"Gipsy girl!" I whispered, glancing rapidly at Smith.
"I think you are right, Doctor," said Weymouth with his slow smile;
"it was Karamaneh. She asked him the way to somewhere or other and got
him to write it upon a loose page of his notebook, so that she should
not forget it."
"You hear that, Petrie?" rapped Smith.
"I hear it," I replied, "but I don't see any special significance in
the fact."
"I do!" rapped Smith; "I didn't sit up the greater part of last night
thrashing my weary brains for nothing! But I am going to the British
Museum to-day, to confirm a certain suspicion." He turned to Weymouth.
"Did Burke go back?" he demanded abruptly.
"He returned hidden under the empty boxes," was the reply. "Oh! you
never saw a man in such a funk in all your life!"
"He may have good reasons," I said.
"He has good reasons!" replied Nayland Smith grimly; "if that man
really possesses information inimical to the safety of Fu-Manchu, he
can only escape doom by means of a miracle similar to that which has
hitherto protected you and me."
"Burke insists," said Weymouth at this point, that something comes
almost every night after dusk, slinking about the house--it's an old
farmhouse, I understand; and on two or three occasions he has been
awakened (fortunately for him he is a light sleeper) by sounds of
coughing immediately outside his window. He is a man who sleeps with a
pistol under his pillow, and more than once, on running to the window,
he has had a vague glimpse of some creature leaping down from the
tiles of the roof, which slopes up to his room, into the flower beds
below . . ."
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