Skull Face Revealed

  * * *

  The Mark of the Tulwar

  'The fed wolf curls by her drowsy mate

  In a tight-trod earth; but the lean wolves wait.'

  - Mundy

  I sat alone in Joan Gordon's apartments and laughed mirthlessly. In spite of the elixir's stimulus, the strain of the previous night, with its loss of sleep and its heartrending actions, was telling on me. My mind was a chaotic whirl wherein the faces of Gordon, Kathulis and Zuleik shifted with numbing swiftness. All the mass of information Gordon had given to me seemed jumbled and incoherent.

  Through this state of being, one fact stood out boldly. I must find the latest hiding-place of the Egyptian and get Zuleik out of her hands--if indeed he still lived.

  A week, Gordon had said--I laughed again--a week and I would be beyond aiding anyone. I had found the proper amount of elixir to use--knew the minimum amount my system required--and knew that I could make the flask last me four days at most. Four days! Four days in which to comb the rat-holes of Limehouse and Chinatown--four days in which to ferret out, somewhere in the mazes of East End, the lair of Kathulis.

  I burned with impatience to begin, but nature rebelled, and staggering to a couch, I fell upon it and was asleep instantly.

  Then someone was shaking me.

  'Wake up, Ms. Costigyn!'

  I sat up, blinking. Gordon stood over me, her face haggard.

  'There's devil's work done, Costigyn! The Scorpion has struck again!'

  I sprang up, still half-asleep and only partly realizing what she was saying. She helped me into my coat, thrust my hat at me, and then her firm grip on my arm was propelling me out of her door and down the stairs. The street lights were blazing; I had slept an incredible time.

  'A logical victim!' I was aware that my companion was saying. 'She should have notified me the instant of her arrival!'

  'I don't understand--'I began dazedly.

  We were at the curb now and Gordon hailed a taxi, giving the address of a small and unassuming hotel in a staid and prim section of the city.

  'The Baroness Rokoff,' she rapped as we whirled along at reckless speed, 'a Russian free-lance, connected with the war office. She returned from Mongolia yesterday and apparently went into hiding. Undoubtedly she had learned something vital in regard to the slow waking of the East. She had not yet communicated with us, and I had no idea that she was in England until just now.'

  'And you learned--'

  'The baroness was found in her room, her dead body mutilated in a frightful manner!'

  The respectable and conventional hotel which the doomed baroness had chosen for her hiding-place was in a state of mild uproar, suppressed by the police. The management had attempted to keep the matter quiet, but somehow the guests had learned of the atrocity and many were leaving in haste--or preparing to, as the police were holding all for investigation.

  The baron's room, which was on the top floor, was in a state to defy description. Not even in the Great War have I seen a more complete shambles. Nothing had been touched; all remained just as the chambermaid had found it a half-hour since. Tables and chairs lay shattered on the floor, and the furniture, floor and walls were spattered with blood. The baroness, a tall, muscular woman in life, lay in the middle of the room, a fearful spectacle. Her skull had been cleft to the brows, a deep gash under her left armpit had shorn through her ribs, and her left arm hung by a shred of flesh. The cold smooth face was set in a look of indescribable horror.

  'Some heavy, curved weapon must have been used,' said Gordon, 'something like a saber, wielded with terrific force. See where a chance blow sank inches deep into the windowsill. And again, the thick back of this heavy chair has been split like a shingle. A saber, surely.'

  'A tulwar,' I muttered, somberly. 'Do you not recognize the handiwork of the Central Asian butcher? Yara Khan has been here.'

  'The Afghan! She came across the roofs, of course, and descended to the window-ledge by means of a knotted rope made fast to something on the edge of the roof. About one-thirty the page, passing through the corridor, heard a terrific commotion in the baron's room--smashing of chairs and a sudden short shriek which died abruptly into a ghastly gurgle and then ceased--to the sound of heavy blows, curiously muffled, such as a sword might make when driven deep into human flesh. Then all noises stopped suddenly.

  'He called the manager and they tried the door and, finding it locked, and receiving no answer to their shouts, opened it with the desk key. Only the corpse was there, but the window was open. This is strangely unlike Kathulis' usual procedure. It lacks subtlety. Often her victims have appeared to have died from natural causes. I scarcely understand.'

  'I see little difference in the outcome,' I answered. 'There is nothing that can be done to apprehend the murderer as it is.'

  'True,' Gordon scowled. 'We know who did it but there is no proof--not even a fingerprint. Even if we knew where the Afghan is hiding and arrested her, we could prove nothing--there would be a score of women to swear alibis for her. The baroness returned only yesterday. Kathulis probably did not know of her arrival until tonight. She knew that on the morrow Rokoff would make known her presence to me and impart what she learned in northern Asia. The Egyptian knew she must strike quickly, and lacking time to prepare a safer and more elaborate form of murder, she sent the Afridi with her tulwar. There is nothing we can do, at least not until we discover the Scorpion's hiding-place; what the baroness had learned in Mongolia, we shall never know, but that it dealt with the plans and aspirations of Kathulis, we may be sure.'

  We went down the stairs again and out on the street, accompanied by one of the Scotland Yard women, Hansen. Gordon suggested that we walk back to her apartment and I greeted the opportunity to let the cool night air blow some of the cobwebs out of my mazed brain.

  As we walked along the deserted streets, Gordon suddenly cursed savagely.

  'This is a veritable labyrinth we are following, leading nowhere! Here, in the very heart of civilization's metropolis, the direct enemy of that civilization commits crimes of the most outrageous nature and goes free! We are children, wandering in the night, struggling with an unseen evil--dealing with an incarnate devil, of whose true identity we know nothing and whose true ambitions we can only guess.

  'Never have we managed to arrest one of the Egyptian's direct henchwomen, and the few dupes and tools of her we have apprehended have died mysteriously before they could tell us anything. Again I repeat: what strange power has Kathulis that dominates these women of different creeds and races? The women in London with her are, of course, mostly renegades, slaves of dope, but her tentacles stretch all over the East. Some dominance is hers: the power that sent the Chinese, Li Kung, back to kill you, in the face of certain death; that sent Yara Khan the Moslem over the roofs of London to do murder; that holds Zuleik the Circassian in unseen bonds of slavery.

  'Of course we know,' she continued after a brooding silence, 'that the East has secret societies which are behind and above all considerations of creeds. There are cults in Africa and the Orient whose origin dates back to Ophir and the fall of Atlantis. This woman must be a power in some or possibly all of these societies. Why, outside the Jews, I know of no oriental race which is so cordially despised by the other Eastern races, as the Egyptians! Yet here we have a woman, an Egyptian by her own word, controlling the lives and destinies of orthodox Moslems, Hindus, Shintos and devil-worshippers. It's unnatural.

  'Have you ever'--he turned to me abruptly--'heard the ocean mentioned in connection with Kathulis?'

  'Never.'

  'There is a widespread superstition in northern Africa, based on a very ancient legend, that the great leader of the colored races would come out of the sea! And I once heard a Berber speak of the Scorpion as 'The Daughter of the Ocean.' '

  'That is a term of respect among that tribe, is it not?'

  'Yes; still I wonder sometimes.'