Standing above the quivering Jap, he harangued him in halting yet vehement Japanese, gesticulating and--after the manner of people speaking a tongue unfamiliar to them--talking at the top of his voice. But his oration had no stimulating effect on the poor Sato. Scarce waiting for Brice to finish speaking, the butler broke again into that monkey-like chatter of appeal and fright. Gavin silenced him with a threatening gesture, and renewed his own harangue. But, after perhaps a minute of it, he saw the uselessness of trying to put manhood or pluck into the groveling little Oriental. And he lost his own temper. "Here!" he growled, to Standish. "Open the front door. Open it good and wide. So!" Picking up the quaking and chattering Sato by the collar, he half shoved and half flung him across the hallway, and, with a final heave, tossed him bodily down the veranda steps. Then, closing the door, and checking Bobby Burns's eager yearnings to charge out after his beloved deity's victim, Brice exclaimed: "There! That's one thing well done. We're better off without a coward like that. He'd be getting under our feet all the time, or else opening the doors to the Caesars, with the idea of currying favor with them. Where did you ever pick up such an arrant little poltroon? Most Japs are plucky enough." "Hade lent him to us," said Milo, evidently impressed by Brice's athletic demonstration against the little Oriental. "Sato worked for him, after Hade's regular butler fell ill. He--" "H'm!" mused Brice. "A hanger-on of Hade's, eh? That may explain it. Sato's cowardice may have been a bit of rather clever acting. He saw no use in risking his neck for you people when his master wasn't here. It was no part of his spy work to--" "Spy work?" echoed Standish, in real astonishment. "What?" "Let it go at that," snapped Brice, adding as Claire reentered the room, followed by the lanky house-man, "All secure in the kitchen quarters, Miss Standish? Good! Please send this man to close the upstairs shutters, too. Not that there's any danger that the Caesars will try to climb, before they find they can't get in on this floor. The sight of the barred shutters will probably scare them off, anyway. They're likely to be more hungry for a surprise rush, than for a siege with resistance thrown in. If--" He ceased speaking, his attention caught by a sight which, to the others, carried no significance, whatever. Simon Cameron, the insolently lazy Persian cat, had been awakened from a nap in a rose-basket on the top of one of the hall bookcases. The tramping of feet, the scrambling ejection of the Jap butler, the clanging shut of many metal blinds--all these had interfered with the calm peacefulness of Simon Cameron's slumbers.