“Certainly,” I said. “We all know that is true. But why was he killed?”
Again Sir Henry regarded me with his ironical smile.
“Perhaps,” he drawled, “there is some explanation in the report in your pocket, to the Monastic Head. It's only a theory, you know.”
He smiled, showing his white, even teeth.
We went into the superintendent's room, and sat down by a smoldering fire of coals in the gate. I handed Marquis the roll of vellum. It was in one of the Shan dialects. He read it aloud. With the addition of certain formal expressions, it contained precisely the Oriental's testimony before the court, and no more.
“Ah!” he said in his curiously inflected Oxford voice.
And he held the scroll out to the heat of the fire. The vellum baked slowly, and as it baked, the black Chinese characters faded out and faint blue ones began to appear.
Marquis read the secret message in his emotionless drawl:
“'The American is destroyed, and his accursed work is destroyed with him. Send the news to Bangkok and west to Burma. The treasures of India are saved.”'
I cried out in astonishment.