Читать книгу President Fu Manchu - Arthur Henry Ward - Страница 8

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“What’s this?” muttered Nayland Smith hoarsely.

The car was pulled up. They were in sight of the woods skirting Weaver’s Farm. Night had fallen, and although the violence of the storm had abated there was a great eerie darkness over the snow-covered landscape.

Parties of men carrying torches and hurricane lanterns moved like shadows through the trees!

Smith sprang out onto a faintly discernible track, Mark Hepburn close behind him. They began to run towards the woods, and presently a man who peered about among the silvered bushes turned.

“What has happened?” Smith demanded breathlessly.

The man, whose bearing suggested military training, hesitated, holding a hurricane lamp aloft and staring hard at the speaker. But something in Smith’s authoritative manner brought a change of expression.

“We are federal agents,” said Mark Hepburn. “What’s going on here?”

“Dr. Orwin Prescott has disappeared!”

Nayland Smith clutched Hepburn’s shoulder: Mark could feel how his fingers quivered.

“My God, Hepburn,” he whispered, “we are too late!”

Clenching his fists, he turned and began to race back to the car. Mark Hepburn exchanged a few words with the man to whom they had spoken and then doubled after Nayland Smith.

They had been compelled by the violence of the blizzard to proceed by rail to Buffalo; the military plane had been forced down by heavy snow twenty miles from the landing place selected. At Buffalo they had had further bad news from Lieutenant Johnson.

Crowning the daring getaway of Mrs. Adair, James Richet, whose arrest had been ordered by Mark Hepburn, had vanished....

And now they were plowing a way along the drive which led up to Weaver’s Farm, a white frame house with green shutters, sitting far back from the road. A survival of Colonial New England, it had stood there, outpost of the white man’s progress in days when the red man still hunted the woods and lakes, trading beads for venison and maple sugar. Successive generations had modernized it so that today it was a twentieth-century home equipped from cellar to garret with every possible domestic convenience.

The door was wide open; and in the vestibule, with its old prints and atmosphere of culture, a tall, singularly thin man stood on the mat talking to a little white-haired old lady. He held a very wide-brimmed hat in his hand and constantly stamped snow from his boots. His face was gloomily officious. Members of the domestic staff might dimly be seen peering down from an upper landing. Unrest, fear, reigned in this normally peaceful household.

The white-haired lady started nervously as Mark Hepburn stepped forward.

“I am Captain Hepburn,” he said. “I think you are expecting me. Is this Miss Lakin?”

“I am glad you are here, Captain Hepburn,” said the little lady, with a frightened smile. She held out a small, plump, but delicate hand. “I am Elsie Frayne, Sarah Lakin’s friend and companion.”

“I am afraid,” Hepburn replied, “we come too late. This is Federal Officer Smith. We have met with every kind of obstacle on our way.”

“Miss Frayne,” rapped Smith in his staccato fashion, “I must put a call through immediately. Where is the telephone?”

Miss Frayne, suddenly quite at ease with these strange invaders out of the night, smiled wanly.

“I regret to say, Mr. Smith, that our telephone was cut off some hours ago.”

“Ah!” murmured Smith, and began tugging at the lobe of his left ear, a habit which Hepburn had come to recognize as evidence of intense concentration. “That explains a lot.” He stared about him, his disturbing glance finally focusing upon the face of the thin man.

“Who are you?” he snapped abruptly.

“I’m Deputy Sheriff Black,” was the prompt but gloomy answer. “I have had orders to protect Weaver’s Farm.”

“I know it. They were my orders—and a pretty mess you’ve made of it.”

The local officer bristled indignantly. He resented the irritable, peremptory manners of this G man; in fact Deputy Sheriff Black had never been in favor of federal interference with county matters.

“A man can only do his duty, Mr. Smith,” he answered angrily, “and I have done mine. Dr. Prescott slipped out some time after dusk this evening. Nobody saw him go. Nobody knows why he went or where he went. I may add that although I may be responsible there are federal men on this job as well, and not one of them knows any more than I know.”

“Where is Miss Lakin?”

“Out with a search party down at the lake.”

“Sarah has such courage,” murmured Miss Frayne. “I wouldn’t go outside the house tonight for anything in the world.”

Mark Hepburn turned to her.

“Is there any indication,” he asked, “that Dr. Prescott went that way?”

“Mr. Walsh, a federal agent who arrived here two hours ago, discovered tracks leading in the direction of the lake.”

“John Walsh is our man,” said Hepburn, turning to Smith. “Do you want to make any inquiries here, or shall we head for the lake?”

Nayland Smith was staring abstractedly at Miss Frayne, and now:

“At what time, exactly,” he asked, “was your telephone disconnected?”

“At five minutes after three,” Deputy Sheriff Black’s somber tones interpolated. “There are men at work now trying to trace the break.”

“Who last saw Dr. Prescott?”

“Sarah,” Miss Frayne replied—“that is, so far as we know.”

“Where was he and what was he doing?”

“He was in the library writing letters.”

“Were these letters posted?”

“No, Mr. Smith, they are still on the desk.”

“Was it dark at this time?”

