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"Pull up here." he directed presently, and they rolled to a halt in a shabby side-street in the native quarter. "I have to leave the boat here. They may steal the wheels off of it before we get back, but it won't navigate the alley we've got to follow. Here, this is it."

It was dark in the alley. They groped their way along and presently came out into an open space, lined on one side by rotten, deserted wharves.

"That's the warehouse." Clanton indicated a building looming darkly before them. "He's got a camp-cot and some canned grub in one of the lower rooms, and he aims to hide there till I let him know what move Ahmed's making about that theft."

NO LIGHT showed behind the shutters of the barred windows. Clanton knocked and softly called: "Ram Lal!" No answer, he tried the door and found it to be unlocked. He pushed it open and Marianne pressed close on his heels as he entered. She jumped and grabbed his arm as they stood in the darkness.

"The door! Somebody pushed it to behind us!"

"Wind must have blown it shut," he grunted. "But where the hell's Ram Lal?"

"Listen!" She clutched him convulsively. Somewhere in the darkness sounded a steady drip-drip as if somebody had left a faucet partly open. But Clanton's hair began to rise, because be knew there wasn't any faucet in that room. He struck a match in a hurry and held it up. Marianne clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle a shriek. Clanton swore. In the wavering light they saw Ram Lal. The fat, swarthy babu slumped drunkenly in a chair near a table. His head lolled on his breast and his eyes were glassy. And from a throat slashed from ear to car, blood still oozed sluggishly to fall drop by drop in a widening crimson puddle on the floor.

"God almighty!" muttered Clanton. "We've got to get out of here—ow!"

Something that glinted swished at him out of the shadows. Marianne had a brief glimpse of an arc of gleaming steel and a dark contorted face behind it. Then the match went out, clipped from Clanton's hand by that slashing blade, and the dark filled with hair-raising sounds. Marianne dropped to the floor and scurried on all-fours in the direction she hoped the door was. She'd lost touch with Clanton, but he couldn't be dead, because no corpse could put up the fight he was putting up.

Lurid Anglo-Saxon oaths mingled with Asiatic yowls, and she almost pitied his adversaries as she heard what sounded like beeves being knocked in the head with a maul, but which she knew to be the impact of his massive fists on human skulls. Howls of pain and rage filled the room, the table overturned crashingly, and then somebody stumbled over her in the dark.

It was a Malay. She could tell by the smell, even in the dark. She heard him floundering on the floor near her, and her blood froze at the wheep- wheep of a keen blade being whirled at random. It was close behind her, and the flesh of her hips contracted as she scuttled away on her all-fours. Her groping hands found a door and pulled it open, but no light came in, and she felt steps leading upward. But any avenue of escape from that blind blade flailing the blackness was welcome.

She shut the door behind her and went up the stair as fast as she could and eventually emerged into an equally dark space that felt big and empty and smelled musty. There she crouched, shivering, while the noise of battle went on below, until it culminated in an amazing crash that sounded as though somebody had been knocked bodily through a closed door. Then the sounds died away and silence reigned. She believed that Clanton had broken away from his attackers and fled, pursued by them.

She was right. At that moment Clanton was racing down a winding alley, hearing the pad of swift feet close behind him, and momentarily expecting a knife thrust in the back. They were too many for even him to fight with his bare hands, and they were gaining on him. With a straining burst of effort he reached an empty, dim-lit side-street ahead of them, and before he vanished into an entrance on the other side, he cast something on the paving in the light of the dim street-lamp.

Startled yelps escaped his pursuers, and abandoning the chase, they pounced on the yellowed ivory dragon Clanton had discarded.

Back in the loft of the deserted warehouse Marianne crept down the stairs. For some time she had heard no sound below. Then just as she reached the stair-door, she checked, her heart in her throat. Somebody had entered the room beyond. But this man wore the boots of a white man; she could tell by his footfalls. Then she heard a smothered, English oath.

Clanton must have eluded his pursuers and returned. She heard a match struck, and light stole through the crack under the door. She pushed the door ajar. A brawny figure, wearing a seaman's cap, with his back to the door, was bending over the corpse slumped in the chair.