n and
gloom, Chief Inspector Kerry, carrying an irritable toy spaniel, came
out of a turning which forms a V with Limehouse Canal, into a narrow
street which runs parallel with the Thames. He had arrived at the
conclusion that the neighborhood was sown so thickly with detectives
that one could not throw a stone without hitting one. Yet Sin Sin Wa had
quietly left his abode and had disappeared from official ken.

Three times within the past ten minutes the spaniel had tried to
bite Kerry, nor was Kerry blind to the amusement which his burden had
occasioned among the men of K Division whom he had met on his travels.
Finally, as he came out into the riverside lane, the ill-tempered little
animal essayed a fourth, and successful, attempt, burying his wicked
white teeth in the Chief Inspector's wrist.

Kerry hooked his finger into the dog's collar, swung the yapping animal
above his head, and hurled it from him into the gloom and rain mist.

"Hell take the blasted thing!" he shouted. "I'm done with it!"

He tenderly sucked his wounded wrist, and picking up his cane, which he
had dropped, he looked about him and swore savagely. Of Seton Pasha he
had had news several times during the day, and he was aware that the
Home office agent was not idle. But to that old rivalry which had leapt
up anew when he had seen Seton near Kennington oval had succeeded a
sort of despair; so that now he would have welcomed the information
that Seton had triumphed where he had failed. A furious hatred of the
one-eyed Chinaman around whom he was convinced the mystery centred had
grown up within his mind. At that hour he would gladly have resigned his
post and sacrificed his pension to know that Sin Sin Wa was under lock
and key. His outlook was official, and accordingly peculiar. He regarded
the murder of Sir Lucien Pyne and the flight or abduction of Mrs. Monte
Irvin as mere minor incidents in a case wherein Sin Sin Wa figured as
the chief culprit. Nothing had acted so powerfully to bring about
this conviction in the mind of the Chief Inspector as the inexplicable
disappearance of the Chinaman under circumstances which had apparently
precluded such a possibility.

A whimpering cry came to Kerry's ears; and because beneath the mask of
ferocity which he wore a humane man was concealed: "Flames!" he snapped;
"perhaps I've broken the poor little devil's leg."

Shaking a cascade of water from the brim of his neat bowler, he set off
through the mur