“Mr. Henderson!” I cried, “relight the lantern and take charge of Lord Southery.  Here is my flask on the floor.  I rely upon you.”

Smith’s revolver spoke again as I went bounding up the stair.  Black against the square of moonlight I saw him stagger, I saw him fall.  As he fell, for the third time, I heard the crack of his revolver.

Instantly I was at his side.  Somewhere along the black aisle beneath the trees receding footsteps pattered.

“Are you hurt, Smith?” I cried anxiously.

He got upon his feet.

“He has a dacoit with him,” he replied, and showed me the long curved knife which he held in his hand, a full inch of the blade bloodstained.  “A near thing for me, Petrie.”

I heard the whir of a restarted motor.

“We have lost him,” said Smith.

“But we have saved Lord Southery,” I said.  “Fu-Manchu will credit us with a skill as great as his own.”

“We must get to the car,” Smith muttered, “and try to overtake them.  Ugh! my left arm is useless.”

“It would be mere waste of time to attempt to overtake them,” I argued, “for we have no idea in which direction they will proceed.”

“I have a very good idea,” snapped Smith.  “Stradwick Hall is less than ten miles from the coast.  There is only one practicable means of conveying an unconscious man secretly from here to London.”

“You think he meant to take him from here to London?”

“Prior to shipping him to China; I think so.  His clearing-house is probably on the Thames.”

“A boat?”

“A yacht, presumably, is lying off the coast in readiness. 
Fu-Manchu may even have designed to ship him direct to China.”

Lord Southery, a bizarre figure, my traveling coat wrapped about him, and supported by his solicitor, who was almost as pale as himself, emerged from the vault into the moonlight.

“This is a triumph for you, Smith,” I said.

The throb of Fu-Manchu’s car died into faintness and was lost in the night’s silence.

“Only half a triumph,” he replied.  “But we still have another chance—­ the raid on his house.  When will the word come from Karamaneh?”

Southery spoke in a weak voice.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “it seems I am raised from the dead.”

It was the weirdest moment of the night wherein we heard that newly buried man speak from the mold of his tomb.

“Yes,” replied Smith slowly, “and spared from the fate of Heaven alone knows how many men of genius.  The yellow society lacks a Southery, but that Dr. Fu-Manchu was in Germany three years ago I have reason to believe; so that, even without visiting the grave of your great Teutonic rival, who suddenly died at about that time, I venture to predict that they have a Von Homber.  And the futurist group in China knows how to make men work!”

CHAPTER XXIV