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.”