Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 36, No. 4, October 20, 1928

It was ginger-haired, pock-marked Joe Mortimer who loosed the deadly scourge that struck in the darkness.

I

Never, I believe, in all my experience with one of the most desperate criminals in history, have I encountered anything quite so horrible as the Crimson Death. Nor have I now any doubt that the victim of this latest example of Oriental ingenuity was intended to be myself.

It was one of those glorious spring mornings when one feels that it is good to be alive. Breakfast was finished and cleared away, and I was reading my paper by the long leaded-paned window when the boyish face and Chinese eyes of Peter Pennington came round the door.

“Top of the morning, Gray!” he laughed, and settled himself down on the arm of a chair by the fireplace.

“Meditating a day’s hike?” he queried presently, interrupting the rolling of a cigarette to kick my bag of golf-clubs standing propped against the table.

“Gouldie phoned me from my chambers that there was nothing doing,” I answered, “and I decided to take a day off.”

He glanced at the clock on the mantelshelf.

“Sorry, old son,” he rejoined, “but I’m afraid I’ve got to disappoint you. Parsons and Hodges are due here at ten and they’re bringing a chap named Mortimer with them.

“Hard-bitten little devil Mortimer! — but I assure you, Gray, he’s got a yarn that’ll make your hair stand on end. It’s about the umpteenth time we’ve used this place of yours as a conference chamber, but I know you won’t mind. The fact is he knows more than he cares to tell us about a little bloke with a yellow face and the most murderous disposition I’ve met—”

“Meaning Chanda-Lung, of course?”

“True, O, King! Meaning Chanda-Lung.”

A chunk of white ash from his cigarette dropped on to his knee and he brushed it off.

“Lord, Gray!” he continued, talking rapidly. “I’ve been learning a lot these past few weeks. I’ve barged into the lowest haunts of Bermondsey, Whitechapel and Limehouse, disguised as a coal-heaver, Chinese, anything you like. It’s been tremendously interesting, I can tell you.

“Chanda-Lungism, to coin a phrase, is petering out. He came to Europe a year ago, financed by powerful Eastern syndicates. The confidence of a hemisphere was behind him — and he promised ’em quick returns. They got ’em at first, but they can’t get them now.

“We’ve got him running, don’t you see. He daren’t operate from the same place twice.”

I folded my paper and pitched it into a chair.

“That’s why it’s so deucedly difficult to locate him,” I interposed.

“Precisely. This campaign of his to shift the center of commerce across the globe is not just the effort of a dreamer, with all the tricks of the East in his pocket and a few stanch pals gather about him to back him up. It was a world movement — an underworld movement!

“Every lascar that shipped as a stoker on an ocean-going steamer was in it. It was behind the riots in Calcutta, Java, Rangoon. Wu-Chong-Hi, the defeated dictator of Central China, was in it up to the hilt.

“Communism cut no ice in comparison with a menace that had hundreds of millions behind it.

“When you and I came in, the train of mysterious assassinations, that had begun in Lhassa and Tokyo, was continuing here. Scotland Yard couldn’t tackle it; they didn’t know where to start. I think we can claim that we cramped Mr. Chanda-Lung’s style!”

He rose to his feet and began pacing the room, leaving me watching him curiously, wondering where this rare stream of eloquence was going to lead.

I saw him stop to admire a row of blue hyacinths set in earthenware pots along the window sill.

“The patience of the East isn’t quite what it used to be,” he threw back at me. “Interest is dropping off, Java’s quiet, the Calcutta business has petered out — and General Wu-Chong-Hi was blown to blazes in his own train yesterday!”

I moved impatiently.

“You haven’t told me yet where Mortimer comes in.”

He turned and faced me, his back to the window.

“Mortimer, I honestly believe, is part of Chanda-Lung’s last line of attack — one of those renegade Europeans that for one reason and another have sworn allegiance to the Yellow Scorpion.”

I looked up sharply.

“One of the gang?” I gasped.

Pennington nodded.

“According to his own story, he is a chair-mender by trade, and a member of the Chanda-Lung fraternity by accident!”

“You think he’s reliable?”

“That’s what we have to find out. He seems ready to talk about himself; our job is to persuade him to divulge something about Chanda-Lung. I f we can only manage to do that we may be a deal for’arder.”

I could see that Pennington was in one of his optimistic moods. Personally, the cancelling of a golf appointment: and recollections of many vain chases after our arch-bandit, combined to give me a more skeptical outlook.

II

A tap came on the door presently and my landlady announced Inspector Parsons.

