ghts grotesquely
turned upon the murdered man's gold tooth.

Vague creakings from within the house, sounds as though of stealthy
footsteps upon the stairs, set my nerves tingling; but Nayland Smith gave
no sign, and I knew that my imagination was magnifying these ordinary night
sounds out of all proportion to their actual significance. Leaves rustled
faintly outside the window at my back: I construed their sibilant whispers
into the dreaded name--_Fu-Manchu_--_Fu-Manchu_--_Fu-Manchu_!

So wore on the night; and, when the ticking clock hollowly boomed the
hour of one, I almost leapt out of my chair, so highly strung were my
nerves, and so appallingly did the sudden clangour beat upon them.
Smith, like a man of stone, showed no sign. He was capable of so
subduing his constitutionally high-strung temperament, at times, that
temporarily he became immune from human dreads. On such occasion he
would be icily cool amid universal panic; but, his object
accomplished, I have seen him in such a state of collapse, that utter
nervous exhaustion is the only term by which I can describe it.

_Tick_-_tick_-_tick_-_tick_ went the clock, and, my heart still
thumping noisily in my breast, I began to count the tickings; _one_,
_two_, _three_, _four_, _five_, and so on to a hundred, and from one
hundred to many hundreds.

Then, out from the confusion of minor noises, a new, arresting sound
detached itself. I ceased my counting; no longer I noted the
_tick_-_tick_ of the clock, nor the vague creakings, rustlings and
whispers. I saw Smith, shadowly, raise his hand in warning--in
needless warning; for I was almost holding my breath in an effort of
acute listening.

From high up in the house this new sound came--from above the topmost
rooms, it seemed, up under the roof; a regular squeaking, oddly
familiar, yet elusive. Upon it followed a very soft and muffled thud;
then a metallic sound as of a rusty hinge in motion; then a new
silence, pregnant with a thousand possibilities more eerie than any
clamour.

My mind was rapidly at work. Lighting the topmost landing of the house
was a sort of glazed trap, evidently set in the floor of a loft-like
place extending over the entire building. Somewhere in the red-tiled
roof above, there presumably existed a corresponding skylight or
lantern.

So I argued; and, ere I had come to any proper decision, another
sound, more intimate, came to interrupt me.

This time I could be in no doubt; some one