Li Shoon's Nine Lives/Chapter 1

IX weeks after they were back from their Colorado adventure, Donald Carrick, seated in the carpeted section of Doctor John Fleming's wonderfully compact laboratory, uttered an exclamation of wonder. As the chemist whirled about, he beheld Carrick drawing very hard at his pipe and staring steadily through one of the windows."

"What's going on outside, to draw such an outburst from my calm friend?" Fleming asked.

"Nothing in the gardenette before this window," responded Carrick briefly, continuing to send up great clouds of pipe smoke.

Fleming, who had started to join his friend, now turned back to a bench on which stood a test-tube rack containing liquid in a dozen test tubes, to which he had just added as many reagents.

For at least three minutes Carrick continued looking out of the window, though he saw no near object. At last, picking up the newspaper, he resurveyed what he had been reading.

"That's strange," he muttered.

"Is it permissible to ask what is so strange?" Fleming inquired lightly, as he reached to an upper shelf over the bench and brought down a two-liter bottle of tenth-normal acid.

"Why, the Spokane, of the Blue Stack line, is missing—nine days overdue, and not sighted anywhere," replied Carrick. "She's a freighter, last stop San José de Guatemala, bound with general cargo to San Francisco. I own a bit of stock in the Blue Stack line."

"I see," said the chemist, nodding. "Looks, as if she had been lost. How do you relish a slump in the returns from and value of your stock?"

"Not particularly pleased over the prospect," responded the Master Hound, "though at the moment I was not thinking of that. Incidentally, Fleming, the Spokane carried in her strong room something over two million dollars in gold, shipped from South American banks to meet collections in San Francisco."

"But if the Spokane was wrecked," Fleming argued, the line is hardly responsible for the value of the money."

"The value of the money, in any event, will come out of the pockets of the underwriters at San Francisco," retorted Carrick.

"Let's see," mused Doctor Fleming, clamping to a stand the burette he had just filled with acid solution, and turning around, "wasn't the steamship Halcyon, of the Red M line lost about three weeks ago in the Pacific, with two million and a half in gold on board? You are beginning to see light, I believe, Fleming," said Carrick.

"Not the light that is illuminating or irritating your mind, I fancy," replied the chemist, with a smile. "If the San Francisco underwriters have to face a loss of four million and a half dollars, it must make them peevish. Yet how does it affect you? You haven't any funds invested in marine insurance, have you?"

"Not a penny," Carrick declared promptly.

"Then"

"But see here, Fleming," went on the Master Hound quickly, "neither steamship can have been lost in a gale, for there was no gale along the Pacific coast at the time either craft was last seen, nor for many days after. Both boats are American owned, had no munitions aboard, so could not have been blown up by submarines. Besides, none of the warring nations have submarines in those waters. It seems highly probable, therefore, that both the Spokane and the Halcyon foundered in smooth seas."

"Did neither craft carry wireless?"

"Both did," Carrick went on, his eyes gleaming. "That makes the mystery all the more dense. No distress signals were received anywhere from either craft."

"But there is only one class of men who rob ships and then sink them, destroying their crews," the chemist objected. "Such men used to be called pirates, and pirates are extinct in these days of steam."

"That doesn't mean that a new breed of pirates couldn't spring up," Donald Carrick interposed, speaking almost impatiently for one of his equable temperament. "In fact, if piracy has been committed in these two instances, then we are bound to admit that pirates exist, or reëxist. The point, Fleming, is right here. For weeks there have been no other losses in the Pacific, from Panama up, and the only two vessels to vanish are, curiously enough, the only two that carried* notable lots of gold coin."

"Does the newspaper say anything that could throw more light on the double mystery?" the chemist inquired.

"Here's the article," replied the Master Hound. "You may read it for yourself."

Hastily the chemist scanned the printed paragraphs, then shook his head, for he had really learned nothing that his friend had not already told him.

"If it weren't a flat impossibility," Carrick went on musingly, "I should be tempted to say that the vanishing of the two ships has many of the earmarks of the uncanny work of the dread Li Shoon. But that can hardly be, since we saw Li and his satellite, Weng-yu, leap to death over the edge of that Colorado precipice. More, we saw their mangled bodies lying crushed in the gully below."

"That would be proof enough of the death of most men," laughed John Fleming. "But would even such proof hold good in the case of an archfiend and a piece of cleverness like our Chinese friend, Li Shoon?"

Once more Donald Carrick picked up the paper, studying it attentively through eyes one-quarter closed.

"I could almost swear that Li was behind this job," he grumbled.

Fleming sprang to answer the telephone, but quickly swung around to say:

"Telegram for you, Carrick."

The latter moved to the instrument, listening intently. At last he said briskly:

"Send that telegram here in writing, and deliver it as speedily as you can." Resuming his chair and his pipe, Carrick smoked harder than ever, sending up clouds of smoke, yet uttering no word. Knowing his friend well, Fleming asked no questions, but continued letting a drop at a time fall from the stopcock of the' burette into a flask underneath.