“Yes. Dr. Prescott—he is Miss Lakin’s cousin, you know—had lighted the reading lamp, so Sarah told me.”

“It was alight when I arrived,” growled Deputy Sheriff Black.

“When did you arrive?” Smith asked.

“Twenty minutes after it was suspected Dr. Prescott had left the house.”

“Where were you prior to that time?”

“Out in the road. I had been taking reports from the men on duty.”

“Has anyone touched those letters since they were written?”

“No one, Mr. Smith,” the gentle voice of Miss Frayne replied.

Nayland Smith turned to Deputy Sheriff Black.

“See that no one enters the library,” he snapped, “until I return. I want to look over the room in which Dr. Prescott slept.”

Deputy Sheriff Black nodded tersely and crossed the vestibule.

But even as Nayland Smith turned toward the stair, a deep feminine voice came out of the night beyond the entrance doors, which had not been closed. The remorseless wind was threatening to rise again, howling wanly through the woods like a phantom wolf pack. Flakes of fine snow fluttered in.

“He has been kidnapped, Mr. Walsh—because of what he knew. His tracks end on the shore of the lake. It’s frozen over ... but there are no more tracks.”

And now the speaker came in, followed by two men carrying lanterns; a tall, imperious woman with iron-gray hair, aristocratic features, and deep-set flashing eyes. She paused, looking about her with a slow smile of inquiry. One of the two men saluted Hepburn.

“My name is Smith,” said Federal Officer 56, “and this is Captain Hepburn. You are Miss Lakin, Dr. Orwin Prescott’s cousin? It was my business, Miss Lakin, to protect him. I fear I have failed.”

“I fear it also,” she replied, watching him steadily with her fine grave eyes. “Orwin has gone. They have him. He came here for rest and security. He always came here before any important public engagement. Very soon now at Carnegie Hall is the debate with Harvey Bragg.” (She was very impressive, this grande dame of Old America.) “He had learned something, Mr. Smith—heaven knows I wish I shared his knowledge—which would have sent Bluebeard back forever to his pinewoods.”

“He had!” snapped Smith grimly.

He reached out a long, leather-clad arm and gripped Miss Lakin’s shoulder. For a moment she was startled—this man’s electric gestures were disturbing—then, meeting that penetrating stare, she smiled with sudden confidence.

“Don’t despair, Miss Lakin. All is not lost. Others know what Dr. Prescott knew——”

At which moment somewhere a telephone bell rang!

“They’ve mended the line,” came the gloomy voice of Deputy Sheriff Black, raised now on a note of excitement.

He appeared at a door on the right of the vestibule.

“All incoming calls are covered,” snapped Smith, “as you were advised?”

“Yes.”

“Who is calling?”

“I don’t know,” the deputy sheriff replied, “but it’s someone asking for Sir Denis Nayland Smith.”

He looked in bewilderment from face to face. Nayland Smith stared at Miss Lakin, smiled grimly and walked into a long, low library, a book-lined room with a great log fire burning at one end of it. The receiver of a telephone which stood upon a table near the fire was detached from its rest.

Someone closed the outer door, and a sudden silence came in that cozy room where the logs crackled. Sarah Lakin stood at the threshold, watching with calm, grave eyes. Mark Hepburn stared in over her shoulder.

“Yes,” snapped Smith; “who is speaking?”

There was a momentary silence.

“Is it necessary, Sir Denis, for me to introduce myself?”

“Quite unnecessary, Dr. Fu Manchu! But it is strangely unlike you to show your hand so early in the game. You are outside familiar territory. So am I. But this time, Doctor, by God we shall break you.”

“I trust not, Sir Denis; so much is at stake: the fate of this nation, perhaps of the world—and there are bunglers who fail to appreciate my purpose. Dr. Orwin Prescott, for instance, has been very ill-advised.”

Nayland Smith turned his head towards the door, nodding significantly to Mark Hepburn; some trick of the shaded lights made his lean, tanned face look very drawn, very tired.

“Since you have a certain manuscript in your possession, I assume it to be only a question of time for you to learn why the voice of the Holy Thorn became suddenly silent. In the Father’s interests and in the interests of Dr. Prescott, I advise you to consider carefully your next step, Sir Denis——”

Nayland Smith’s heart pulsed a fraction faster—Orwin Prescott was not dead!

“The abbot’s eloquence is difficult to restrain—and I respect courage. But someday I may cry in the words of your English King—Henry the Second, was it not?—‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest ...’ My cry would be answered—nor should I feel called upon to walk, a barefooted penitent, to pray at the Father Abbot’s tomb beside his Tower of the Holy Thorn.”

Nayland Smith made no reply. He sat there, motionless, listening.

“We enter upon the last phase, Sir Denis ...”

The guttural voice ceased.

Smith replaced the receiver, sprang up, turned.

“That was a cut-in on the line,” he snapped. “Quick, Hepburn! the nearest phone in the neighborhood: Check up that call if you can.”

“Right.” Mark Hepburn, his jaw grimly squared, buttoned up his coat.

Sarah Lakin watched Nayland Smith fascinatedly.

“Hell-for-leather, Hepburn! At any cost you must get through to Abbot Donegal tonight. Dr. Fu Manchu warns only once....”