The mandarin turned his face away and looked out of the car window into the night. Motor Matt felt miserable enough. His words, just uttered, might have sealed the doom of the mandarin.
"Converse with me at length upon the subject," said Tsan Ti, again turning toward Matt. "What you say is of vast importance, excellent friend."
Matt had twenty miles of slow traveling in which to make his disclosures, and he made them in detail, with now and then an explanatory word from McGlory.
He began at the point where he had received the ruby, and set forth the manner in which Bunce had presented himself. Bunce's cock-and-bull story was gone into, and Tsan Ti's eyes twinkled humorously—Matt wondered at the humor—as he heard how he had been lured into a basement by a beach comber and was being held a prisoner. The leaving of the box with the hotel clerk, the flight into the hills, and the disappearance of Bunce, all dropped into the recital in chronological form; then came the tracking to the "pocket" under the ledge, and the following of the motorcycle trails in the direction of Catskill, the arrival of the boys in town, and the report of the clerk concerning the forged letter and the removal of the box.
"So there," put in the mandarin, "is where my ruby escaped from your unfortunate hands."
"Don't be so quick in your snap judgments, Tsan," spoke up McGlory. "The ruby wasn't in the box, but in Motor Matt's pocket. My pard had left the empty box with the clerk for a bluff."
The mandarin chuckled, and his body shook with his suppressed mirth.
"Remarkably well planned!" approved Tsan Ti. "Who could have done better? You have a brain of great power, my renowned friend, and your talk gives me much amusement and instruction. Grattan had the empty box and you had the ruby. What then?"
Then followed the call at the hotel of the man from the Iris, and Matt's agreement to take charge of the yacht's motor on the down-river trip, Matt to return to Catskill on the following morning. The treachery aboard the boat was listened to by the mandarin with flashing eyes.
"Grattan is possessed of a demon," declared Tsan Ti. "His wits are as keen as a sword's edge, and he knows how to use them. I do not wonder, estimable friend, that you fell into his power. Even I, had I been in your place, could not have saved the jewel."