Perhaps they knew and perhaps they knew not, that during the period ruled by D.O.R.A. as much as L25 was paid by habitues for one pipe of chandu.  The power of gold is often badly estimated by an official whose horizon is marked by a pension.  This is mere lack of imagination, and no more reflects discredit upon a man than lack of hair on his crown or of color in his cheeks.  Nevertheless, it may prove very annoying.

Towards the close of an afternoon which symbolized the worst that London’s particular climate can do in the matter of drizzling rain and gloom, Chief Inspector Kerry, carrying an irritable toy spaniel, came out of a turning which forms a V with Limehouse Canal, into a narrow street which runs parallel with the Thames.  He had arrived at the conclusion that the neighborhood was sown so thickly with detectives that one could not throw a stone without hitting one.  Yet Sin Sin Wa had quietly left his abode and had disappeared from official ken.

Three times within the past ten minutes the spaniel had tried to bite Kerry, nor was Kerry blind to the amusement which his burden had occasioned among the men of K Division whom he had met on his travels.  Finally, as he came out into the riverside lane, the ill-tempered little animal essayed a fourth, and successful, attempt, burying his wicked white teeth in the Chief Inspector’s wrist.

Kerry hooked his finger into the dog’s collar, swung the yapping animal above his head, and hurled it from him into the gloom and rain mist.

“Hell take the blasted thing!” he shouted.  “I’m done with it!”

He tenderly sucked his wounded wrist, and picking up his cane, which he had dropped, he looked about him and swore savagely.  Of Seton Pasha he had had news several times during the day, and he was aware that the Home office agent was not idle.  But to that old rivalry which had leapt up anew when he had seen Seton near Kennington oval had succeeded a sort of despair; so that now he would have welcomed the information that Seton had triumphed where he had failed.  A furious hatred of the one-eyed Chinaman around whom he was convinced the mystery centred had grown up within his mind.  At that hour he would gladly have resigned his post and sacrificed his pension to know that Sin Sin Wa was under lock and key.  His outlook was official, and accordingly peculiar.  He regarded the murder of Sir Lucien Pyne and the flight or abduction of Mrs. Monte Irvin as mere minor incidents in a case wherein Sin Sin Wa figured as the chief culprit.  Nothing had acted so powerfully to bring about this conviction in the mind of the Chief Inspector as the inexplicable disappearance of the Chinaman under circumstances which had apparently precluded such a possibility.

A whimpering cry came to Kerry’s ears; and because beneath the mask of ferocity which he wore a humane man was concealed:  “Flames!” he snapped; “perhaps I’ve broken the poor little devil’s leg.”