His voice came dimly:
"Mind the beam! Pass the light forward...."
Sowerby was struggling with the door by which Miguel and Ah-Fang-Fu
unseen had made their escape and Dunbar, having rested Max's head upon
a pillow, was glaring all about him, his square jaw set grimly and his
eyes fierce with anger.
A voice droned from a bunk:
_"Cheal kegur men ms ka-dheer!"_
The police were moving from bunk to bunk, scrutinising the occupants.
The uproar had penetrated to them even in their drugged slumbers.
There were stirrings and mutterings and movements of yellow hands.
"But where is 'The Scorpion'?"
He turned and stared at the wall from which the matting had been
torn. And out of the little niche in the cunningly masked door the
green-eyed joss leered at him complacently.
PART IV
THE LAIR OF THE SCORPION
CHAPTER I
THE SUBLIME ORDER
Stuart awoke to a discovery so strange that for some time he found
himself unable to accept its reality. He passed his hands over his
face and eyes and looked about him dazedly. He experienced great
pain in his throat, and he could feel that his neck was swollen. He
stared down at his ankles, which also were throbbing agonisingly--to
learn that they were confined in gyves attached by a short chain to
a ring in the floor!
He was lying upon a deep _diwan,_ which was covered with leopard-skins
and which occupied one corner of the most extraordinary room he had
ever seen or ever could have imagined.
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