Within ten minutes Tako, Fleming's Japanese servant, knocked, then entered, handing a telegram to the Hound, then silently withdrawing. Tearing off the end of the envelope, Carrick read twice through the message on the yellow page.

"See what you think of this, Fleming," he said finally, and the chemist read:

The telegram was signed by Bowers, sheriff of the Colorado county in which was the mountain precipice from which Carrick and Fleming believed they had witnessed the suicide of Li Shoon and Weng-yu.

"I never did a more foolish thing than not to investigate the two supposed bodies at the bottom of the gully," remarked Carrick, rather bitterly when he saw his chemist friend lay the sheet down.

"It would have taken hours to have reached that gully," Doctor John Fleming responded, "and the scene laid out for us was so real that I do not wonder that even you, Carrick, were fooled. Confound Li Shoon! He appears to possess the nine lives of a cat."

"Li Shoon would make a cat look foolish by comparison," retorted Carrick, more bitterly. "It seems impossible to slay him. I never really thirsted for any man's blood—not even Li's—but I am certain that it would not grieve me greatly if I were to see him cut into small pieces. Only then could I feel certain that he had ceased to girdle this suffering earth with his villainy."

"Are you going to do anything immediately in this matter?" Fleming asked.

"Nothing more than to think about it, if you mean the disappearance of the two treasure ships."

"I have finished this bench work," Fleming continued, as he lifted three racks of test tubes and some other bits of apparatus and stacked them neatly at the back of the bench. "So now, if you do not need me, I thought I would run up to Sylvia's hotel and chance a visit. If she is out, I will come right back."

"What if she has already vanished?" suggested Carrick, though he smiled, for he regarded the chance of that as slight. It was enough, though, to cause Fleming to turn a bit pale. With a spring he was at the telephone, calling up the hotel where Miss Dorrance lived. He soon heard that young lady's voice at the wire.

"If I arrive in about fifteen minutes," inquired the lover, "do I stand a good chance of being able to have a little time with you?"

"An excellent chance," laughed Sylvia.

"Ask if I may call with you?" suggested Carrick. Fleming did so, though he frowned slightly over the request. Lovers have sometimes been known to be impatient of the presence of third parties.

"You are wondering why I wish to go," Carrick continued, as Fleming hung up the receiver. "I shall not dally long, John, but I wish to warn Miss Dorrance, in my own way, against any efforts that Li Shoon's emissaries may make to lure her once more into captivity such as she was forced to endure on two other occasions."

"That will be as well," smiled the chemist thoughtfully. "Though, after what I have said to Sylvia on that very subject, I doubt if she would be likely to be trapped by anything less than downright force."

For five minutes Fleming busied himself with his toilet. Then, passing his own inspection in a mirror, he turned away just as Tako came in to report that the doctor's motor, which he had ordered brought round, stood at the door. Fleming and his friend went out, the former taking his place at the steering wheel. Quite punctually to their appointment, they presented themselves at the hotel desk to have their names telephoned up to Miss Dorrance's rooms. Two minutes later, the callers were received by the elder and the younger Miss Dorrance.

"We did not know but that you had already vanished," smiled Donald Carrick. "Unfortunately, we have news that Li Shoon, though officially dead, is again at large."

"You cannot mean it!" gasped Sylvia Dorrance, much of the color fading from her lovely face.

"It is true," replied Fleming, while Carrick pleasantly inquired:

"Has Li made any effort to get you away from your hotel again, to some point at which you might again fall into his power?"

"No," said Sylvia Dorrance, regaining most of her composure. "On the contrary, in yesterday afternoon's mail I received a much pleasanter letter and one which auntie and I have been wondering if we could not accept. It was from Elsie Duveen, one of my school chums. She and her mother are at Citrusville, California, and they have invited us to spend a few weeks with them."

"California?" quickly inquired Carrick, barely concealing his deep interest.

"Here is the note," said Miss Dorrance, rising, going to a desk, and returning with a folded, scented sheet of paper. "Perhaps you can read Elsie's horrible scrawl. I used to tell her that she had never really learned to write."

"And this is her writing—her own writing?" Carrick inquired, as he glanced at the letter.

"There can be no mistaking Elsie's handwriting," said Miss Dorrance.

"Thank you," said Carrick, passing back the sheet after having read it through. "Miss Dorrance, may I advise you not to think of starting to California until I am able better to advise you?"

"Why—what—do you really think?" asked the young woman, in astonishment.

"Later to-day I shall be able to tell you just what I think," Donald Carrick replied, rising. "And when I advise you, I shall know!"

Most courteously he took leave of the ladies, next nodding cheerily to Doctor John Fleming, who, despite the little that he knew of the Hound's thoughts, now appeared to be a bit mystified.

As he dropped in the elevator to the office floor, Carrick said to himself:

"At present I suspect old Li Shoon of knowing all about the disappearance of the treasure ships. Inside of two or three hours I think I shall know positively whether that yellow scoundrel is now after the yellow metal of ships on the Pacific!"