While he spoke, Scudder filled the syringe, and adjusted a needle.
Then, the syringe in his hand, he came and stood over Murray.
"Struggling won't do you any good," he said, and bent down.
Murray struck at him--struck weakly and vainly. Scudder seized his
right wrist and drew it down--put it under his foot and held it there.
Then he seized Murray's left arm, gripped the wrist, and drew it up to
meet the syringe.
"Now for happyland!" he said. "One slight prick----"
He paused suddenly--paused and jerked himself upright, a flood of color
sweeping into his pale features as his head came up. From the clumps
of manzanita twenty feet away, had come a voice.
"Hold on, Scudder!"
And from that covert of twisting, grotesque, blood-red manzanita trees,
stepped Tom Lee. Murray felt something of the fright that had seized
upon Scudder, for the presence of Tom Lee seemed nothing short of an
apparition.
"I waited for this, Scudder!" rang out the voice of the yellow man, his
eyes fastened upon the horrified gaze of Scudder. "When you gave me
all that dope last night, I guessed that you were coming here; I
discovered that you had planted the stuff in Doctor Murray's suitcase,
I had begun to penetrate your wiles and deviltry! Now it's ended."
Tom Lee came forward. Before him, Scudder shrank. The syringe dropped
from his nerveless fingers; he stepped back from the figure of Murray,
retreated from the advancing form of Tom Lee in visible terror and
consternation.
"You devil!" cried the oriental, a deep and surging passion filling his
voice. "I came here last night in Hennesy's car--I've been waiting for
you! I heard all your lies, heard all your plotted deviltry. You
thought you'd dispose of Murray and have Claire in your power, didn't
you?"
There was reason for the sheer terror that filled Scudder. The face of
the advancing man had changed into a frightful mask; it had changed and
altered into the face of the great stone Buddha that watches over the
Yungmen caves--it had become a purely Asian face, filled with terrible
and deadly things, unguessed menaces.
Murray painfully got to one elbow again and watched. The others were
oblivious of him; all their attention was fastened upon each other.
Still Scudder retreated, and still Tom Lee advanced upon him,
weaponless, yet in his advance a potent and fearful threat. Before
that threat, Scudder still retreated, his face ghastly.
"Damn you!" he cried, his voice shrill. "What d'ye mean by all
this----?"
"You can't get away from me," said Tom Lee impassively. "I'm going to
have a reckoning with you."
"No, but I can stop your game!" retorted Scudder with an oath. The
mask was gone now, and he cursed luridly. "You can't run any damned
Chinese bluff on me----"
With the words, he plucked a revolver from his pocket and fired.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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