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Page 16
Fu-Manchu!
And that was enough to set me watching as keenly as he; to set me
listening; not only for sounds outside the house but for sounds
within. Doubts, suspicions, dreads, heaped themselves up in my mind.
Why was Forsyth standing there at the gate? I had never seen him
before, to my knowledge, yet there was something oddly reminiscent
about the man. Could it be that his visit formed part of a plot? Yet
his wound had been genuine enough. Thus my mind worked, feverishly;
such was the effect of an unspoken thought--Fu-Manchu.
Nayland Smith's grip tightened on my arm.
"There it is again, Petrie!" he whispered.
"Look, look!"
His words were wholly unnecessary. I, too, had seen it; a wonderful
and uncanny sight. Out of the darkness under the elms, low down upon
the ground, grew a vaporous blue light. It flared up, elfinish, then
began to ascend. Like an igneous phantom, a witch flame, it rose,
high--higher--higher, to what I adjudged to be some twelve feet or
more from the ground. Then, high in the air, it died away again as it
had come!
"For God's sake, Smith, what was it?"
"Don't ask me, Petrie. I have seen it twice. We--"
He paused. Rapid footsteps sounded below. Over Smith's shoulder I saw
Forsyth cross the road, climb the low rail, and set out across the
common.
Smith sprang impetuously to his feet.
"We must stop him!" he said hoarsely; then, clapping a hand to my
mouth as I was about to call out--"Not a sound, Petrie!"
He ran out of the room and went blundering downstairs in the dark,
crying:
"Out through the garden--the side entrance!"
I overtook him as he threw wide the door of my dispensing room.
Through it he ran and opened the door at the other end. I followed him
out, closing it behind me. The smell from some tobacco plants in a
neighboring flower-bed was faintly perceptible; no breeze stirred; and
in the great silence I could hear Smith, in front of me, tugging at
the bolt of the gate.
Then he had it open, and I stepped out, close on his heels, and left
the door ajar.
"We must not appear to have come from your house," explained Smith
rapidly. "I will go along the highroad and cross to the common a
hundred yards up, where there is a pathway, as though homeward bound
to the north side. Give me half a minute's start, then you proceed in
an opposite direction and cross from the corner of the next road.
Directly you are out of the light of the street lamps, get over the
rails and run for the elms!"
He thrust a pistol into my hand and was off.
While he had been with me, speaking in that incisive, impetuous way of
his, with his dark face close to mine, and his eyes gleaming like
steel, I had been at one with him in his feverish mood, but now, when
I stood alone, in that staid and respectable byway, holding a loaded
pistol in my hand, the whole thing became utterly unreal.
It was in an odd frame of mind that I walked to the next corner, as
directed; for I was thinking, not of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the great and evil
man who dreamed of Europe and America under Chinese rule, not of
Nayland Smith, who alone stood between the Chinaman and the
realization of his monstrous schemes, not even of Karamaneh the slave
girl, whose glorious beauty was a weapon of might in Fu-Manchu's hand,
but of what impression I must have made upon a patient had I
encountered one then.
Such were my ideas up to the moment that I crossed to the common and
vaulted into the field on my right. As I began to run toward the elms
I found myself wondering what it was all about, and for what we were
come. Fifty yards west of the trees it occurred to me that if Smith
had counted on cutting Forsyth off we were too late, for it appeared
to me that he must already be in the coppice.
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