“You will not fail me, Excellency — already for my bias to the Master I am reduced in merit.”

I put the scroll into my pocket and went out, for a motorcar had come into the park, and I knew that Marquis had arrived.

I met Sir Henry and the superintendent in the long corridor; they had been looking in at my interview through the elevated grating.

“Marquis,” I cried, “the judge was right to cut short the criminal trial and issue a lunacy warrant.  This creature is the maddest lunatic in this whole asylum.  The human mind is capable of any absurdity.”

Sir Henry looked at me with a queer ironical smile.

“The judge was wrong,” he said.  “The creature, as you call him, is as sane as any of us.”

“Then you believe this amazing story?” I said.

“I believe Rodman was found at daylight dead on the hearth, with practically every bone in his body crushed,” he replied.

“Certainly,” I said.  “We all know that is true.  But why was he killed?’

Again Sir Henry regarded me with his ironical smile.

“Perhaps,” he drawled, “there is some explanation in the report in your pocket, to the Monastic Head.  It’s only a theory, you know.”

He smiled, showing his white, even teeth.

We went into the superintendent’s room, and sat down by a smoldering fire of coals in the gate.  I handed Marquis the roll of vellum.  It was in one of the Shan dialects.  He read it aloud.  With the addition of certain formal expressions, it contained precisely the Oriental’s testimony before the court, and no more.

“Ah!” he said in his curiously inflected Oxford voice.

And he held the scroll out to the heat of the fire.  The vellum baked slowly, and as it baked, the black Chinese characters faded out and faint blue ones began to appear.

Marquis read the secret message in his emotionless drawl: 

“`The American is destroyed, and his accursed work is destroyed with him.  Send the news to Bangkok and west to Burma.  The treasures of India are saved."’

I cried out in astonishment.

“An assassin!  The creature was an assassin!  He killed Rodman simply by crushing him in his arms!”

Sir Henry’s drawl lengthened.

“It’s Lal Gupta,” he said, “the cleverest Oriental in the whole of Asia.  The jewel-traders sent him to watch Rodman, and to kill him if he was ever able to get his formulae worked out.  They must have paid him an incredible sum.”

“And that is why the creature attached himself to Rodman!” I said.

“Surely,” replied Sir Henry.  “He brought that bronze Romulus carrying off the Sabine woman and staged the supernatural to work out his plan and to save his life.  I knew the bronze as soon as I got my eye on it — old Franz Josef gave it as a present to Mahadal in Bombay for matching up some rubies.”

I swore bitterly.