ove
one of the hands, and I called out again, though not so loudly. Then
both the hands were back again; I was weakening; but I clawed like a
madman at the thin, hairy arms of the strangling thing, and with a
blood-red mist dancing before my eyes, I seemed to be whirling madly
round and round until all became a blank. Evidently I used my nails
pretty freely--and there's the trophy."

For the twentieth time, I should think, I raised the ash-tray in my
hand and held it immediately under the table lamp in order to examine
its contents. In the little brass bowl lay a blood-stained fragment of
greyish hair attached to a tatter of skin. This fragment of epidermis
had an odd bluish tinge, and the attached hair was much darker at the
roots than elsewhere. Saving its singular colour, it might have been
torn from the forearm of a very hirsute human; but although my
thoughts wandered, unfettered, north, south, east and west; although,
knowing the resources of Fu-Manchu, I considered all the recognized
Mongolian types, and, in quest of hirsute mankind, even roamed, far
north among the blubber-eating Esquimaux; although I glanced at
Australasia, at Central Africa, and passed in mental review the dark
places of the Congo, nowhere in the known world, nowhere in the
history of the human species, could I come upon a type of man
answering to the description suggested by our strange clue.

Nayland Smith was watching me curiously as I bent over the little
brass ash-tray.

"You are puzzled," he rapped in his short way. "So am I--utterly
puzzled. Fu-Manchu's gallery of monstrosities clearly has become
reinforced; for even if we identified the type, we should not be in
sight of our explanation."

"You mean--" I began.

"Fully four feet from the window, Petrie, and that window but a few
inches open! Look"--he bent forward, resting his chest against the
table, and stretched out his hand towards me--"you have a rule there;
just measure."

Setting down the ash-tray, I opened out the rule and measured the
distance from the farther edge of the table to the tips of Smith's
fingers.

"Twenty-eight inches--and _I_ have a long reach!" snapped Smith,
withdrawing his arm and striking a match to relight his pipe. "There's
one thing, Petrie, often proposed before, which now we must do without
delay. The ivy must be stripped from the walls at the back. It's a
pity, but we cannot afford to sacrifice our lives to our sense of the
aesthetic. What do