.

“The shock consequent upon the deed sobered the half crazy woman,” continued the speaker. “Her usual resourcefulness returned to her. Self-preservation had to be considered before remorse. Mrs. Irvin had swooned, and”–he hesitated–“Mrs. Sin saw to it that she did not revive prematurely. Mareno was summoned from the room above. The outer door was locked.

“It affords evidence of this woman’s callous coolness that she removed from the Kazmah premises, and–probably assisted by her brother, although he denies it–from the person and garments of the dead man, every scrap of evidence. They had not by any means finished the task when you knocked at he door, Gray. But they completed it, faultlessly, after you had gone.

“Their unconscious victim, and the figure of Kazmah, as well as every paper or other possible clue, they carried up to the Cubanis office, and from thence across the roof to Sir Lucien’s study. Next, while Mareno went for the car, Mrs. Sin rifled the safe, bureaus and desks in Sir Lucien’s flat, so that we had the devil’s own work, as you know, to find out even the more simple facts of his everyday life.

“Not a soul ever came forward who noticed the big car being driven into Albemarle Street or who observed it outside the flat. The chances run by the pair in conveying their several strange burdens from the top floor, down the stairs and out into the street were extraordinary. Yet they succeeded unobserved. Of course, the street was imperfectly lighted, and is but little frequented after dusk.

“The journey to Limehouse was performed without discovery–aided, no doubt, by the mistiness of the night; and Mareno, returning to the West End, ingeniously inquired for Sir Lucien at his club. Learning, although he knew it already, that Sir Lucien had not been to the club that night, he returned the car to the garage and calmly went back to the flat.

“His reason for taking this dangerous step is by no means clear. According to his own account, he did it to gain time for the fugitive Mrs. Sin. You see, there was really only one witness of the crime (Mrs. Irvin) and she could not have sworn to the identity of the assassin. Rashid was warned and presumably supplied with sufficient funds to enable him to leave the country.

“Well, the woman met her deserts, no doubt at the hands of Sin Sin Wa. Kerry is sure of this. And Sin Sin Wa escaped, taking with him an enormous sum of ready money. He was the true genius of the enterprise. No one, his wife and Mareno excepted–we know of no other–suspected that the real Sin Sin Wa was clean-shaven, possessed two eyes, and no pigtail! A wonderfully clever man!”

The native servant appeared to announce that dinner was served; African dusk drew its swift curtain over the desert, and a gun spoke sharply from the Citadel. In silence the party watched the deepening velvet of the sky, witnessing the birth of a million stars, and in silence they entered the gaily lighted dining-room.

Seton Pasha moved one of the lights so as to illuminate a small oil painting which hung above the sideboard. It represented the head and shoulders of a savage-looking red man, his hair close-cropped like that of a pugilist, and his moustache trimmed in such a fashion that a row of large, fierce teeth were revealed in an expression which might have been meant for a smile. A pair of intolerant steel-blue eyes looked squarely out at the spectator.

“What a time I had,” said Seton, “to get him to sit for that! But I managed to secure his wife’s support, and the trick was done. You are down to toast Kismet, Margaret, but I am going to propose the health, long life and prosperity of Chief Inspector Kerry, of the Criminal Investigation Department.”