how this sound
must have been familiar to Abel Slattin, how it must have formed
part and parcel of his life, as it were, and how it went on
now--tick-tick-tick-tick--whilst he, for whom it had ticked, lay
unheeding--would never heed it more.

As I grew more accustomed to the gloom, I found myself staring at his
office chair; once I found myself expecting Abel Slattin to enter the
room and occupy it. There was a little China Buddha upon the bureau in
one corner, with a gilded cap upon its head, and as some reflection of
the moonlight sought out this little cap, my thoughts grotesquely turned
upon the murdered man's gold tooth.

Vague creakings from within the house, sounds as though of stealthy
footsteps upon the stair, set my nerves tingling; but Nayland Smith gave
no sign, and I knew that my imagination was magnifying these ordinary
night sounds out of all proportion to their actual significance.
Leaves rustled faintly outside the window at my back: I construed their
sibilant whispers into the dreaded name--Fu-Manchu-Fu-Manchu--Fu-Manchu!

So wore on the night; and, when the ticking clock hollowly boomed the
hour of one, I almost leaped out of my chair, so highly strung were my
nerves, and so appallingly did the sudden clangor beat upon them. Smith,
like a man of stone, showed no sign. He was capable of so subduing his
constitutionally high-strung temperament, at times, that temporarily
he became immune from human dreads. On such occasions he would be icily
cool amid universal panic; but, his object accomplished, I have seen him
in such a state of collapse, that utter nervous exhaustion is the only
term by which I can describe it.

Tick-tick-tick-tick went the clock, and, with my heart still thumping
noisily in my breast, I began to count the tickings; one, two, three,
four, five, and so on to a hundred, and from one hundred to many
hundreds.

Then, out from the confusion of minor noises, a new, arresting sound
detached itself. I ceased my counting; no longer I noted the tick-tick
of the clock, nor the vague creakings, rustlings and whispers. I saw
Smith, shadowly, raise his hand in warning--in needless warning, for I
was almost holding my breath in an effort of acute listening.

From high up in the house this new sound came from above the topmost
room, it seemed, up under the roof; a regular squeaking, oddly familiar,
yet elusive. Upon it followed a very soft and muffled thud; then a
metallic sound as of a rus