Free The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer Page A

been
neglected. Is there any creature, any large creature, which could
climb up the wall to the window? Do you know of anything with a
long, thin body?"
    For a moment I offered no reply, studying the girl's pretty
face, her eager, blue-gray eyes widely opened and fixed upon mine.
She was not of the neurotic type, with her clear complexion and
sun-kissed neck; her arms, healthily toned by exposure to the
country airs, were rounded and firm, and she had the agile shape of
a young Diana with none of the anaemic languor which breeds morbid
dreams. She was frightened; yes, who would not have been? But the
mere idea of this thing which she believed to be in Redmoat,
without the apparition of the green eyes, must have prostrated a
victim of "nerves."
    "Have you seen such a creature, Miss Eltham?"
    She hesitated again, glancing down and pressing her finger-tips
together.
    "As father awoke and called out to know why I knocked, I glanced
from my window. The moonlight threw half the lawn into shadow, and
just disappearing in this shadow was something-something of a brown
color, marked with sections!"
    "What size and shape?"
    "It moved so quickly I could form no idea of its shape; but I
saw quite six feet of it flash across the grass!"
    "Did you hear anything?"
    "A swishing sound in the shrubbery, then nothing more."
    She met my eyes expectantly. Her confidence in my powers of
understanding and sympathy was gratifying, though I knew that I but
occupied the position of a father-confessor.
    "Have you any idea," I said, "how it came about that you awoke
in the train yesterday whilst your father did not?"
    "We had coffee at a refreshment-room; it must have been drugged
in some way. I scarcely tasted mine, the flavor was so awful; but
father is an old traveler and drank the whole of his cupful!"
    Mr. Eltham's voice called from below.
    "Dr. Petrie," said the girl quickly, "what do you think they
want to do to him?"
    "Ah!" I replied, "I wish I knew that."
    "Will you think over what I have told you? For I do assure you
there is something here in Redmoat-something that comes and goes in
spite of father's 'fortifications'? Caesar knows there is. Listen
to him. He drags at his chain so that I wonder he does not break
it."
    As we passed downstairs the howling of the mastiff sounded
eerily through the house, as did the clank-clank of the tightening
chain as he threw the weight of his big body upon it.
    I sat in Smith's room that night for some time, he pacing the
floor smoking and talking.
    "Eltham has influential Chinese friends," he said; "but they
dare not have him in Nan-Yang at present. He knows the country as
he knows Norfolk; he would see things!
    "His precautions here have baffled the enemy, I think. The
attempt in the train points to an anxiety to waste no opportunity.
But whilst Eltham was absent (he was getting his outfit in London,
by the way) they have been fixing some second string to their
fiddle here. In case no opportunity offered before he returned,
they provided for getting at him here!"
    "But how, Smith?"
    "That's the mystery. But the dead dog in the shrubbery is
significant."
    "Do you think some emissary of Fu-Manchu is actually inside the
moat?"
    "It's impossible, Petrie. You are thinking of secret passages,
and so forth. There are none. Eltham has measured up every foot of
the place. There isn't a rathole left unaccounted for; and as for a
tunnel under the moat, the house stands on a solid mass of Roman
masonry, a former camp of Hadrian's time. I have seen a very old
plan of the Round Moat Priory as it was called. There is no
entrance and no exit save by the steps. So how was the dog
killed?"
    I knocked out my pipe on a bar of the grate.
    "We are in the thick of it here," I said.
    "We are always in the thick of it," replied Smith. "Our danger
is no greater in Norfolk than in London. But what do they want to
do? That man in the train with the case of instruments-WHAT
instruments? Then the apparition of the green eyes to-night.