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*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RETURN OF DR. FU-MANCHU *** Produced by Alan Johns, and David Widger



THE RETURN OF DR. FU-MANCHU


By Sax Rohmer





CONTENTS


CHAPTER I.   A MIDNIGHT SUMMONS

CHAPTER II.   ELTHAM VANISHES

CHAPTER III.   THE WIRE JACKET

CHAPTER IV.   THE CRY OF A NIGHTHAWK

CHAPTER V.   THE NET

CHAPTER VI.   UNDER THE ELMS

CHAPTER VII.   ENTER MR. ABEL SLATTIN

CHAPTER VIII.   DR. FU-MANCHU STRIKES

CHAPTER IX.   THE CLIMBER

CHAPTER X.   THE CLIMBER RETURNS

CHAPTER XI.   THE WHITE PEACOCK

CHAPTER XII.   DARK EYES LOOKED INTO MINE

CHAPTER XIII.   THE SACRED ORDER

CHAPTER XIV.   THE COUGHING HORROR

CHAPTER XV.   BEWITCHMENT

CHAPTER XVI.   THE QUESTING HANDS

CHAPTER XVII.   ONE DAY IN RANGOON

CHAPTER XVIII.   THE SILVER BUDDHA

CHAPTER XIX.   DR. FU-MANCHU’S LABORATORY

CHAPTER XX.   THE CROSS BAR

CHAPTER XXI.   CRAGMIRE TOWER

CHAPTER XXII.   THE MULATTO

CHAPTER XXIII.   A CRY ON THE MOOR

CHAPTER XXIV.   STORY OF THE GABLES

CHAPTER XXV.   THE BELLS

CHAPTER XXVI.   THE FIERY HAND

CHAPTER XXVII.   THE NIGHT OF THE RAID

CHAPTER XXVIII.     THE SAMURAI’S SWORD

CHAPTER XXIX.   THE SIX GATES

CHAPTER XXX.   THE CALL OF THE EAST

CHAPTER XXXI.   "MY SHADOW LIES UPON YOU”

CHAPTER XXXII.   THE TRAGEDY

CHAPTER XXXIII.   THE MUMMY





CHAPTER I. A MIDNIGHT SUMMONS

“When did you last hear from Nayland Smith?” asked my visitor.

I paused, my hand on the syphon, reflecting for a moment.

“Two months ago,” I said; “he’s a poor correspondent and rather soured, I fancy.”

“What—a woman or something?”

“Some affair of that sort. He’s such a reticent beggar, I really know very little about it.”

I placed a whisky and soda before the Rev. J. D. Eltham, also sliding the tobacco jar nearer to his hand. The refined and sensitive face of the clergy-man offered no indication of the truculent character of the man. His scanty fair hair, already gray over the temples, was silken and soft-looking; in appearance he was indeed a typical English churchman; but in China he had been known as “the fighting missionary,” and had fully deserved the title. In fact, this peaceful-looking gentleman had directly brought about the Boxer Risings!

“You know,” he said, in his clerical voice, but meanwhile stuffing tobacco into an old pipe with fierce energy, “I have often wondered, Petrie—I have never left off wondering—”

“What?”

“That accursed Chinaman! Since the cellar place beneath the site of the burnt-out cottage in Dulwich Village—I have wondered more than ever.”

He lighted his pipe and walked to the hearth to throw the match in the grate.

“You see,” he continued, peering across at me in his oddly nervous way, “one never knows, does one? If I thought that Dr. Fu-Manchu lived; if I seriously suspected that that stupendous intellect, that wonderful genius, Petrie, er—” he hesitated characteristically—“survived, I should feel it my duty—”

“Well?” I said, leaning my elbows on the table and smiling slightly.

“If that Satanic genius were not indeed destroyed, then the peace of the world, may be threatened anew at any moment!”

He was becoming excited, shooting out his jaw in the truculent manner I knew, and snapping his fingers to emphasize his words; a man composed of the oddest complexities that ever dwelt beneath a clerical frock.

“He may have got back to China, Doctor!” he cried, and his eyes had the fighting glint in them. “Could you rest in peace if you thought that he lived? Should you not fear for your life every time that a night-call took you out alone? Why, man alive, it is only two years since he was here among us, since we were searching every shadow for those awful green eyes! What became of his band of assassins—his stranglers, his dacoits, his damnable poisons and insects and what-not—the army of creatures—”

He paused, taking a drink.

“You—” he hesitated diffidently—“searched in Egypt with Nayland Smith, did you not?”

I nodded.

“Contradict me if I am wrong,” he continued; “but my impression is that you were searching for the girl—the girl—Karamaneh, I think she was called?”

“Yes,” I replied shortly; “but we could find no trace—no trace.”

“You—er—were interested?”

“More than I knew,” I replied, “until I realized that I had—lost her.”

“I never met Karamaneh, but from your account, and from others, she was quite unusually—”

“She was very beautiful,” I said, and stood up, for I was anxious to terminate that phase of the conversation.

Eltham regarded me sympathetically; he knew something of my search with Nayland Smith for the dark-eyed, Eastern girl who had brought romance into my drab life; he knew that I treasured my memories of her as I loathed and abhorred those of the fiendish, brilliant Chinese doctor who had been her master.

Eltham began to pace up and down the rug, his pipe bubbling furiously; and something in the way he carried his head reminded me momentarily of Nayland Smith. Certainly, between this pink-faced clergyman, with his deceptively mild appearance, and the gaunt, bronzed,

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