The Umayyad Empire Andrew Marsham
For B.E.M.
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Box Text
Chapter 2
The ‘Late Antique Little Ice Age’ and the ‘Justinianic Plague’
Chapter 3
An Administrative Papyrus from the Conquest of Egypt, 642 ce
Chapter 4
The Inscription from Hammat Gader, 5 December 662
Chapter 5
The Rebellion of al-Mukhtar al-Thaqafi at Kufa, 685–7
Chapter 6
Medinan Scholars in the Orbit of the Marwanids
Chapter 7
Joining the Conquerors: walā’ and mawālī
Chapter 8
Religious Leaders in Marwanid Basra and Kufa
Chapter 9
Factional Competition in the Umayyad Armies? ‘Qays’ and ‘Yemen’
Chapter 10
Itinerant Monarchy: The Umayyads and the Syrian Landscape
Chapter 11
The Monastery at Mount Sinai in the Umayyad Era
Chapter 12 Chief Scribes and Tax Officials at the Syrian Umayyad Court
Illustrations
Figures
I.1 The three largest (upper curve) and single largest (lower curve) states through history 2
1.1 Sheep grazing on the Syrian steppe with Bedouin tents in the background, near Damascus, Syria, c. 1950–5 39
1.2 The Namara inscription 42
2.1 The Harran inscription, 568 ce 49
3.1 Receipt for sixty-five sheep, 25 April 643 ce 73
4.1 The Bathhouse inscription at Hammat Gader, 5 December 662 ce 94
6.1 Solidus of Justinian II, c. 690 ce 129
6.2 ‘Standing Caliph’ dinar, Damascus mint, ah 77/696–7 ce 129
6.3 Dirham in the name of ‘Qatari, Commander of the Faithful’ (Middle Persian), Bishapur mint 134
6.4 Folio from the ‘Fustat Umayyad codex’ (after François Déroche) 139
6.5 Aniconic and epigraphic ‘reform’ dinar from Syria, dated ah 77/696–7 ce 140
6.6 Aerial view of the Old City of Jerusalem in winter, looking north-west 143
6.7 The Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, from the north 144
6.8 The Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, interior of the top of the inner arcade, looking north 145
6.9 Aerial view of the Umayyad Mosque at Damascus, looking south-east 155
7.1 Aerial view of the Old City of Istanbul in the early twentieth century, looking north 165
8.1 Near life-size stucco figure from the palace of Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi, between Damascus and al-Rusafa, probably depicting Caliph Hisham, c. 727 ce 177
10.1 Tiraz embroidered with ‘God’s Servant Marwan Commander of the Faithful ... in the tiraz of Ifriqiya’ 225
10.2 Plan of the Umayyad-era mosque-palace complex at Kufa, Iraq 227
10.3 The caliphal palace building at Qasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi, between Tadmur/Palmyra and Raqqa, April 1996 237
10.4 Bathhouse reception room floor mosaic at Khirbet al-Mafjar, near Jericho 238
10.5 Reconstructed façade of the gateway to the palace at Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi at the National Museum, Damascus, January 1993 239
10.6 Plan of the caliphal palace at Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi, between Damascus and Tadmur/Palmyra 240
10.7 Schematic plan of the site of Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi 241
11.1 St Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai in 2013 263
12.1 Milestone inscribed in Arabic in the name of ‘Abd al-Malik, Commander of the Faithful, from Khan al-Hathrura, between Jerusalem and Damascus, 685–705 ce 309
12.2 Papyrus document in Arabic about a tax debt, dated Safar ah 91/December 709–January 710 ce 313
Charts
I.1 Simplified genealogy of the Prophet Muhammad, the first two caliphs, the Umayyads, the Abbasids and the Shi‘i Imams 6
I.2 The caliphal branches of the Umayyads 16
2.1 Simplified genealogy of Quraysh 57
4.1 Simplified genealogy of the Hashimites and Zubayrids 81
4.2 Simplified genealogy of the Banu Kalb and their marriages to Umayyads 87
