for me, Petrie."

I heard the whir of a restarted motor.

"We have lost him," said Smith.

"But we have saved Lord Southery," I said. "Fu-Manchu will credit us
with a skill as great as his own."

"We must get to the car," Smith muttered, "and try to overtake them.
Ugh! my left arm is useless."

"It would be mere waste of time to attempt to overtake them," I argued,
"for we have no idea in which direction they will proceed."

"I have a very good idea," snapped Smith. "Stradwick Hall is less than
ten miles from the coast. There is only one practicable means of
conveying an unconscious man secretly from here to London."

"You think he meant to take him from here to London?"

"Prior to shipping him to China; I think so. His clearing-house is
probably on the Thames."

"A boat?"

"A yacht, presumably, is lying off the coast in readiness. Fu-Manchu
may even have designed to ship him direct to China."

Lord Southery, a bizarre figure, my traveling coat wrapped about him,
and supported by his solicitor, who was almost as pale as himself,
emerged from the vault into the moonlight.

"This is a triumph for you, Smith," I said.

The throb of Fu-Manchu's car died into faintness and was lost in the
night's silence.

"Only half a triumph," he replied. "But we still have another
chance--the raid on his house. When will the word come from Karamaneh?"

Southery spoke in a weak voice.

"Gentlemen," he said, "it seems I am raised from the dead."

It was the weirdest moment of the night wherein we heard that newly
buried man speak from the mold of his tomb.

"Yes," replied Smith slowly, "and spared from the fate of Heaven alone
knows how many men of genius. The yellow society lacks a Southery, but
that Dr. Fu-Manchu was in Germany three years ago I have reason to
believe; so that, even without visiting the grave of your great
Teutonic rival, who suddenly died at about that time, I venture to
predict that they have a Von Homber. And the futurist group in China
knows how to MAKE men work!"

CHAPTER XXIV

FROM the rescue of Lord Southery my story bears me mercilessly on to
other things. I may not tarry, as more leisurely penmen, to round my
incidents; they were not of my choosing. I may not pause to make you
better acquainted with the figure of my drama; its scheme is none of
mine. Often enough, in those days, I found a fitness in the lines of
Omar:

We are no other than a moving show
Of