Parsons came in, looking more like a lizard than ever in a gray suit and a hard hat. A still shorter man followed, stocky, ginger-haired and pockmarked, surveying every fresh object he met with an air of suspicion. The burly Hodges brought up the rear.

I offered them chairs and they all sat down, the officers perfectly at their ease in a room that had known many similar gatherings, Joe Mortimer perching himself on the very edge of the seat, nursing his cap. I pushed over a box of cigarettes and Sergeant Hodges gave him one before helping himself.

“Cheer up, Joe!” he cried. “Make yourself at home! They’re not goin’ to eat you!”

The cigarettes were cork-tipped and Mortimer, in his confusion, ignited the wrong end by mistake. Trying to rectify the error, he burned his lips and spat into the fender.

Parsons rose suddenly and joined us at the window.

“We’ve got to humor this fellow,” he confided in a low voice. “We can get a lot out of him, provided we handle him properly.”

Leaving I lodges to entertain him, we strolled out into the bedroom.

“How much do you know already?” asked Pennington.

Parsons moistened his lips.

“Born in Camberwell,” he said, reading from a notebook. “Newsvender, boxer, race course tout. Ran away to sea at fourteen, deserted ship at Karachi. Blank here for a couple of years, can’t get him to talk about those! Laborer on dockworks at Singapore. Drifted to China. Joined a pearl-diving outfit bound for New Guinea. Turned gold miner and did time out there for something or other — exact nature not disclosed.

“Home for the war and enlisted Royal Scots. Deserted. Joined Naval Division. Deserted. Highland Light Infantry — and deserted again! Served in France and Gallipoli. Prisoner with the Turks. Escaped—”

“A slippery customer!” commented Pennington under his breath.

“Another blank here,” pursued the inspector, not noticing the interruption. “Turned up in China again four years ago, as servant to Chanda-Lung—”

I whistled softly.

“Did he, by Jove?”

Parsons closed his book.

“Briefly, gentleman,” he continued, looking from one to the other, “that is the history of Mr. Joe Mortimer. A pretty grim record, reading between the lines! After the last episode he came home to Battersea, married and started business as an itinerant mender of chairs.

“Last week, as he will tell you when we go in, he met Chanda-Lung face to face in Epsom. It was not a pleasant interview for Mortimer, as you can imagine. He won’t say why or how he left China. Very possibly he murdered somebody to get away, and Chanda-Lung held that over his head.”

“He was ordered to call at an address in Hoxton,” said Pennington, carrying on at this point. “He went and was given certain things and very definite instructions.

“The things included the usual warning-card bearing the yellow scorpion sign, a jade-handled knife, smeared with the fatal ipoh batang poisoning and carefully sheathed, and a yellow card bearing a name and address. The instructions were to kill Inspector Parsons here within seven days!”

Parsons nodded grimly.

“But for a stroke of luck, my number would have been up by to-night!” he smiled.

“Mortimer got cold feet and went to the police?” I hazarded, vainly trying to connect the shabby, red-haired man in the next room with the desperate adventurer of Parsons’s notebook.

“Hardly that,” said the detective. “Joe was afraid of us — and mortally scared of Chanda-Lung. In his dilemma he went out and got drunk. The Sutton police took him and found the things on him. They called up the Yard and I went down immediately.

“Even then Joe wasn’t talking! He stuck to the tale he’d found the things in a garbage-heap until I persuaded him the crimes that troubled his personal conscience were of no particular interest to us.

“He’s made five consecutive statements since then — and they all read differently; but I’m pinning my faith on the first — the one he got out before he had time to remember what Chanda-Lung had promised to do to him if he split!”

III

We returned to the living room to find Joe Mortimer sitting with his head on his hands and his shifty eyes fixed on the carpet. At the sound of the door closing he sat up with a start.

Hodges was standing back from the window, looking out on a vista of trim-clipped privet hedges and a broad roadway with red tiled pavements and lime trees set on either side at intervals. He turned as we filed in.

“What’s up, Joe?” he demanded in his deep, booming voice of the much-traveled scarecrow in the chair. “Feeling depressed?”

The little man clutched at the green scarf at his throat. His freckled face — lined and yellowed like old parchment — had gone a shade paler than when I first saw him, and the corners of his mouth twitched queerly.

“He’s ’ere, I tell you!” he whispered suddenly, casting a nervous glance around the room. “I can feel ’im lookin’ at me from somewhere. If he knows that I’ve told you, ’e’ll—”

The sergeant crossed and bent over him.

