I stopped.

“Go on,” said Nayland Smith, turning the ray to the left, “what did she have in the basket?”

“Valerian,” I replied mechanically.

The ray rested upon the lithe creature that I had shot down.

It was a black cat!

“A cat will go through fire and water for valerian,” said Smith; “but I got first innings this morning with fish and milk!  I had recognized the imprints under the trees for those of a cat, and I knew, that if a cat had been released here it would still be hiding in the neighborhood, probably in the bushes.  I finally located a cat, sure enough, and came for bait!  I laid my trap, for the animal was too frightened to be approachable, and then shot it; I had to.  That yellow fiend used the light as a decoy.  The branch which killed him jutted out over the path at a spot where an opening in the foliage above allowed some moon rays to penetrate.  Directly the victim stood beneath, the Chinaman uttered his bird cry; the one below looked up, and the cat, previously held silent and helpless in the leather sack, was dropped accurately upon his head!”

“But”—­I was growing confused.

Smith stooped lower.

“The cat’s claws are sheathed now,” he said; “but if you could examine them you would find that they are coated with a shining black substance.  Only Fu-Manchu knows what that substance is, Petrie, but you and I know what it can do!”

CHAPTER VII

ENTER MR. ABEL SLATTIN

“I don’t blame you!” rapped Nayland Smith.  “Suppose we say, then, a thousand pounds if you show us the present hiding-place of Fu-Manchu, the payment to be in no way subject to whether we profit by your information or not?”

Abel Slattin shrugged his shoulders, racially, and returned to the armchair which he had just quitted.  He reseated himself, placing his hat and cane upon my writing-table.

“A little agreement in black and white?” he suggested smoothly.

Smith raised himself up out of the white cane chair, and, bending forward over a corner of the table, scribbled busily upon a sheet of notepaper with my fountain-pen.

The while he did so, I covertly studied our visitor.  He lay back in the armchair, his heavy eyelids lowered deceptively.  He was a thought overdressed—­a big man, dark-haired and well groomed, who toyed with a monocle most unsuitable to his type.  During the preceding conversation, I had been vaguely surprised to note Mr. Abel Slattin’s marked American accent.

Sometimes, when Slattin moved, a big diamond which he wore upon the third finger of his right hand glittered magnificently.  There was a sort of bluish tint underlying the dusky skin, noticeable even in his hands but proclaiming itself significantly in his puffy face and especially under the eyes.  I diagnosed a laboring valve somewhere in the heart system.