Part 2 (1/2)

It was the afternoon following the day of our strange discovery of the fireplace done in sympathetic ink on the apparently blank sheet of paper in Bennett's effects, when the speaking-tube sounded and I answered it.

”Why--it's Elaine,” I exclaimed.

Kennedy's face showed the keenest pleasure at the unexpected visit.

”Tell her to come right up,” he said quickly.

I opened the door for her.

”Why--Elaine--I'm awfully glad to see you,” he greeted, ”but I thought you were rusticating.”

”I was, but, Craig, it seems to me that wherever I go, something happens,” she returned. ”You know, Aunt Tabby said there were haunts. I thought it was an old woman's fear--but last night I heard the strangest noises out there, and I thought I saw a face at the window--a face in a helmet. And when Joshua went out, this is what he found on the ground under my window.”

She handed Kennedy a box, a peculiar affair which she touched gingerly and only with signs of the greatest aversion.

Kennedy opened it. There, in the bottom of the box, was a little ivory devil-G.o.d. He looked at it curiously a moment.

”Let me see,” he ruminated, still regarding the sign. ”The house you bought for Aunt Tabby, once belonged to Bennett, didn't it?”

Elaine nodded her head. ”Yes, but I don't see what that can have to do with it,” she agreed, adding with a shudder, ”Bennett is dead.”

Kennedy had taken a piece of paper from the desk where he had put it away carefully. ”Have you ever seen anything that looks like this?” he asked, handing her the paper.

Elaine looked at the plan carefully, as Kennedy and I scanned her face.

She glanced up, her expression showing plainly the wonder she felt.

”Why, yes,” she answered. ”That looks like Aunt Tabby's fireplace in the living-room.”

Kennedy said nothing for a moment. Then he seized his hat and coat.

”If you don't mind,” he said, ”we'll go back there with you.”

”Mind?” she repeated. ”Just what I had hoped you would do.”

Wu Fang, the Chinese master mind, had arrived in New York.

Beside Wu, the inscrutable, Long Sin, astute though he was, was a mere pigmy--his slave, his advance agent, as it were, a tentacle sent out to discover the most promising outlet for the nefarious talents of his master.

New York did not know of the arrival of Wu Fang, the mysterious--yet.

But down in the secret recesses of Chinatown, in the ways that are devious and dark, the oriental crooks knew--and trembled.

Thus it happened that Long Sin was not permitted to enjoy even the foretaste of Bennett's spoils which he had forced from him after his weird transformation into his real self, the Clutching Hand, when the Chinaman had given him the poisoned draught that had put him into his long sleep.

He had obtained the paper showing where the treasure ama.s.sed by the Clutching Hand was hidden, but Wu Fang, his master, had come.

Wu had immediately established himself in the most sumptuous of apartments, hidden behind the squalid exterior of the ordinary tenement building in Chinatown.