5.1 Simplified genealogy of Marwan b. al-Hakam and his Umayyad relatives 109
II.1 Simplified genealogy of the Marwanid caliphs 120
Maps
I.1 The Umayyad Empire at its greatest extent, in c. 740 ce 3
1.1 Rome and Iran in the fourth–fifth centuries ce and the neighbouring steppe, forest and desert zones 33
1.2 Relief map of the Arabian Peninsula and the Syrian Desert 36
1.3 Modern precipitation map of ‘Greater Syria’ (Bilād al-Shām) with some of the major late antique settlements
38
4.1 The Arabian conquests at c. 650 ce 79
6.1 The eastern frontier at the time of Qutayba b. Muslim 160
10.1 The main ecological zones of the Mediterranean and West Eurasia 215
10.2 Umayyad-era ‘aristocratic settlements’ (or ‘desert castles’) in Syria 236
10.3 Map depicting volume of imports in amphorae from a late seventh-century deposit at the Crypta Balbi, Rome
12.1 Late Sasanian and early Islamic Iraq 297
12.2 Late Roman and early Islamic Egypt 299
12.3 The military districts (ajnād) of Syria after the conquests 300
12.4 The ‘Umayyad North’ (the Caucasus and Mesopotamia) 302
12.5 Late Roman and early Islamic South Mediterranean and North Africa 304
12.6 The eastern lands of the Umayyad Empire in Marwanid times 306
Abbreviations
Journals, Encyclopedias and Reference Works
BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
CAH Cambridge Ancient History
DOP Dumbarton Oaks Papers
EI1 Encyclopaedia of Islam, First Edition
EI2 Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition
EI3 Encyclopaedia of Islam: THREE
E.Ir. Encyclopaedia Iranica
EQ Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an
IJMES International Journal of Middle East Studies
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
JESHO Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
JLA Journal of Late Antiquity
JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies
JRAS Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
JSAI Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam
JSS Journal of Semitic Studies
NCHI New Cambridge History of Islam
ODLA Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity
PmBZ Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit Online
Frequently Cited Texts and Translations
Baladhuri, Ansab Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā al-Balādhurī, Ansāb al-Ashrāf, ed. M. Fardūs al-Aẓm (Damascus, 1997–2004).
Baladhuri, Futuh Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā al-Balādhurī, Futūḥ al-Buldān, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden, 1866).
History of the B. Evetts (ed. and tr.), History of the Patriarchs of the Patriarchs Coptic Church of Alexandria (Paris, 1904–14).
Ibn ‘Asakir ‘Alī b. al-Ḥasan b. ‘Asākir, Ta’rīkh Madīnat Dimashq, ed. ‘Umar Gharāma al-‘Amrawī (Beirut, 1995–2000).
Khalifa
Khalīfa b. Khayyāṭ al-‘Usfurī, Ta’rīkh Khalīfa b. Khayyāṭ, eds Muṣtafā Najīb Fawwāz and Hikma Kashlī Fawwāz (Beirut, 1995).
Kindi Abū ‘Umar Muḥammad b. Yūsuf al-Kindī, The Governors and Judges of Egypt (= Kitāb Wulāt Miṣr wa-Quḍātihā), ed. Rhuvon Guest (Leiden, 1912).
Tabari Abū Ja‘far Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, Ta’rīkh alRusul wa-l-Mulūk, eds M. J. de Goeje et al. (Leiden 1879–1901).
Tabari, History Abu Ja‘far Muhammad b. Jarir al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, eds and trs Ehsan Yar-Shater et al. (Albany, NY, 1985–2007).
Theophanes Cyril Mango and Roger Scott (eds and trs), The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History ad 284–813 (Oxford, 1997).
Theophilus Robert G. Hoyland, Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle and the Circulation of Historical Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (Liverpool, 2011).
