President Fu-Manchu Read Online Free PDF

all but throwing the nine men out of their chairs. Nayland Smith came to his feet at a bound, clutching the side of the car.
    “Hepburn!” he cried, “go forward with two men. This train can slow down but it must not stop!”
    Mark Hepburn ran forward along the car, touching two of the seven on their shoulders as he passed. They followed him out. A flare spluttered through snowy mist, clearly visible from the off-side windows.
    “Switch off the lights!” The order came in a high-pitched, irritable voice.
    A trainman appeared and the car was plunged in darkness.
    A second flare broke through the veil of snow. Federal Officer 56 was crouching by a window looking out, and now:
    “Do you see!” he cried, and grabbed the arm of a man who was peering out beside him. “Do you see!”
    As the train regained momentum, presumably under the urge of Hepburn, a group of men armed with machine-guns became clearly visible beside the tracks.
    The special was whirling through the night again when Hepburn came back. He was smiling his slow smile. Federal Agent 56 turned and stood up.
    “This train won’t stop,” said Hepburn, “until we make Cleveland.”

CHAPTER SIX

AT WEAVER’S FARM
    “ W hat’s this?” muttered Nayland Smith hoarsely. The car was pulled up. They were in sight of the woods skirting Weaver’s Farm. Night had fallen, and although the violence of the storm had abated there was a great eerie darkness over the snow-covered landscape.
    Parties of men carrying torches and hurricane lanterns moved like shadows through the trees!
    Smith sprang out on to a faintly discernible track, Mark Hepburn close behind him. They began to run towards the woods, and presently a man who peered about among the silvered bushes turned.
    “What has happened?” Smith demanded breathlessly.
    The man, whose bearing suggested military training, hesitated, holding a hurricane lamp aloft and staring hard at the speaker. But something in Smith’s authoritative manner brought a change of expression.
    “We are federal agents,” said Mark Hepburn. “What’s going on here?”
    “Dr. Orwin Prescott has disappeared!”
    Nayland Smith clutched Hepburn’s shoulder: Mark could feel how his fingers quivered.
    “My God, Hepburn,” he whispered, “we are too late!”
    Clenching his fists, he turned and began to race back to the car. Mark Hepburn exchanged a few words with the man to whom they had spoken and then doubled after Nayland Smith.
    They had been compelled by the violence of the blizzard to proceed by rail to Buffalo; the military plane had been forced down by heavy snow twenty miles from the landing place selected. At Buffalo they had had further bad news from Lieutenant Johnson.
    Crowning the daring getaway of Mrs. Adair, James Richet, whose arrest had been ordered by Mark Hepburn, had vanished…
    And now they were plowing a way along the drive which led up to Weaver’s Farm, a white frame house with green shutters, sitting far back from the road! A survival of Colonial New England, it had stood there, outpost of the white man’s progress in days when the red man still hunted the woods and lakes, trading beads for venison and maple sugar. Successive generations had modernized it so that today it was a twentieth-century home equipped from cellar to garret with every possible domestic convenience.
    The door was wide open; and in the vestibule, with its old prints and atmosphere of culture, a tall, singularly thin man stood on the mat talking to a little white-haired old lady. He held a very wide-brimmed hat in his hand and constantly stamped snow from his boots. His face was gloomily officious. Members of the domestic staff might dimly be seen peering down from an upper landing. Unrest, fear, reigned in this normally peaceful household.
    The white-haired lady started nervously as Mark Hepburn stepped forward.
    “I am Captain Hepburn,” he said. “I think you are expecting me. Is this Miss Lakin?”
    “I am glad you are here,