and siphon, saying:

"You have taken your leave early?"

"I am not on leave," he replied, and slowly filled his pipe. "I am on
duty."

"On duty!" I exclaimed. "What, are you moved to London or something?"

"I have got a roving commission, Petrie, and it doesn't rest with me
where I am to-day nor where I shall be to-morrow."

There was something ominous in the words, and, putting down my glass,
its contents untasted, I faced round and looked him squarely in the
eyes. "Out with it!" I said. "What is it all about?"

Smith suddenly stood up and stripped off his coat. Rolling back his
left shirt-sleeve he revealed a wicked-looking wound in the fleshy part
of the forearm. It was quite healed, but curiously striated for an
inch or so around.

"Ever seen one like it?" he asked.

"Not exactly," I confessed. "It appears to have been deeply
cauterized."

"Right! Very deeply!" he rapped. "A barb steeped in the venom of a
hamadryad went in there!"

A shudder I could not repress ran coldly through me at mention of that
most deadly of all the reptiles of the East.

"There's only one treatment," he continued, rolling his sleeve down
again, "and that's with a sharp knife, a match, and a broken cartridge.
I lay on my back, raving, for three days afterwards, in a forest that
stank with malaria, but I should have been lying there now if I had
hesitated. Here's the point. It was not an accident!"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that it was a deliberate attempt on my life, and I am hard upon
the tracks of the man who extracted that venom--patiently, drop by
drop--from the poison-glands of the snake, who prepared that arrow, and
who caused it to be shot at me."

"What fiend is this?"

"A fiend who, unless my calculations are at fault is now in London, and
who regularly wars with pleasant weapons of that kind. Petrie, I have
traveled from Burma not in the interests of the British Government
merely, but in the interests of the entire white race, and I honestly
believe--though I pray I may be wrong--that its survival depends
largely upon the success of my mission."

To say that I was perplexed conveys no idea of the mental chaos created
by these extraordinary statements, for into my humdrum suburban life
Nayland Smith had brought fantasy of the wildest. I did not know what
to think, what to believe.

"I am wasting precious time!" he rapped decisively, and, draining his
glass, he stood up. "I came straight to y