Ya‘qubi Aḥmad b. Abī Ya‘qūb al-Ya‘qūbī, Historiae (= Ta’rīkh al-Ya‘qūbī), ed. M. J. Houtsma (Leiden, 1883).
Frequently Cited Secondary Studies
EIC Fred M. Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton, 1981).
IatMC Michael G. Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest (Princeton, 1984).
RoIM Andrew Marsham, Rituals of Islamic Monarchy: Accession and Succession in the First Muslim Empire (Edinburgh, 2009).
SaMS Petra M. Sijpesteijn, Shaping a Muslim State: The World of a Mid-Eighth-Century Egyptian Official (Oxford, 2013).
SIAOSI Robert G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam As Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Princeton, 1997).
SoH Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (Cambridge, 1980).
WtaWC James Howard-Johnston, Witnesses to a World Crisis: Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century (Oxford, 2010).
Languages
Ar. Arabic Lat. Latin pl. plural
Gk Greek pl. plural sing. singular
Note on Dates, Transliteration and Names
Except where noted otherwise, dates are given in the Common Era (ce) form (ad, or Anno Domini, in most older publications). bce is used to mark Before Common Era (bc, Before Christ).
Where the Islamic lunar hijrī calendar is used, it is marked ah (Anno Hegirae). The Islamic lunar calendar begins with year 1 in mid-July 622 ce and each year is ten or eleven days shorter than the solar year.
Other than primary sources cited in the Bibliography, Arabic personal names and book titles are transliterated without the diacritical marks used by specialists. Only the markers for the letters ‘ayn and hamza have been retained (an opening and closing single quotation mark, respectively). Both are forms of glottal stop (arguably in the case of ‘ayn). Other Arabic words and phrases are italicised and transliterated according to a modified version of the scheme used in Brill’s Encyclopaedia of Islam: THREE.
Only the most widely recognised name for each person is used after the first mention of them, where a fuller set of names is sometimes given.
In the Arabic sources, everyone is known by their own name (their ism) and those of their forefathers (their nasab). Hence, the famous Umayyad caliph ‘Abd al-Malik is often known as ‘Abd al-Malik b. Marwan – that is, ‘Abd alMalik the son of Marwan (ibn, abbreviated to b., being the word for son; bint, abbreviated to bt., the word for daughter). Sometimes an individual became best known by a patronym. For example, an early biographer of the Prophet, Muhammad b. Ishaq, is more usually known simply as Ibn Ishaq – ‘Son of Ishaq’, since this distinguishes him more effectively than his ism, Muhammad.
People had at least two other names: a kunya, or teknonym, usually derived from the name of their eldest child, and a nisba, relating to their tribe or place of origin. ‘Abd al-Malik’s kunya was Abu Sa‘id – the father of Sa‘id. One of ‘Abd al-Malik’s nisbas was al-Umawi, ‘the Umayyad’, after his great great-grandfather, Umayya b. ‘Abd Shams. Someone could have more than one kunya and more than one nisba.
Acknowledgements
This book has been long enough in the making that I have incurred far more debts than it is possible to acknowledge individually here. I have attempted to single out some of the greatest, to institutions, groups and individuals. I apologise sincerely for oversights.
Much of the preliminary research for this book was supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Early Career Fellowship (grant no. 1026731/1) and further research and writing was facilitated by the universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge, as well as by Queens’ College, Cambridge. I am most grateful to all four institutions.
I would like to thank the editor of the series, Ian Netton, and the staff at Edinburgh University Press, particularly Nicola Ramsey, Rachel Bridgewater, Eddie Clark and Lel Gillingwater. Early in the publishing process, the anonymous reviewers of the book proposal made helpful comments and criticisms, for which I am also most grateful.
