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The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu | Sax Rohmer | |
The Wire Jacket |
Page 5 of 6 |
Dr. Fu-Manchu was speaking! "I have asked you," came with ever-increasing clearness (Smith had begun to turn the knob), "to reveal to me the name of your correspondent in Nan-Yang. I have suggested that he may be the Mandarin Yen-Sun-Yat, but you have declined to confirm me. Yet I know" (Smith had the door open a good three inches and was peering in) "that some official, some high official, is a traitor. Am I to resort again to the question to learn his name?" Ice seemed to enter my veins at the unseen inquisitor's intonation of the words "the question." This was the Twentieth Century, yet there, in that damnable room . . . Smith threw the door open. Through a sort of haze, born mostly of horror, but not entirely, I saw Eltham, stripped to the waist and tied, with his arms upstretched, to a rafter in the ancient ceiling. A Chinaman who wore a slop-shop blue suit and who held an open knife in his hand, stood beside him. Eltham was ghastly white. The appearance of his chest puzzled me momentarily, then I realized that a sort of tourniquet of wire-netting was screwed so tightly about him that the flesh swelled out in knobs through the mesh. There was blood-- "God in heaven!" screamed Smith frenziedly--"they have the wire-jacket on him! Shoot down that damned Chinaman, Petrie! Shoot! Shoot!" |
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The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu Sax Rohmer |
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