figure stumble, pause—run on.
“Cease fire there!” he shouted angrily.
But Sam’s blood was up. He either failed to hear the order, or willfully ignored it. He fired again—then, rapidly, a third time.
The tall figure stopped suddenly, dropped the flashlamp, and crumpled to the damp floor.
“You fool!” Nayland Smith’s words came as a groan. “This was no end for the greatest brain in the world!”
He forced his way past Sam, stooped, and turned the fur-capped head. As he did so, the fallen man writhed, coughed, and was still.
Nayland Smith looked into a face scarcely human, scarred, a parody of humanity—a face he had never seen before—the face of M’goyna . . .
He stood up very slowly. The dark, sloping passage behind him seemed to be embossed with staring eyes.
“Outmanoeuvred!” he said. “Fu Manchu played for time. This poor devil was the last of his rearguards. He has slipped through our fingers!”
Chapter XXII
Ten days later, Nayland Smith gave a small dinner party at his hotel to celebrate the engagement of Camille Mirabeau (Navarre) to Dr. Morris Craig. When the other guests had left, these three went to Smith’s suite, and having settled down:
“Of course,” said Smith, in reply to a question from Camille, “the newspapers are never permitted to print really important news! It might frighten somebody.”
“Quite a lot has leaked out, though,” Craig amended. “The cops gave it away. Poor old Regan has been pestered since I resigned. But although he can chatter quite acidly again, he won’t chatter to reporters.”
“How’s Frobisher?”
“Rotten. He’ll recover all right, but carry a crop of scars.”
“Does his wife know the truth?”
“Couldn’t say What do you think, Camille?”
Camille, lovely in her new-found happiness and a Paris frock, shrugged white shoulders.
“Stella Frobisher is like a cork,” she said. “I think she can stay afloat in the heaviest weather. But I don’t know her well enough to tell you if she suspects the truth.”
“The most astounding thing which the newspapers haven’t reported,” Nayland Smith remarked after an interval, “concerns the body of that ape man—almost certainly the creature of which I had a glimpse at Falling Waters. He’s been examined by all the big doctors. And they are unanimous on one point.”
“What is that?” Camille asked.
“They say the revolver bullets didn’t kill him.”
“What?” Craig exclaimed.
“They state, positively, that he had been dead many years before the shooting!”
And Camille (such was the strange power of Dr. Fu Manchu) simply shook her red head and murmured. “But that is impossible.”
Yes—that was impossible. It was also impossible, no doubt, that Dr. Fu Manchu had visited New York, and perhaps, as a result of his visit, given a few more years of uneasy peace to a world coquetting with war. And so, Manhattan danced on . . .
“Our two Russian acquaintances”—Nayland Smith rapped out the words venomously—”have been quietly deported. But what I really wanted to show you was this.”
From the pocket of his dinner jacket he took a long, narrow envelope. It had come by air mail and was stamped “Cairo.” It was addressed to him at his New York hotel. He passed it to Camille.
“Read it together. There was an enclosure.”
And so, Craig bending over Camille’s shoulder, his cheek against her glowing hair, they read the letter, handwritten in copperplate script:
Sir Denis—
It was a serious disappointment to be compelled to leave New York without seeing you again. I regret, too, that M’goyna, one of my finer products, had to be sacrificed to my safety. But a little time was necessary to enable me to reach the boat which awaited me. I left by another exit. I greet Dr. Craig. He is a genius and a brave man. But his keen sense of honor is my loss. Will you, on my behalf, advise him to devote his great talents to non- destructive purposes? His future experiments will be watched with interest. I enclose a wedding present for his bride.
There was no signature.
Camille and Morris Craig raised their eyes, together. On his extended palm Nayland Smith was holding out a large emerald. And as Camille, uttering a long, wondering sigh, took the gem between her fingers, Nayland Smith reached for his dilapidated pouch and began, reflectively, to load his blackened briar.
The End
