We had not gone far before we came to the blind beggar.  He was sitting by number fourteen with a sign on his breast, grinding industriously at a small barrel organ before him on which rested a tin cup.

We passed him and Kennedy took out a coin from his pocket and dropped it into the cup.  As he did so, he thrust his hand into the cup and quickly took out a piece of paper which he palmed.

The blind beggar thanked and blessed us, and we dodged into a doorway where Kennedy opened the paper:  “Wu Fang gone out.”

“What shall we do?” I asked.

“Go in anyhow,” decided Kennedy quickly.

We left the shelter of the doorway and walked boldly up to the door.  Deftly Kennedy forced it and we entered.

We had scarcely mounted the stairs to the den of the Serpent, when a servant in a back room, hearing a noise, stuck his head in the door.  Kennedy and I made a dash at him and quickly overpowered him, snapping the bracelets on his wrists.

“Watch him, Walter,” directed Craig as he made his way into the back room.

. . . . . . .

In the devious plots and schemes of Wu Fang, his nefarious work had brought him into contact not only with criminals of the lowest order but with those high up in financial and diplomatic circles.

Thus it happened that at such a crisis as Kennedy had brought about for him Wu had suddenly been called out of the city and had received an order from a group of powerful foreign agents known secretly as the Intelligence Office to meet an emissary at a certain rocky promontory on the Connecticut shore of Long Island Sound the very day after Kennedy’s little affair with him in the laboratory and the day before the letter from Washington arrived.

Though he was mortally afraid of Kennedy’s pursuit, there was nothing to do but obey this imperative summons.  Quietly he slipped out of town, the more readily when he realized that the summons would take him not far from the millionaire cottage colony where Elaine had her summer home, which, however, she had not yet opened.

There, on the rocky shore, he sat gazing out at the waves, waiting, when suddenly, from around the promontory, came a boat rowed by two stalwart sailors.  It carried as passengers two dark-complexioned, dark-haired men, foreigners evidently, though carefully dressed so as to conceal both their identity and nationality.

As the boat came up to a strip of sandy beach among the rocks, the sailors held it while their two passengers jumped out.  Then they rowed away as quickly as they had come.

The two mysterious strangers saluted Wu.

“We are under orders from the Intelligence Office,” introduced one who seemed to be the leader, “to get this American, Kennedy.”

A subtle smile overspread Wu’s face.  He said nothing but this adventure promised to serve more than one end.  “Information has just come to us,” the stranger went on, “that Kennedy has invented a new wireless automatic torpedo.  Already a letter is on its way informing him that it has been accepted by the Navy.”