“Tell me,” she said, “what has happened? How did he come here?”
“Blinga filly doggy,” murmured Sin Sin Wa. “Knockee Ah Fung on him head and comee down here, lo. Ah Fung allee lightee now—topside. Chasee filly doggy. Allee velly proper. No bhobbery.”
“Talk less and act more,” said Mrs. Sin. “Tie him up, and if you must talk, talk Chinese. Tie him up.”
She pointed to Kerry. Sin Sin Wa tucked his hands into his sleeves and shuffled towards the masked door communicating with the inner room.
“Only by intelligent speech are we distinguished from the other animals,” he murmured in Chinese.
Entering the inner room, he began to extricate a long piece of thin rope from amid a tangle of other materials with which it was complicated. Mrs. Sin stood looking down at the fallen man. Neither Kerry nor Sam Tûk gave the slightest evidence of life. And as Sin Sin Wa disentangled yard upon yard of rope from the bundle on the floor by the bed where Rita Irvin lay in her long troubled sleep, he crooned a queer song. It was in the Ho-Nan dialect and intelligible to himself alone.
“Shöa, the evil woman (he chanted), the woman of many strange loves....
Shöa, the ghoul....
Lo, the Yellow River leaps forth from the nostrils of the mountain god....
Shöa, the betrayer of men....
Blood is on her brow.
Lo, the betrayer is betrayed. Death sits at her elbow.
See, the Yellow River bears a corpse upon its tide...
Dead men hear her secret.
Shöa, the ghoul....
Shöa, the evil woman. Death sits at her elbow.
Black, the vultures flock about her....
Lo, the Yellow River leaps forth from the nostrils of the mountain god.”
Meanwhile Kerry, lying motionless at the feet of Sam Tûk was doing some hard and rapid thinking. He had recovered consciousness a few moments before Mrs. Sin had come into the vault from the inner room. There were those, Seton Pasha among them, who would have regarded the groan and the convulsive movements of Kerry’s body with keen suspicion. And because the Chief Inspector suffered from no illusions respecting the genius of Sin Sin Wa, the apparent failure of the one-eyed Chinaman to recognize these preparations for attack nonplussed the Chief Inspector. His outstanding vice as an investigator was the directness of his own methods and of his mental outlook, so that he frequently experienced great difficulty in penetrating to the motives of a tortuous brain such as that of Sin Sin Wa.
That Sin Sin Wa thought him to be still unconscious he did not believe. He was confident that his tactics had deceived the Jewess, but he entertained an almost superstitious respect for the cleverness of the Chinaman. The trick with the ball of leaf opium was painfully fresh in his memory.
Kerry, in common with many members of the Criminal Investigation Department, rarely carried firearms. He was a man with a profound belief in his bare hands—aided when necessary by his agile feet. At the moment that Sin Sin Wa had checked the woman’s murderous and half insane outburst Kerry had been contemplating attack. The sudden change of language on the part of the Chinaman had arrested him in the act; and, realizing that he was listening to a confession which placed the hangman’s rope about the neck of Mrs. Sin, he lay still and wondered.