Chapter IX · THE WORM TURNS

When the door had closed behind the detective, Deweese walked across the room and put his ear to the keyhole.

He heard the shrill chatter of Sing Tong Fat as he let Peret out of the house, and the slam of the front door when he closed it behind him. Heaving a sigh of relief, Deweese threw himself into a chair. The strain through which he had just come had been terrific. Ordinarily, he would have found a battle of wits with the detective much to his liking, for it was for just such games as this that he lived. But his experience with the Whispering Thing had left his nerves in such a state that he felt he had been no match for the Frenchman.

Nevertheless, now that he was at least temporarily unembarrassed by the detective’s presence, his brain began to function more normally and he set about evolving plans to extricate himself from his hazardous position. What a devil the Frenchman was! The man’s powers of deduction smacked of the supernatural. And yet—

He knitted his brow. Recalling to his mind his own blundering, it was not so difficult, after all, to perceive how the detective had arrived at his conclusions. He, Deweese, had laid his plans so carefully, that he had believed detection impossible. But now, viewing the working out of his plan in retrospection, he could see where he had erred, and cursed himself for his carelessness. His blunders, as Peret had implied, had been too obvious to escape notice. Should not the remarkable accuracy of Peret’s reasoning, therefore, be attributed to chance rather than to genius? The accursed dying speech of the scientist had given him the key to the mystery, and it was certainly only an ill chance that had led him to be on hand to hear it. With such a clue to work on, he reasoned, the solving of the case had simply been a matter of routine. Without this clue, the detective would have been lost. The fact that he himself had been attacked by the Whispering Thing would have shielded him from suspicion.

As he thought of his chance encounter with the bat, he shuddered. The accident in itself proved his carelessness. It had indeed almost proved his death. As Peret had said, he had been a fool to linger near the scene of his crime, but he had been so sure, so confident, that he had done his work too well to fear detection. As for Peret—well, his very frankness proved that he was something of a fool. Who but an idiot would have exposed his hand when he knew that his opponent held the strongest cards!

Of course, there was a possibility that the Frenchman was holding something back, but what if he was? Was he, Count Vincent di Dalfonzo, “mystery man” of a hundred aliases and acknowledged by the police to be the cleverest international crook outside of prison bars, to be deprived of his liberty and a fortune by an imbecile of a private detective?

He laughed, and his laugh did not sound pleasant. After all, he had the formula, and the game was not yet lost. His blunders had not been as bad as they might have been. He would have been arrested at once, he argued, had Peret believed that there was even the slightest chance of convicting him. It only remained for him to make one imperative move, and then sit tight. The Frenchman was bluffing, or perhaps he was laying another of his diabolical traps. Well, he should see!

After fortifying himself with a stiff drink of whisky from the flask in the table drawer, he tapped the hand-bell on the table, and Sing Tong Fat, as if he had been awaiting the summons, entered the room with noiseless tread.

“Did you let that blankety-blank Frenchman out?” demanded Deweese.

“Tchèe, tchée,” chattered Sing Tong Fat. “He gone. Me watchee him glo dlown stleet. He allee samee tam fool clazy man. He say he blowee topee head off. Hoi, hoi.” He drew one of the silken sleeves of his blouse across his face and looked at his master anxiously. “He say polis alle lound house in stleet, Fan-Fu. He talkee allee samee Victrolee—”

“The house is still under surveillance, is it?” observed Deweese, wrinkling his brow. “Well, so much the better. We work best when we work cautiously, and we are not likely to be incautious when we know we are watched.”

He lighted a fresh cigarette and gazed reflectively at the thread of smoke that curled upward from the lighted end. The drink of whisky had cleared his brain, and, alert, feverishly bright-eyed, every nerve in tune, he was now the man who for years had matched wits with the continental police and eluded them at every turn. Sing Tong Fat, well aware of the seriousness of the situation, shuffled his feet uneasily and waited, with an anxious look on his face, for his “master” to speak.

“Sing Tong Fat,” said Deweese, finally, “you and I have been friends and coworkers for many years. We have associated in many dangerous enterprises and I have always been liberal when it came to a division of the spoils. As we have shared the pleasures of our adventures, so too have we shared their dangers. I feel it only fair to tell you, therefore, that our peril has never been so great as it is now. Unless we act quickly we are doomed. You follow me, do you not?”

Sing Tong Fat touched his forehead and gravely nodded.

