r we waited by the gate until the half-caste appeared on the
bend of the path with a grip in either hand. He was a great, muscular
fellow with a stoic face, and, for the purpose of visiting Saul,
presumably, he had doffed his white raiment and now wore a sort of
livery, with a peaked cap.

Smith watched him enter the house. Then--

"I wonder where Van Roon obtains his provisions and so forth," he
muttered. "It's odd they knew nothing about the new tenant of Cragmire
Tower at 'The Wagoners.'"

There came a sort of sudden expectancy into his manner for which I
found myself at a loss to account. He turned his gaze inland and stood
there tugging at his left ear and clicking his teeth together. He
stared at me, and his eyes looked very bright in the dusk, for a sort
of red glow from the sunset touched them; but he spoke no word, merely
taking my arm and leading me off on a rambling walk around and about
the house. Neither of us spoke a word until we stood at the gate of
Cragmire Tower again; then--

"I'll swear, now, that we were followed here to-day!" muttered Smith.

The lofty place immediately within the doorway proved, in the light of
a lamp now fixed in an iron bracket, to be a square entrance hall
meagrely furnished. The closed study door faced the entrance, and on
the left of it ascended an open staircase up which the mulatto led the
way. We found ourselves on the floor above, in a corridor traversing
the house from back to front. An apartment on the immediate left was
indicated by the mulatto as that allotted to Smith. It was a room of
fair size, furnished quite simply but boasting a wardrobe cupboard,
and Smith's grip stood beside the white-enamelled bed. I glanced
around, and then prepared to follow the man, who had awaited me in the
doorway.

He still wore his dark livery, and as I followed the lithe yet brawny
figure along the corridor, I found myself considering critically his
breadth of shoulder and the extraordinary thickness of his neck.

I have repeatedly spoken of a sort of foreboding, an elusive stirring
in the depths of my being, of which I became conscious at certain
times in my dealings with Dr. Fu-Manchu and his murderous servants.
This sensation, or something akin to it, claimed me now,
unaccountably, as I stood looking into the neat bedroom, on the same
side of the corridor but at the extreme end, wherein I was to sleep. A
voiceless warning urged me to return; a kind of childish panic came
f