“Who’s here, Joe?” he asked.

“Chanda-Lung!” came the low response. “ ’E ain’t human, sir, straight ’e ain’t. If you’d worked for ’im, same as I ’ave, you’d understand. I’ve seen things in China—”

With a sudden bound he was out of the chair and over by the window, peering out.

Parsons dropped a hand on his shoulder.

“Pull yourself together,” he advised him sternly. “You’re safe enough with us. We’ll look after you.”

“Safe!” echoed Mortimer with fine irony. “There ain’t such a word as far as ’e’s concerned! I’ve worked for ’im, I tell you, and I know. I was a fool to ’ave opened my mouth. I could ’ave told you blokes anything!”

I can see that extraordinary warped figure as I write, the man of many trades and many vicissitudes, in his shabby gray suit, frayed at the cuffs and faded at the knees, clutching at a window sill where hyacinths bloomed, scanning a sun-lit street with terror in his eyes.

What he expected to see there I cannot say. The white-coated milkman with his wagon bore no semblance to the redoubtable master of crime we sought, and there was no one else in sight but an old man being pushed by a nurse in a bath-chair and two children playing with a toy tricycle.

Pennington strode up to him and pulled him round by the fringed ends of a preposterous green scarf that wound round and round his scraggy neck and deputized for a collar and tie.

“What was this address in Hoxton, Joe?” he demanded.

The other shook his head.

“I can’t tell you no more,” he moaned. “Straight I can’t.”

“Can you take us there?” I interposed.

The question seemed to throw him into a greater panic than ever, and he trembled visibly.

“Not for a million pounds!” he asserted. “Not if you was to put in my ’ands!” His manner changed suddenly and he looked me straight in the eyes. “I ain’t afraid of death, guv’nor; I’ve seen it too often. It’s not just plain, ordinary death I’m scared of — knives or a gun — or drownin’ at sea.

“In a way that’s natural; an’ it’s quick. But when ’e kills, it comes to you slowly—’orribly! ’E finds you alone somewhere — in the dark, and lets you feel it comin’ — and when it comes it ain’t finished!”

Pennington nodded.

“Do you know what will happen to you, Joe, if you fail to carry out Chanda-Lung’s commands?” he jerked out quickly.

Mortimer gulped.

“The Crimson Death!” he answered huskily.

We exchanged glances. It was the first definite fact we had elicited that morning.

“And what’s that like, Joe?” boomed out Hodges from the middle of the room.

A wild cry escaped Joe’s lips. The index finger of his right hand, short and stubby and dark as mahogany, indicated a first-floor window of the opposite house. Brought to the window in a body, we saw the vague outline of a head and shoulders vanishing into the inner darkness.

Pennington nudged me.

“Did you see those eyes?” he queried excitedly. “Mortimer was right, old son. That’s Chanda-Lung himself — or I’m a Dutchman. Who lives in that house?”

“People named Henderson. They’re away, I believe. The gardener looks after it.”

He was out of the room and down the stairs like a shot, with Hodges lumbering at his heels. I followed as far as the landing and remembered Parsons. He called to me as I looked back into the room.

“All right, Gray. You carry on. I’ll stop.”

The others were already in the garden of the empty house by the time I caught them. Our insistent knocking bringing no response, Hodges squeezed in by a loose window at the back and admitted us by the side door. I glanced in at the kitchen as I passed.

It was white tiled and beautifully clean; in the scullery at the far end a tap was dripping. Something, protruding just beyond the door that separated these two rooms, caught my attention. It was the sole of a hobnailed boot. In a less tidy place I might not have noticed it.

I slipped back and recoiled in amazement from the huddled form to which the boot was attached — the lifeless corpse of the Henderson’s gardener, with glassy eyes staring up at a very white ceiling and a series of vivid crimson marks around his throat!

For minutes on end I stared at him, rooted to the spot in mute horror. The sound of the others coming down roused me to action.

“There’s nothing there,” Hodges was saying. “You’re certain you saw him, Mr. Pennington? It might have been a trick of Mortimer’s to get us away so that he could bolt.”

“Here!” I called. “Both of you I Quick!”

“What is it?” asked Pennington, coming in at the kitchen door.

“The Crimson Death!” I answered.

It was queer that! I scarcely remembered framing the words — and yet the expression came to me quite glibly. Either this fresh product of the ingenuity of Chanda-Lung was aptly named, or I was merely echoing Mortimer’s words.

