upon its tide...
Dead men hear her secret.
Shoa, the ghoul....
Shoa, the evil woman. Death sits at her elbow.
Black, the vultures flock about her....
Lo, the Yellow River leaps forth from the nostrils
of the mountain god."

Meanwhile Kerry, lying motionless at the feet of Sam Tuk was doing some
hard and rapid thinking. He had recovered consciousness a few moments
before Mrs. Sin had come into the vault from the inner room. There were
those, Seton Pasha among them, who would have regarded the groan and the
convulsive movements of Kerry's body with keen suspicion. And because
the Chief Inspector suffered from no illusions respecting the genius of
Sin Sin Wa, the apparent failure of the one-eyed Chinaman to recognize
these preparations for attack nonplussed the Chief Inspector. His
outstanding vice as an investigator was the directness of his own
methods and of his mental outlook, so that he frequently experienced
great difficulty in penetrating to the motives of a tortuous brain such
as that of Sin Sin Wa.

That Sin Sin Wa thought him to be still unconscious he did not believe.
He was confident that his tactics had deceived the Jewess, but he
entertained an almost superstitious respect for the cleverness of the
Chinaman. The trick with the ball of leaf opium was painfully fresh in
his memory.

Kerry, in common with many members of the Criminal Investigation
Department, rarely carried firearms. He was a man with a profound belief
in his bare hands--aided when necessary by his agile feet. At the
moment that Sin Sin Wa had checked the woman's murderous and half insane
outburst Kerry had been contemplating attack. The sudden change of
language on the part of the Chinaman had arrested him in the act;
and, realizing that he was listening to a confession which placed the
hangman's rope about the neck of Mrs. Sin, he lay still and wondered.

Why had Sin Sin Wa forced his wife to betray herself? To clear Mareno?
To clear Mrs. Irvin--or to save his own skin?

It was a frightful puzzle for Kerry. Then--where was Kazmah? That Mrs.
Irvin, probably in a drugged condition, lay somewhere in that mysterious
inner room Kerry felt fairly sure. His maltreated skull was humming like
a bee-hive and aching intensely, but the man was tough as men are
made, and he could not only think clearly, but was capable of swift and
dangerous action.

He believed that he could tackle the Chinaman with fair prospects of
succ