lantern stood upon the floor; and beside it ...

The place seemed to be swimming around me, the stone floor to be
heaving beneath my feet....

Beside the lantern stood a wooden chest, some six feet long, and
having strong rope handles at either end. Evidently the chest had but
recently been nailed up. As Zarmi touched it lightly with the pointed
toe of her little red slipper I clutched at Fletcher for support.

Fletcher grasped my arm in a vice-like grip. To him, too, had come
the ghastly conviction--the gruesome thought that neither of us dared
to name.

It was Nayland Smith's coffin that we were to carry!

"Through here," came dimly to my ears, "and then I tell you what to
do...."

Coolness returned to me, suddenly, unaccountably. I doubted not for an
instant that the best friend I had in the world lay dead there at the
feet of the hellish girl who called herself Zarmi, and I knew since it
was she, disguised, who had driven him to his doom, that she must have
been actively concerned in his murder.

But, I argued, although the damp night air was pouring in through the
door which Zarmi now held open, although sound of Thames-side activity
came stealing to my ears, we were yet within the walls of the Joy-Shop,
with a score or more Asiatic ruffians at the woman's beck and call....

With perfect truth I can state that I retain not even a shadowy
recollection of aiding Fletcher to move the chest out on to the brink
of the cutting--for it was upon this that the door directly opened.
The mist had grown denser, and except a glimpse of slowly moving water
beneath me, I could discern little of our surrounding.

So much I saw by the light of a lantern which stood in the stern of a
boat. In the bows of this boat I was vaguely aware of the presence of
a crouched figure enveloped in rugs--vaguely aware that two filmy
eyes regarded me out of the darkness. A man who looked like a lascar
stood upright in the stern.

I must have been acting like a man in a stupor; for I was aroused to
the realities by the contact of a burning cigarette with the lobe of
my right ear!

"Hurry, quick, strong feller!" said Zarmi softly.

At that it seemed as though some fine nerve of my brain, already
strained to utmost tension, snapped. I turned, with a wild,
inarticulate cry, my fists raised frenziedly above my head.

"You fiend!" I shrieked at the mocking Eurasian, "you yellow fiend of
hell!"

I was beside myself, insane. Zarmi fell bac