7. Enter Mr. Abel Slattin
"I don't blame you!" rapped Nayland Smith. "Suppose we say, then, a thousand pounds if
you show us the present hiding-place of Fu-Manchu, the payment to be in no way subject
to whether we profit by your information or not?"
Abel Slattin shrugged his shoulders, racially, and returned to the armchair which he had
just quitted. He reseated himself, placing his hat and cane upon my writing-table.
"A little agreement in black and white?" he suggested smoothly.
Smith raised himself up out of the white cane chair, and, bending forward over a corner
of the table, scribbled busily upon a sheet of notepaper with my fountain-pen.
The while he did so, I covertly studied our visitor. He lay back in the armchair, his heavy
eyelids lowered deceptively. He was a thought overdressed--a big man, dark-haired and
well groomed, who toyed with a monocle most unsuitable to his type. During the
preceding conversation, I had been vaguely surprised to note Mr. Abel Slattin's marked
American accent.
Sometimes, when Slattin moved, a big diamond which he wore upon the third finger of
his right hand glittered magnificently. There was a sort of bluish tint underlying the
dusky skin, noticeable even in his hands but proclaiming itself significantly in his puffy
face and especially under the eyes. I diagnosed a laboring valve somewhere in the heart
system.
Nayland Smith's pen scratched on. My glance strayed from our Semitic caller to his cane,
lying upon the red leather before me. It was of most unusual workmanship, apparently
Indian, being made of some kind of dark brown, mottled wood, bearing a marked
resemblance to a snake's skin; and the top of the cane was carved in conformity, to
represent the head of what I took to be a puff-adder, fragments of stone, or beads, being
inserted to represent the eyes, and the whole thing being finished with an artistic realism
almost startling.
When Smith had tossed the written page to Slattin, and he, having read it with an
appearance of carelessness, had folded it neatly and placed it in his pocket, I said:
Our visitor, whose dark eyes revealed all the satisfaction which, by his manner, he sought
to conceal, nodded and took up the cane in his hand.
"It comes from Australia, Doctor," he replied; "it's aboriginal work, and was given to me
by a client. You thought it was Indian? Everybody does. It's my mascot."
