reat eyes were
turned towards me fascinatedly. Smith locked the door with much care.
We began a tip-toed progress along the dimly-lighted passage.

From beneath a door on the left, and near the end, a brighter light
shone. Beyond that again was another door. A voice was speaking in the
lighted room; yet I could have sworn that Karamaneh had come, not from
there but from the room beyond--from the far end of the passage.

But the voice!--who, having once heard it, could ever mistake that
singular voice, alternately guttural and sibilant.

Dr. Fu-Manchu was speaking!

"I have asked you," came with ever-increasing clearness (Smith had
begun to turn the knob), "to reveal to me the name of your
correspondent in Nan-Yang. I have suggested that he may be the
Mandarin Yen-Sun-Yat, but you have declined to confirm me. Yet I know"
(Smith had the door open a good three inches and was peering in) "that
some official, some high official, is a traitor. Am I to resort again
to _the question_ to learn his name?"

Ice seemed to enter my veins at the unseen inquisitor's intonation of
the words "_the question_." This was the twentieth century; yet there,
in that damnable room....

Smith threw the door open.

Through a sort of haze, born mostly of horror, but not entirely, I saw
Eltham, stripped to the waist and tied, with his arms upstretched, to
a rafter in the ancient ceiling. A Chinaman, who wore a slop-shop blue
suit and who held an open knife in his hand, stood beside him. Eltham
was ghastly white. The appearance of his chest puzzled me momentarily,
then I realized that a sort of _tourniquet_ of wire-netting was
screwed so tightly about him that the flesh swelled out in knobs
through the mesh. There was blood--

"God in heaven!" screamed Smith frenziedly, "_they have the
wire-jacket on him!_ Shoot down that damned Chinaman, Petrie! Shoot!
Shoot!"

Lithely as a cat the man with the knife leapt around--but I raised the
Browning, and deliberately--with a cool deliberation that came to me
suddenly--shot him through the head. I saw his oblique eyes turn up to
the whites; I saw the mark squarely between his brows; and with no word
nor cry he sank to his knees and toppled forward with one yellow hand
beneath him and one outstretched, clutching--clutching--convulsively.
His pigtail came unfastened and began to uncoil, slowly, like a snake.

I handed the pistol to Smith; I was perfectly cool, now; and I leapt
forward, took up the