Pennington uttered an exclamation and dropped on his knees beside me. Hodges leaned against the door, mopping his forehead.

“Poor devil!” he ejaculated. “I supposed he’s snuffed out?”

Pennington looked up.

“Clean out!” he diagnosed. “Been dead for the past hour or more. Search the top floor again thoroughly, Hodges, we may have missed something. Gray, you nip out into the grounds.”

The words were hardly out of his mouth when a crashing of glass sounded above us, followed by a duller noise outside. We reached the pavement in a bunch, in time to see a long saloon car streaking off into the distance.

It must have come at some mysterious signal from a turning and slowed down for our quarry outside, for a door that had been swinging open was pulled to as we looked.

Hodges jotted down the number and made off for the garage at the corner without a word.

IV

“Well get Parsons,” Pennington sang after him, and we crossed the road together. Leaving him at the telephone in the hall, I pushed on upstairs. The door of the living room was wide open; at first sight the room was empty! I paused on the threshold, puzzled at this fresh development.

Chanda-Lung, for all his uncanny ingenuity, could not have been here too! We had heard him escape and seen the car that helped him! And then I spotted Mortimer’s cap on the floor by my golf-bag, and a yard or so of thick green scarf trailing across the carpet.

Something moved convulsively on the far side of the table, and groaned. I crossed the room, moving cautiously, and stumbled upon the recumbent form of Inspector Parsons.

His fingers clutched at his throat and it was not until I had lifted him into a chair that I noticed there the same chain of crimson marks that I had found on the body at the opposite house.

“He — tricked — me!” he managed to get out. “It was — in — his scarf!” And then his eyes closed.

Pennington came in and we moved him to my bed. I went down and rang up a doctor. By the time I got back the blinds were drawn and the man with the Chinese eyes was experimenting on Parsons with a hypodermic syringe and a selection of strange drugs in a flat aluminium case.

“I think he’s easier,” he said in a low voice. “If we pull him out of this we’ll have a lot to thank old Professor Okura for and his ‘Malay Poisons and their Antidotes!’ ”

He tapped the case.

Bending over Parsons, I was inclined to agree. His breathing was fairly regular and the rash at his throat looked less vivid.

“How did you know which to use?” I asked.

“I didn’t. I glanced through the symptoms in Okura’s little book — and took my chance.”

For the moment his answer staggered me, until I remembered his vast experience of native habits and his previous experiences with Okura’s aluminium box.

I found myself jerked back to Everitt’s house in Kensington on the night that the White Owl called. Pennington himself had been the victim then — and I the physician.

Stricken with a drug that normally killed in ten seconds, he had given me the number of the antidote to use! And then there was the case of Ducros at Argeles.

By the evening Parsons was better.

We had seen him in the hospital after a day of fruitless wandering in the district Mortimer had named. Hodges had trailed the runaway car, overhauled it in Kennington — and found it empty! The driver had been taken to the Yard and questioned, but had divulged nothing. He was being detained for further examination.

We returned to my rooms for dinner, as bang up against a blank wall as we ever had been. The subtle combination of Chinese and Hindu that walked the earth as Chanda-Lung carried out its work effectively, drawing false scents across the trail and vanishing completely while we followed them.

The irritating point was that we had fallen into a trap, succumbed to what seemed to me afterward as the simplest piece of strategy conceivable.

I gave my views to Pennington from my armchair after dinner.

“We’ve been too regular in our habits, Penn,” I insisted. “Chanda-Lung knows this place well, knows, too, that we get together pretty frequently here. Like you with the dope, he chanced his arm — and chanced it pretty well!

“You may argue that it was lucky for him that the Hendersons were away at Bognor, although we know him to be equal to drugging an entire household to achieve his end. Joe Mortimer was too dark a horse to be trusted; we should have remembered that. Look at his record!”

Pennington screwed up his eyes and moved his head slowly up and down, smoking steadily all the time.

“He’s a wily bird right enough,” he admitted.

“The whole affair must have been planned from the start,” I continued.

“Very probably.”

“Joe getting drunk and being run-in with the knife and things in his possession. That was a clever move. His well-assumed horror, the talk about Chanda-Lung’s eyes, the face at the window— It had us all guessing, Penn. You must admit that.”

The man in the chair opposite was still nodding.

“I’m prepared to admit anything,” he returned placidly. “I m too confoundedly tired to argue. But doesn’t it strike you as queer that it was Parsons who stopped behind with Mortimer? Any one of us might have stayed—”

“That was luck, too,” I suggested. Pennington yawned.

