Part 41 (1/2)

Impossible! They are watching you like a rat. In a moment they know you can stand this strain no longer! Face them, I say! Show them that----”

Peter pushed her away from him in loathing, and she lay still, only whimpering.

Yet the devils of darkness--where were they? And slowly, yet more slowly, the rosewood clock ticked off its seconds. It should be nearly one. At one----

A fighting chance?

CHAPTER XV

On his hands and knees he crouched, and began crawling, an inch at a time, toward the French window, dragging the automatic over the thick satin carpet. He reached the window. It was still ajar. Far, far below twinkled the lights of Hong Kong, of s.h.i.+ps anch.o.r.ed in the bay, and the glitter of Kowloon across the bay. Out there was life!

A board creaked near him, toward the heart of that darkened vault. He spun about, aimed blindly, fired!

The floor shook as an unseen shape collapsed and writhed within reach of his hand. In his grasp, was the oily, thick queue of a coolie.

And suddenly, as he groped, the wall spat out angry tongues of corrosive red flame.

A white-hot iron seemed to shoot through the flesh of his left arm.

The pain reached his shoulder. His left arm was useless--the bone cracked!

Groaning, he pushed himself back. His knees struck the sill, slid over, and he felt the coa.r.s.e, peeled paint of the veranda. He reached the ledge--dropped to the ground, and in dropping, the revolver spilled from his hand as it caught on a projecting ledge of the floor, bounded off into the darkness.

He groveled to retrieve it, muttering as his hands probed through the tufted gra.s.s.

Light glimmered in the room above. There occurred sounds of a struggle, of feet sc.r.a.ping, a m.u.f.fled oath, a short scream.

Peter leaped back, looking up, prepared to dash for the road.

A yellow light within the room silhouetted the slender figure of Romola Borria against the French window. Her arms went out in frantic appeal to the darkness, to him.

”Wait!” she cried in an awful voice. ”I love you! Wait!”

At that confession, a hand seemingly suspended in s.p.a.ce was elevated slowly behind her. The hand paused high above her head. A face appeared in the luminous s.p.a.ce above her head, an evil face, carved with a hideous brutality, wearing an ominous snarl; and above the writhing lips of this one was a black growth, a mustache, pointed, like twin black daggers.

Emiguel Borria, ardent tool of the Gray Dragon? Emiguel Borria, husband of the girl Romola?

Emiguel Borria, in whose lifting hand Peter now caught the glint of a revolver, attempted to crowd the girl to one side. But she held her ground, and then this woman who had on a half-dozen successive occasions tricked and deceived Peter, who had deliberately and on her own confession lured him into this trap, upset, womanlike, the elaborate plan of her master.

In a frenzy she spun upon Emiguel Borria, seized the white barrel of the revolver in her two hands and forced it against his side. Tiny red flames spurted out on either side of the cylinder and smeared in a smoky circle where the muzzle was momentarily buried in the tangled black coat. And Emiguel Borria seemed to sink into the great room and entirely out of Peter's sight.

Romola leaned far into the darkness.

”Run! Run! For your life!”

And as Peter started to run, out of the compound for the dubious safety of the cloistered road, other men of the Gray Dragon, posted for such a contingency, let loose a shower of bullets from adjoining windows.

But the G.o.ds were for the time being on the side of Peter. These shots all went wild.

Shuddering, with teeth chattering and eyes popping, Peter dove through the matted hedge, dashed into the street, and down the street, lighted at intervals with its pin-points of mysterious light.