Tales of Chinatown, Sax Rohmer [mobile ebook reader .TXT] 📗
- Author: Sax Rohmer
Book online «Tales of Chinatown, Sax Rohmer [mobile ebook reader .TXT] 📗». Author Sax Rohmer
“Dan!” she whispered. “Dan! where is ye'r mackintosh?”
“I didn't take it,” he replied, endeavouring to tell himself that his apprehensions had been groundless. “But how was it that you did not answer the telephone?”
“What do ye mean, Dan?” Mary Kerry stared, her eyes growing wider and wider. “The boy answered, Dan. He set out wi' ye'r mackintosh full an hour and a half since.”
“What!”
The truth leaped out at Kerry like an enemy out of ambush.
“Who sent that message?”
“Someone frae the Yard, to tell the boy to bring ye'r mackintosh alone at once. Dan! Dan———”
She advanced, hands outstretched, quivering, but Kerry had leaped out into the narrow hallway. He raised the telephone receiver, listened for a moment, and then jerked it back upon the hook.
“Dead line!” he muttered. “Someone has been at work with a wire-cutter outside the house!”
His wife came out to where he stood, and, clenching his teeth very grimly, he took her in his arms. She was shaking as if palsied.
“Mary dear,” he said, “pray with all your might that I am given strength to do my duty.”
She looked at him with haggard, tearless eyes.
“Tell me the truth: ha' they got my boy?”
His fingers tightened on her shoulders.
“Don't worry,” he said, “and don't ask me to stay to explain. When I come back I'll have Dan with me!”
He trusted himself no further, but, clapping his hat on his head, walked out to the waiting cab.
“Back to Limehouse police station,” he directed rapidly.
“Lor lumme!” muttered the taximan. “Where are you goin' to after that, guv'nor? It's a bit off the map.”
“I'm going to hell!” rapped Kerry, suddenly thrusting his red face very near to that of the speaker. “And you're going to drive me!”
VI THE KNIGHT ERRANT
Recognizing the superior strength of his captors, young Kerry soon gave up struggling. The thrill of his first real adventure entered into his blood. He remembered that he was the son of his father, and he realized, being a quick-witted lad, that he was in the grip of enemies of his father. The panic which had threatened him when first he had recognized that he was in the hands of Chinese, gave place to a cold rage—a heritage which in later years was to make him a dangerous man.
He lay quite passively in the grasp of someone who held him fast, and learned, by breathing quietly, that the presence of the muffler about his nose and mouth did not greatly inconvenience him. There was some desultory conversation between the two men in the car, but it was carried on in an odd, sibilant language which the boy did not understand, but which he divined to be Chinese. He thought how every other boy in the school would envy him, and the thought was stimulating, nerving. On the very first day of his holidays he was become the central figure of a Chinatown drama.
The last traces of fear fled. His position was uncomfortable and his limbs were cramped, but he resigned himself, with something almost like gladness, and began to look forward to that which lay ahead with a zest and a will to be no passive instrument which might have surprised his captors could they have read the mind of their captive.
The journey seemed almost interminable, but young Kerry suffered it in stoical silence until the car stopped and he was lifted and carried down stone steps into some damp, earthy-smelling place. Some distance was traversed, and then many flights of stairs were mounted, some bare but others carpeted.
Finally he was deposited in a chair, and as he raised his hand to the scarf, which toward the end of the journey had been bound more tightly about his head so as to prevent him from seeing at all, he heard a door closed and locked.
The scarf was quickly removed. And Dan found himself in a low-ceilinged attic having a sloping roof and one shuttered window. A shadeless electric lamp hung from the ceiling. Excepting the cane-seated chair in which he had been deposited and a certain amount of nondescript lumber, the attic was unfurnished. Dan rapidly considered what his father would have done in the circumstances.
“Make sure that the door is locked,” he muttered.
He tried it, and it was locked beyond any shadow of doubt.
“The window.”
Shutters covered it, and these were fastened with a padlock.
He considered this padlock attentively; then, drawing from his pocket one of those wonderful knives which are really miniature tool-chests, he raised from a grove the screw-driver which formed part of its equipment, and with neatness and dispatch unscrewed the staple to which the padlock was attached!
A moment later he had opened the shutters and was looking out into the drizzle of the night.
The room in which he was confined was on the third floor of a dingy, brick-built house; a portion of some other building faced him; down below was a stone-paved courtyard. To the left stood a high wall, and beyond it he obtained a glimpse of other dingy buildings. One lighted window was visible—a square window in the opposite building, from which amber light shone out.
Somewhere in the street beyond was a standard lamp. He could detect the halo which it cast into the misty rain. The glass was very dirty, and young Kerry raised the sash, admitting a draught of damp, cold air into the room. He craned out, looking about him eagerly.
A rainwater-pipe was within reach of his hand on the right of the window and, leaning out still farther, young Kerry saw that it passed beside two other, larger, windows on the floor beneath him. Neither of these showed any light.
Dizzy heights have no terror for healthy youth. The brackets supporting the rain-pipe were a sufficient staircase for the agile Dan, a more slippery prisoner than the famous Baron Trenck; and, discarding his muffler and his Burberry, he climbed out upon the sill and felt with his thick-soled boots for the first of these footholds. Clutching the ledge, he lowered himself and felt for the next.
Then came the moment when he must trust all his weight to the pipe. Clenching his teeth, he risked it, felt for and found the third angle, and then, still clutching the pipe, stood for a moment upon the ledge of the
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