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Page 3
*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
THE RETURN OF DR. FU-MANCHU
BY
SAX ROHMER
CHAPTER I
A MIDNIGHT SUMMONS
"When did you last hear from Nayland Smith?" asked my visitor.
I paused, my hand on the syphon, reflecting for a moment.
"Two months ago," I said; "he's a poor correspondent and rather
soured, I fancy."
"What--a woman or something?"
"Some affair of that sort. He's such a reticent beggar, I really know
very little about it."
I placed a whisky and soda before the Rev. J. D. Eltham, also sliding
the tobacco jar nearer to his hand. The refined and sensitive face of
the clergy-man offered no indication of the truculent character of the
man. His scanty fair hair, already gray over the temples, was silken
and soft-looking; in appearance he was indeed a typical English
churchman; but in China he had been known as "the fighting
missionary," and had fully deserved the title. In fact, this
peaceful-looking gentleman had directly brought about the Boxer
Risings!
"You know," he said, in his clerical voice, but meanwhile stuffing
tobacco into an old pipe with fierce energy, "I have often wondered,
Petrie--I have never left off wondering--"
"What?"
"That accursed Chinaman! Since the cellar place beneath the site of
the burnt-out cottage in Dulwich Village--I have wondered more than
ever."
He lighted his pipe and walked to the hearth to throw the match in the
grate.
"You see," he continued, peering across at me in his oddly nervous
way, "one never knows, does one? If I thought that Dr. Fu-Manchu
lived; if I seriously suspected that that stupendous intellect, that
wonderful genius, Petrie, er--" he hesitated
characteristically--"survived, I should feel it my duty--"
"Well?" I said, leaning my elbows on the table and smiling slightly.
"If that Satanic genius were not indeed destroyed, then the peace of
the world, may be threatened anew at any moment!"
He was becoming excited, shooting out his jaw in the truculent manner
I knew, and snapping his fingers to emphasize his words; a man
composed of the oddest complexities that ever dwelt beneath a clerical
frock.
"He may have got back to China, Doctor!" he cried, and his eyes had
the fighting glint in them. "Could you rest in peace if you thought
that he lived? Should you not fear for your life every time that a
night-call took you out alone? Why, man alive, it is only two years
since he was here among us, since we were searching every shadow for
those awful green eyes! What became of his band of assassins--his
stranglers, his dacoits, his damnable poisons and insects and what-not
--the army of creatures--"
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