The night had grown bitterly cold; high winds had blown themselves away across the Atlantic; the air had that champagne quality which redoubles a man’s vigour.
Many streets were barricaded; a sort of curfew had been imposed upon part of Chinatown. Every householder had been made responsible for the members of his household. Restaurants and cafes were scrutinized from cellar to roof, particularly Wu King’s Bar. Residents returning to the barricaded area were requested to establish their identity before being admitted. Visitors who did not reside there were escorted to their destinations and carefully checked up.
Mark Hepburn had tackled the situation with his usual efficiency. Pretence had been cast aside. All Chinatown knew that the section was being combed for one of the big shots of the underworld.
And all Chinatown remained in suspense; for now the news had spread through those mysterious channels which defy Occidental detection that other members of the Council of the Seven of the Si-Fan were in the city. The dreaded Black Dragon Society of Japan was no more than an offshoot of the Si-Fan, which embraced in its invisible tentacles practically the whole of the coloured races of the world. No dweller east of Suez or west of it to Istanbul would have gambled a dollar on the life of a man marked down by the Si-Fan.
in
In the cave of the seven-eyed goddess Dr. Fu Manchu sat, eyes closed, long, ivory hands extended upon the table before him, listening to the silver tones of that distant speaker, to the rising excitement of the audience which he addressed; an audience representing but a fraction of that which from coast to coast hung upon his words— words destined to play a strange part in the history of the country. The other listeners, invisible in queer cells which surrounded the central apartment, were equally silent, motionless.
In the seventh of these, that which communicated with a series of iron doors protecting the place from the street above, old Sam Pak crouched mummy-like upon a settee listening with others to that wonderful, inspiring voice speaking in a southern state.
A very faint buzz directly above his head resulted in slitlike eyes being opened in the death mask. Sam Pak turned, glanced up. A tiny disc of blue light showed. Slowly he nodded his shrivelled head and watched this blue light. Two, three, four minutes elapsed—and the blue light still prevailed. Where upon that man of vast knowledge and experience acted. There was something strange here.
The appearance of the blue light was in order, for a seventh representative even now was expected by way of the river-gate. The blue light indicated that the river-gate had been opened by one of the two men on duty who knew its secret. Its persistence indicated that the river-gate had not been re-closed; and this was phenomenal.
But even as Sam Pak stood up and began silently to shuffle in the direction of the door, the blue light flickered, dimmed, flickered again and finally went out.
Something definitely was wrong!
A lesser man would have alarmed the council, but Sam Pak was a great man. Quietly he opened the iron door and ascended the stairs beyond. He opened a second door and mounted higher, switching on lights. Half-way along a stone-faced corridor, stone-paved, he paused beneath a pendant lamp. Reaching up he pulled this pendant.
It dropped, lever fashion, and a section of the seemingly solid wall some five feet high and three feet wide dropped backward like a drawbridge. So perfectly was it fitted, so solid its construction, that he would have been a clever detective indeed who could have found it when it was closed.
Sam Pak, stooping, went into the dark opening. An eerie lapping of moving water had become audible at the moment that the secret door had dropped back. There was a dank, unwholesome smell. He reached for, and found, an iron rail;
then from beneath his blue robe he produced a torch and shone its ray ahead.
He stood on a gallery above a deep sewer, an inspection-gallery accessible to, and sometime used by, the sanitary authorities of the city. Into this a way had been struck from the secret warren below Chinatown and another way out at the farther end by the river bank.
He moved slowly along, a crouched, eerie figure in a whispering, evil place.
At a point where the oily waters disappeared beneath an arch, the gallery seemingly ended, and before a stone wall he paused.
His ancient, clawlike hands manipulated some piece of mechanism, and a small box came to light, a box in which a kind of telephone stood. Sam Pak raised the instrument; he listened.
“Chee, chee, chee!” he hissed.
He hung up the telephone, re-closed the box in which it was hidden and began to return along the iron gallery, moving now with extraordinary rapidity for a man of his years. The unexpected, but not the unforeseen, had happened.
The enemy had forced the water-gate.
IV
At the corner of Doyers Street a crowd had gathered beyond the barricade. Those who wished to pass were referred by the police officer on duty to another point, which necessitated a detour. A tall, bearded man, his coat collar turned up and his hat brim pulled down, stood beside a big car, the windows of which were bullet-proof, lurking in shadow and studying the group beyond the barricade. A messenger from local police headquarters made his way to his side.
“Captain Hepburn?”
“Yes. What is it?”
“We seem to have lost contact with the party operating under Federal Officer Smith down on East River.”
“No news?”
“Not a thing.”
Mark Hepburn experienced a sudden, great dread. The perils of the river-gate, although a large party had been assembled, were unknown—unknown as the resources of the formidable group which Nayland Smith sought to