“It smacks more to me like the long arm of coincidence. Chanda-Lung couldn’t have foreseen that. No, Gray, I incline to the opinion that the use of Parsons’s name as an intended victim was purely haphazard. The scheme was to wipe out one of us; it didn’t matter which. That is just my opinion and we needn’t bother ourselves to verify it.

“Our problem is solve the mystery of the Crimson Death. You noticed Mortimer’s scarf? It was lined with sheet-rubber and the Stitches had been ripped at one end when we found it. Whatever it was made those ghastly marks on Parsons’s throat was concealed in there — and it was alive, Gray, all the time!”

I glanced at him uneasily.

“Alive?”

“I believe so. No man of Mortimer’s class could simulate fear in the way he did this morning. He was mortally afraid, old son. Don’t you see why? Because he knew that he carried something which, if carelessly handled, might recoil upon himself!”

“A snake,” I suggested.

“I hardly think so.”

I sat forward, a sudden thought striking me.

“Penn,” I cried, “what do you suppose happened to the thing after it poisoned Parsons?”

He spread out his hands.

“Ask me another!”

“Mortimer wouldn’t have taken it. He wouldn’t have risked touching it with his hands — and he left his scarf behind on the floor.”

“Which means—”

“That it may be here now!”

I got to my feet and moved about the room uneasily, surveying the cornices and the floor and every fold in the blue casement curtains, with Pennington, his feet on the mantelshelf, watching me.

And the longer I searched, the more feasible my theory appeared. A thing that had lain unsuspected between the folds of a greasy scarf might have taken refuge anywhere.

I turned up the corner of the carpet gingerly and let it fall again, loosing into the atmosphere a faint cloud of dust; moved the golf-bag from the recess in which it now reposed and looked behind it; tried the underneath of each piece of furniture in turn.

V

“No luck?” inquired Pennington presently.

I shook my head.

Settling myself in my chair again, I surveyed him reproachfully.

“I’ve got to sleep in this place,” I reminded him, “and you haven’t!”

“Try leaving the light on!”

His superior smile annoyed me.

“What in the name of everything,” I demanded, “is the use of that?”

“Every use in the world, if the brute’s what I think it is.”

“And supposing it isn’t! What then? It bit Parsons in the daylight.”

“Because it was thrown at him — and couldn’t help it!”

He burst out laughing, and just at that moment the phone bell in the hall rang. I ran down and picked up the receiver. It was Hodges calling.

“That you, Mr. Gray? — Sergeant Hodges here. I’ve picked up Joe again — found him on the Batavia boat trying to ship for Holland. Put up a bit of a fight when I tackled him, but he’s quieter now—”

“Hang on a minute,” I answered, and called the news up to Pennington.

Pennington strolled out on to the landing.

“Tell him to slip the bracelets on him and bring him down here. We may as well get to the bottom of this. Joe Mortimer, with the gallows at the back of his mind, may prove more communicative than we found him this morning. In any case it’s worth trying.”

I gave the message to Hodges and went back.

It was ten minutes to eleven by the clock on the mantelpiece when a car drew up outside and a long ring at the bell announced the arrival of Hodges and his prisoner.

Joe entered first, propelled from the rear by his captor, who politely removed his hat for him — a gray velour this time, new and glossy. A change into a blue serge suit and collar and tie lent an air of respectability that the freckled face positively denied!

He paused just inside the door, his legs defiantly apart, the black eye gained in the struggle with Hodges painfully evident.

Pennington nodded to him from his chair.

“Well, Joe!” he greeted him. “Here again, I see!”

Mortimer scowled, but said nothing.

Watching Pennington, I saw the pupils of his eyes contract. The boyish expression had vanished completely; there appeared in its place a queer, set-expression that reminded me somehow of Chanda-Lung, the only man in creation that I believe Mortimer feared.

“Two men died this morning,” he rasped out, “and both in the same manner. You know that, Mortimer, don’t you? You are being charged with both those crimes!”

The man with the sandy hair stiffened suddenly and his thin lips moved one over the other. I felt that we were being treated to a view of the real Mortimer now — the man who had started life in a London slum, learned boxing by fighting for his newspaper pitch, drifted on to the race courses and out to sea.

Fear had crept into those shifty eyes again, a subdued, sullen emotion that-contrasted strangely with his shuddering terror of the morning. In his saner moments he had told us that he was not afraid of death.

I wondered if this threat of the gallows would startle him — or whether he would decide to carry his story with him to another world.

