"If the Embassy people are playing me false I do not know whom to trust," he said brokenly; "I have just come from there, and they assure me that if Wong Li Fu and his gang are in London they are absolutely ignorant of the fact."
"Pooh!" cried Furneaux, snapping a thumb and forefinger. "Don't worry about that! Put yourself in the position of the Chinese Ambassador. He can't even guess who may be the ruler of China from one day to another. Yesterday it was an old woman, today a dictator, tomorrow the mob; who can foretell what shape the lava erupted from a volcano will take? Bet you a new hat, Mr. Forbes, that the minute the embassy heard of Mrs. Lester's murder they put two and two together and kept a sharp eye on these mansions and on your house. That gray car is nothing more nor less than a red herring accidentally drawn across the trail. Some cute Chinaman said 'Hallo! that murdered woman is the wife of Forbes's agent in Shanghai. Now, let's see what Forbes is doing, and who visits him, and perhaps we'll learn something.' Want a bet?"
Forbes could not help but recover some of his shattered nerve in view of the detective's airy optimism. Still, he was shaken and dubious.
"Don't forget that the Chinese Ambassador has no knowledge whatsoever of my share in the revolution," he said.
"And don't forget that for ways which are dark and tricks which are vain the heathen Chinee is peculiar," retorted Furneaux. "How can you be sure that there is not in the Embassy at this moment a full statement of your payments into the reformers' funds, as well as the list of conspirators which our friend Wong Li Fu is in search of?"
"I think that such a thing is almost impossible."
"Is there anything really impossible? We used to believe that once a man was dead he could not be brought to life again. A Frenchman has just demonstrated that by a judicious application of galvanism to the heart and salt water to the veins any average corpse can be revived."
Evidently Furneaux was enjoying himself. He sat there, absorbing new impressions and irradiating scraps of irrelevant knowledge in a way that would have been full of significance to Winter had he been present. Furneaux was never so mercurial, never so ready to jump from one subject to another, as when his subtle brain was working at high pressure.
He actually reveled in a crime which lay on the borderland of the exotic and the grotesque. Like the French philosopher in Poe's "Tales of Mystery and Imagination," the savant who read his newspaper in a dingy Paris room, and solved by sheer force of intellect extraordinary criminal problems which baffled the shrewdest official minds, he felt in relation to this particular tragedy that he required only to be brought in touch with certain contingent forces bound up with it—Forbes, for instance, and, in a minor degree, Theydon—and in due course he would be able to go forth and find the master wrongdoer.
Suddenly the millionaire seemed to cast off the cloak of despair which clogged his energies and impaired his brilliant intellect. He rose to his feet and involuntarily squared his shoulders.