“It seems as if Fate has been against us from the very beginning in the Q-gas business,” resumed Deweese in an unemotional tone. “The murder of Berjet, while necessary, was unfortunate, and since then we have had one stroke of bad luck after the other. We erred in trying to kill the French detective in the manner we did. He should have been knifed, swiftly, surely, silently. The bat that I instructed you to put in his room failed to accomplish his death and gave him a clue which, if we are not careful, may prove to be our undoing. Most important of all, both of us have been recognized. So you can realize how serious the situation is.”

“I await thy command, O Illustrious Master,” said the Chinaman gravely, in his native tongue.

Deweese, as if he took this for granted, nodded and proceeded:

“Of the two of us you have the most cunning, and you therefore stand the better chance of eluding the police. This is not flattery; it is wisdom I have acquired through the years of my association with you. You are as elusive as a phantom when at large, and, when in the toils, as slippery as an eel. Execution of the plan I have formed, therefore, I am going to entrust to you. It is very doubtful if I could slip through the cordon of police around the house but I think that you may be able to do so, and it is very necessary that one of us should. Here, then, is what I want you to do:

“The soviet agent, No. 29, is waiting in New York for the Q-gas formula. He is stopping at the Alpin Hotel. The formula is locked in a safe-deposit box in the Exporter’s Bank in this city. The box was rented by me under the name of John G. McGlynn. I want you to take the first train to New York and get No. 29 to return to Washington with you. It is too risky for you to try to telegraph him.

“I will give you a paper authorizing him to open the box and remove the formula. The formula is to be replaced with fifty thousand dollars in gold, the second and final installment of the price No. 29 agreed to pay for the secret.

“After the exchange, which must take place in your presence, you are to rejoin me here and we will settle our score with Peret, and then take steps to extricate ourselves from the net he has woven around us. The most important thing now is the formula. Once we have gotten rid of that, we can doubtless make our get-away. We have done so many times in the past under circumstances almost as trying as the present ones, and we can doubtless do so again.

“What do you think of the plan, Sing? It is filled with danger, but—if you can think of a better one, I should be glad to hear it.”

“I agree with you as to the danger,” rejoined the Chinaman in a strange voice, and then, very suddenly, he pressed the muzzle of an automatic against Deweese’s temple.

With his free hand he then swept the wax wrinkles from his face and grinned. Deweese, in spite of the proximity of the automatic, recoiled. The man was not Sing Tong Fat. He was Jules Peret!

“Move at your peril, Monsieur,” warned the detective. Then, raising his voice, “Hello, major!” he shouted.

The door swung open, and Major Dobson, accompanied by Detective Sergeant Strange and Harvey Bendlow, entered the room. Behind them came O’Shane and Frank, dragging between them Sing Tong Fat, the latter bound and gagged and minus his skull cap and outer clothing which, needless to say, now adorned the head and body of the mirthful French detective.

“Did you hear the conversation, Major?” cried Peret gleefully.

“Every word of it,” declared Dobson, much gratified at the success of Peret’s stratagem. “Sergeant Strange and I were watching through a crack in the door and heard and saw all. The stenographer in the hall has it all down. The jig is up, Mr. Alias Deweese,” he added, turning to the international agent. “Your goose is cooked, and the mystery of the ‘invisible monster’ is a thing of the past.”

“You devil!” shouted Deweese hoarsely, glaring at the Frenchman; “you have trapped me!”

“So I have,” agreed Peret, wiping the yellow stain from his face with a handkerchief. “But did I not promise you that I would do so? Ah, Monsieur, if you but knew what it cost me to keep my promise! Did I not have to sacrifice my hair and beautiful mustache this morning? Still, the wig and false mustache I wore before I donned Sing Tong Fat’s regalia looked very natural, did they not? They must have, since they deceived you, my friend. But you should see my head without a covering! it looks like the egg of the ostrich.”

He pressed Sing Tong Fat’s skull-cap down more firmly on his head and laughed heartily.

“Ma foi,” he continued, as he removed from his face the little pads of wax that had given his eyes an almond slant, “I almost feel tempted to make my present impersonation permanent. Sing is such a handsome and charming man—which doubtless explains why he fought so hard to retain his identity. When he was seized by my good friends in the vestibule, as he opened the door to let me out awhile ago, he was an astonished and infuriated man. He fought, hissed and scratched like the cat of the alley. And how he glared at them when they divested him of his clothing and helped me to make up my face to look like his own. Look at him glaring at me now!

“My colleagues say I am a mimic and make-up artist of the first order, and when I think how beautifully I deceived you, M. le Comte di Dalfonzo, I am almost persuaded that they are right.”

THE END.

Strange, Indeed, Are the Possibilities of the Human Mind. A Weird Example Is Found in