Hodges had closed the door and was leaning against it, a little proud of his capture, more than anxious lest he should slip through his fingers again. A curtain fluttered in the cool breeze from an open window.

Mortimer’s lips parted.

“I carried out my orders, guv’nor,” he said huskily; “that’s all.”

“What was it you brought here in your scarf, Joe?”

The question rapped out like a pistol-shot, swift and deadly in its effect. It pierced Mortimer’s armor of obstinate silence and sent him stumbling backward against the bag of clubs propped in a corner.

“I never brought nothing there, guv’nor,” he gasped. “Straight I didn’t.” He clasped his manacled hands in front of him and stared in an agony of terror into the accusing eyes of Chinese Pennington.

I saw the beads of perspiration standing out on his forehead in big drops and a blue vein by his temple twitching. “It wasn’t me,” he moaned. “It was ’im what done it — Chanda-Lung!”

In the brief silence that followed I sat upright in my chair, listening. On the heels of the accusation, as it were, I thought I heard a sound of vague movement in the passage outside.

Pennington’s eyelids flickered.

“So it was Chanda-Lung himself who brought the Crimson Death here this morning?”

The other assented, but there was little conviction in his tone.

“Then how do you account for the fact that Inspector Parsons’s last words to Mr. Gray were — ‘It was in his scarf’?”

Mortimer did not answer.

“What did you do with the Crimson Death, Joe?”

Still no reply.

Pennington had crossed his legs and his long fingers were intertwined over his knee. He was speaking more slowly now, but every sentence he uttered carried a sting that went home.

“You didn’t take it away with you, did you?”

Joe Mortimer gulped again. Compelled to reflect upon the mysterious something that his fear of the master-crook had forced him to carry and liberate, he began to show traces of increasing uneasiness. His eyes wandered around the room as mine had done, as if seeking something which he knew to be there.

I glanced at Pennington. He had gone queerly rigid. His hands clutched the arms of his chair and he was staring fixedly at my bag of golf-clubs away behind Mortimer.

I bent forward uneasily. I could have sworn I saw the bag move convulsively!

Pennington rose to his feet. I saw him draw his automatic and hold it behind him, and the other hand reach out for the switch.

“You have never heard of the Scolopendra gigas, I suppose, Mortimer?” he muttered between his teeth, never for one instant losing sight of the phenomenon in the corner.

“It is a peculiar insect — and singularly dangerous to man! It hates the light, you know, and slips away from it into the first convenient hiding place. In the dark, however, it comes out — particularly when hungry. Supposing we turn out the light, Joe!”

Joe Mortimer writhed horribly.

“No, guv’nor, no!” he bleated. “For Gawd’s sake don’t do that! It’s ’ere, I tell you; it—”

The light went suddenly out. Pennington leaned across me, reaching down an electric torch from the mantelpiece. I heard him snick the catch with his thumbnail.

A pale circle of illumination fell upon the bag, and I caught my breath. Two long things, like feelers, were already waving above the leather binding. The waving ceased. Something long, glistening, infinitely revolting, writhed over the edge and dropped with a soft plop to the carpet.

I felt my heart pumping wildly. It was an enormous crimson centipede, fully a foot in length! For a moment it paused there, as if gaining its bearings — then shot forward with incredible rapidity toward Mortimer!

I clutched at the first thing that came to hand — a book — and darted across the room. It had swarmed up his trousers leg and the blood-curdling yell he had given when he saw it still echoed in my ears. He made a feeble effort to beat it off, then flopped against the wall, petrified with terror.

“Quick, Penn! The light!” I yelled. “It may drop!”

The light came on, flooding the room and revealing the final stage of one of the most ghastly examples of poetic justice that I ever remember.

Drawn there apparently by uncanny instinct, the crimson scorpion encircled Mortimer’s throat like the green scarf that had once contained it!

From that day onward I preserved a great respect for Sergeant Hodges. With bare fingers only he plucked the writhing horror clear of his prisoner, dropped it to the carpet and obliterated it calmly with his boot!

By a merciful stroke of chance he was not bitten. Grinning in that queer way men do when death has missed them by inches, he caught Joe as he crumpled up.

The head went back as he laid him on the chesterfield, and for the third time that day we saw the chain of vivid crimson marks.

“The aluminium box, Gray,” whispered Pennington in my ear. “On the chest-of-drawers in your bedroom.”

I hurried out, and the significance of those movements in the passage dawned on me. The box of antidotes was gone. In its place, pinned to the chest by a slender knife, I saw the grim sign of the scorpion!