cy in which the activities of Dr. Fu-Manchu were merely
a part. Hale blundered on to this stupendous business; and from what I
have gathered from Beeton and what I have seen for myself, it is
evident that in yonder coffer"--he pointed to the brass chest standing
hard by--"Hale got hold of something indispensable to the success of
this vast Yellow conspiracy. That he was followed here, to the very
hotel, by agents of this mystic Unknown is evident. But," he added
grimly, "they have failed in their object!"

A thousand outrageous possibilities fought for precedence in my mind.

"Smith!" I cried, "the half-caste woman whom I saw in the hotel ..."

Nayland Smith shrugged his shoulders.

"Probably, as M. Samarkan suggests, an _ayah!_" he said; but there was
an odd note in his voice and an odd look in his eyes.

"Then again, I am almost certain that Hale's warning concerning 'the
man with the limp' was no empty one. Shall you open the brass chest?"

"At present, decidedly _no_. Hale's fate renders his warning one that
I dare not neglect. For I was with him when he died; and they cannot
know how much _I_ know. How did he die? How did he die? How was the
Flower of Silence introduced into his closely guarded room?"

"The Flower of Silence?"

Smith laughed shortly and unmirthfully.

"I was once sent for," he said, "during the time that I was stationed
in Upper Burma, to see a stranger--a sort of itinerant Buddhist priest,
so I understood, who had desired to communicate some message to me
personally. He was dying--in a dirty hut on the outskirts of Manipur,
up in the hills. When I arrived I say at a glance that the man was a
Tibetan monk. He must have crossed the river and come down through
Assam; but the nature of his message I never knew. He had lost the
power of speech! He was gurgling, inarticulate, just like poor Hale.
A few moments after my arrival he breathed his last. The fellow who
had guided me to the place bent over him--I shall always remember the
scene--then fell back as though he had stepped upon an adder.

"'He holds the Flower Silence in his hand!' he cried--'the Si-Fan! the
Si-Fan!'--and bolted from the hut."

"When I went to examine the dead man, sure enough he held in one hand
a little crumpled spray of flowers. I did not touch it with my fingers
naturally, but I managed to loop a piece of twine around the stem,
and by that means I gingerly removed the flowers and carried them to
an orchid-hunter of