would view this message and put it in yonder strong box before others
enter."




CHAPTER XXI

When Captain Barlow had gone Amir Khan took up the message and read it.
Once he chuckled, for it was in his Oriental mind that the deceiving of
Barlow as to his knowledge of writing was rather a joke. Once as he
read the heavy silk _purdah_ of the door swayed a little at one side as
if a draught of wind had shifted it and an evil face appeared in the
opening.

Presently he rose from his chair, took the lamp in one hand and the
paper in the other, and crossed to the iron box in a far corner of the
room. He set the flickering light upon the floor, and dropping to his
knees, drew from his waistband a silver chain, at the end of which were
his seal and keys. His broad shoulders blanked the tiny cone of light,
and behind through a marble fretwork, a delicate tracery of lotus
flowers that screened the window, trickled cold shafts of moonlight
that fell upon something evil that wriggled across the white and black
slabs of marble from beneath the door curtain. The moonlight glistened
the bronze skin of the silent, crawling thing that was a huge snake, or
a giant centipede; it was even like a square-snouted, shovel-headed
_mugger_ that had crept up out of the slimy river that circled
sluggishly the eastern wall of the palace.

Once as Amir Khan fitted a key in the lock he checked and knelt, as