Smith stepped quietly across the room and tried the door. It proved to be unlocked, and
an instant later, we were both outside in the passage. Coincident with our arrival there,
arose a sudden outcry from some place at the westward end. A high-pitched, grating
voice, in which guttural notes alternated with a serpent-like hissing, was raised in anger.
"Dr. Fu-Manchu!" whispered Smith, grasping my arm.
Indeed, it was the unmistakable voice of the Chinaman, raised hysterically in one of those
outbursts which in the past I had diagnosed as symptomatic of dangerous mania.
The voice rose to a scream, the scream of some angry animal rather than anything human.
Then, chokingly, it ceased. Another short sharp cry followed--but not in the voice of Fu-
Manchu--a dull groan, and the sound of a fall.
With Smith still grasping my wrist, I shrank back into the doorway, as something that
looked in the darkness like a great ball of fluff came rapidly along the passage toward
me. Just at my feet the thing stopped and I made it out for a small animal. The tiny,
gleaming eyes looked up at me, and, chattering wickedly, the creature bounded past and
was lost from view.
It was Dr. Fu-Manchu's marmoset.
Smith dragged me back into the room which we had just left. As he partly reclosed the
door, I heard the clapping of hands. In a condition of most dreadful suspense, we waited;
until a new, ominous sound proclaimed itself. Some heavy body was being dragged into
the passage. I heard the opening of a trap. Exclamations in guttural voices told of a heavy
task in progress; there was a great straining and creaking--whereupon the trap was softly
reclosed.
"Fu-Manchu has chastised one of his servants," he whispered. "There will be food for the
grappling-irons to-night!"
I shuddered violently, for, without Smith's words, I knew that a bloody deed had been
done in that house within a few yards of where we stood.
In the new silence, I could hear the drip, drip, drip of the rain outside the window; then a
steam siren hooted dismally upon the river, and I thought how the screw of that very
vessel, even as we listened, might be tearing the body of Fu-Manchu's servant!
"Have you some one waiting?" whispered Smith, eagerly.
