in thickness.

"Excellency," he said, "I have carefully concealed this report through
the misfortunes that have attended me. It is not certain that I shall
be able to deliver it. Will you give it for me to the jewel merchant
Vanderdick, in Amsterdam? He will send it to Mahadal in Bombay, and it
will go north with the caravans."

His voice changed into a note of solicitation.

"You will not fail me, Excellency--already for my bias to the Master I
am reduced in merit."

I put the scroll into my pocket and went out, for a motorcar had come
into the park, and I knew that Marquis had arrived.

I met Sir Henry and the superintendent in the long corridor; they had
been looking in at my interview through the elevated grating.

"Marquis," I cried, "the judge was right to cut short the criminal trial
and issue a lunacy warrant. This creature is the maddest lunatic in this
whole asylum. The human mind is capable of any absurdity."

Sir Henry looked at me with a queer ironical smile.

"The judge was wrong," he said. "The creature, as you call him, is as
sane as any of us."

"Then you believe this amazing story?" I said.

"I believe Rodman was found at daylight dead on the hearth, with
practically every bone in his body crushed," he replied.

"Certainly," I said. "We all know that is true. But why was he killed?"

Again Sir Henry regarded me with his ironical smile.

"Perhaps," he drawled, "there is some explanation in the report in your
pocket, to the Monastic Head. It's only a theory, you know."

He smiled, showing his white, even teeth.

We went into the superintendent's room, and sat down by a smoldering
fire of coals in the gate. I handed Marquis the roll of vellum. It was
in one of the Shan dialects. He read it aloud. With the addition of
certain formal expressions, it contained precisely the Oriental's
testimony before the court, and no more.

"Ah!" he said in his curiously inflected Oxford voice.

And he held the scroll out to the heat of the fire. The vellum baked
slowly, and as it baked, the black Chinese characters faded out and
faint blue ones began to appear.

Marquis read the secret message in his emotionless drawl:

"'The American is destroyed, and his accursed work is destroyed with
him. Send the news to Bangkok and west to Burma. The treasures of India
are saved."'

I cried out in astonishment.

"An assassin! The creature was an assassin! He killed Rodman simply by
crushing him in his arms!