But I could not.
“As I have explained,” continued my friend, “I was awakened by a sound of coughing; then came a death grip on my throat, and instinctively my hands shot out in search of my attacker. I could not reach him; my hands came in contact with nothing palpable. Therefore I clutched at the fingers which were dug into my windpipe, and found them to be small—as the marks show—and hairy. I managed to give that first cry for help, then with all my strength I tried to unfasten the grip that was throttling the life out of me. At last I contrived to move one of the hands, and I called out again, though not so loudly. Then both the hands were back again; I was weakening; but I clawed like a madman at the thin, hairy arms of the strangling thing, and with a blood-red mist dancing before my eyes, I seemed to be whirling madly round and round until all became a blank. Evidently I used my nails pretty freely—and there’s the trophy.”
For the twentieth time, I should think, I carried the ash-tray in my hand and laid it immediately under the table-lamp in order to examine its contents. In the little brass bowl lay a blood-stained fragment of grayish hair attached to a tatter of skin. This fragment of epidermis had an odd bluish tinge, and the attached hair was much darker at the roots than elsewhere. Saving its singular color, it might have been torn from the forearm of a very hirsute human; but although my thoughts wandered unfettered, north, south, east and west; although, knowing the resources of Fu-Manchu, I considered all the recognized Mongolian types, and, in quest of hirsute mankind, even roamed far north among the blubbering Esquimo; although I glanced at Australasia, at Central Africa, and passed in mental review the dark places of the Congo, nowhere in the known world, nowhere in the history of the human species, could I come upon a type of man answering to the description suggested by our strange clue.
Nayland Smith was watching me curiously as I bent over the little brass ash-tray.
“You are puzzled,” he rapped in his short way.
“So am I—utterly puzzled. Fu-Manchu’s gallery of monstrosities clearly has become reinforced; for even if we identified the type, we should not be in sight of our explanation.”
“You mean,” I began...
“Fully four feet from the window, Petrie, and that window but a few inches open! Look”—he bent forward, resting his chest against the table, and stretched out his hand toward me. “You have a rule there; just measure.”
Setting down the ash-tray, I opened out the rule and measured the distance from the further edge of the table to the tips of Smith’s fingers.
“Twenty-eight inches—and I have a long reach!” snapped Smith, withdrawing his arm and striking a match to relight his pipe. “There’s one thing, Petrie, often proposed before, which now we must do without delay. The ivy must be stripped from the walls at the back. It’s a pity, but we can not afford to sacrifice our lives to our sense of the aesthetic. What do you make of the sound like the cracking of a whip?”