. . . . . . .

Meanwhile Long Sin had made his way to the automobile where his master, Wu, waited impatiently.

“Did you get it?” asked Wu eagerly.

Long Sin showed him the box.

“Hurry, master!” he cried breathlessly, leaping into the car and struggling to take off the helmet as they drove away.  “They may be here—­at any moment.”

The machine was off like a shot and even if we had been able to follow, we could not now have caught it.

Back in Wu’s sumptuous apartment, later, Wu and his slave, Long Sin, after their hurried ride, dismissed all the servants and placed the little box on the table.  Wu rose and locked the door.

Then, together, they took a sharp instrument and tried to pry off the lid of the box.

The lid flew off.  They gazed in eagerly.

Inside was a smaller box, which Wu seized eagerly and opened.

There, on the plush cushion lay merely a round knobbed ring!

Was this the end of their great expectations?  Were Bennett’s millions merely mythical?

The two stared at each other in chagrin.

Wu was the first to speak.

“Where there should have been seven million dollars,” he muttered to himself, “why is there only a mystic ring?”

CHAPTER II

THE CRYPTIC RING

Kennedy had been engaged for some time in the only work outside of the Dodge case which he had consented to take for weeks.

Our old friend, Dr. Leslie, the Coroner, had appealed to him to solve a very ticklish point in a Tong murder case which had set all Chinatown agog.  It was, indeed, a very bewildering case.  A Chinaman named Li Chang, leader of the Chang Wah Tong, had been poisoned, but so far no one had been able to determine what poison it was or even to prove that there had been a poison, except for the fact that the man was dead, and Kennedy had taken the thing up in a great measure because of the sudden turn in the Dodge case which had brought us into such close contact with the Chinese.

I had been watching Kennedy with interest, for the Tong wars always make picturesque newspaper stories, when a knock at the door announced the arrival of Dr. Leslie, anxious for some result.

“Have you been able to find out anything yet?” he greeted Kennedy eagerly as Craig looked up from his microscope.

Kennedy turned and nodded.  “Your dead man was murdered by means of aconite, of which, you know, the active principle is the deadly alkaloid aconitine.”

Craig pulled down from the shelf above him one of his well-thumbed standard works on toxicology.  He turned the pages and read: 

“Pure aconite is probably the most actively poisonous substance with which we are acquainted.  It does not produce any decidedly characteristic post-mortem appearances, and, in fact, there is no reliable chemical test to prove its presence.  The chances of its detection in the body after death are very slight.”