I have benefited from numerous enjoyable conversations about the Umayyads and their empire with colleagues and students, especially in various forums at the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Leeds, Hamburg, Tübingen and Paris. It is a great pleasure to express particular thanks to Katie Campbell, Ann Christys, Lauren Erker, Caroline Goodson, Hannah-Lena Hagemann, Geoffrey Khan, Sam Lasman, Marie Legendre, Petra Sijpesteijn and Philip Wood, all of whom gave generous advice and support of various kinds. Alain George is a long-standing collaborator and interlocutor on all things Umayyad, who also provided crucial moral support, while Amira Bennison, Harry Munt and Ed Zychowicz-Coghill read the book at various stages of its production; I am especially grateful to all four of them. All remaining errors in the book are of course my own.
Finally, I would like to record my thanks to my mother, Judith, my late father, Dennis, my brother, John, and my wife, Farrhat. My daughter arrived near the beginning of the process of writing this book, which is dedicated to her, with love.
Introduction
Just to the south of the medieval circuit walls of the Old City of Damascus, in Syria, is the Bab al-Saghir Cemetery, where Damascenes have buried their dead for centuries. I visited the cemetery in 2010, about six months before the beginning of the horror of the Syrian War. I had come to see the tomb of the caliph Mu‘awiya b. Abi Sufyan (r. 661–80 ce). Mu‘awiya was a brother-in-law and distant cousin of the Prophet Muhammad, and is usually considered to be the founder of the Umayyad dynasty. Once an extra-mural burial ground, the cemetery was now surrounded by the modern city. It was full of densely packed gravestones, separated only by narrow paths. There were also larger monuments, visible across the fields of smaller grave markers. When I visited, one mid-week afternoon in blazing July heat, veiled women pilgrims surrounded the large domed tomb of the Prophet Muhammad’s great-granddaughter, Fatima bt. al-Husayn.
Mu‘awiya’s grave was about 100m further along – a modern, pale, concrete cube, about 2m high, encased in green-painted railings and capped by a concrete dome decorated with religious invocations in the same green paint. An inscribed band of Arabic ran around the top of its four walls. The tomb stood in silence, with no visitors. When I got closer, I noticed a large hole broken in the modern inscription, through which the blue and white tiles of an older building showed. The gap seemed unlikely to be accidental damage, since it coincided exactly with Mu‘awiya’s name, all but the last syllable of which had been broken away.
As the damage to his tomb suggests, although Mu‘awiya lived more than 1,300 years ago, he and his family still excite strong feelings – often ambivalent and sometimes fiercely negative. This may seem surprising, and not just because of the remote time in which he lived; Mu‘awiya has the prestigious status of a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad – someone who is said to have met the founder of the Islamic religion, and converted to Islam while Muhammad still lived. Furthermore, in the ninety years between 661 and 750, Mu‘awiya, and then thirteen of his relatives from the Umayyad clan, presided over an era of astonishing empire-building on a hitherto unknown scale.
No previous empire had ever been as geographically vast as that the Umayyads ruled, and none would be again until the conquests of Genghis Khan and the Mongols, half a millennium later, in the thirteenth century (Figure I.1).
During the ninety years of Umayyad rule, many of what were to become the core territories of Islam and the Arab world were conquered by commanders loyal to Mu‘awiya or his Umayyad successors. By 711, the Umayyad Empire stretched from modern Spain and Morocco in the West to modern Afghanistan and Pakistan in the East; by 750, when the Umayyad dynasty fell from power, armies composed of the Arabians and their allies were fighting on imperial frontiers in the Caucasus, Central Asia, East Africa, South Asia and Europe (see Map I.1). The Arabic language had been established as the language of religion and imperial administration across much of the empire, and its governors and soldiers prayed in the mosques that had been built in its cities.
Members of the Umayyad family ruled all these lands as a single political entity. It is often referred to as the Umayyad Caliphate, after one of the titles used by its rulers – ‘God’s Caliph’ (khalīfat Allāh), meaning ‘God’s Representative on Earth’ – and after the name of their common ancestor
Figure I.1 The three largest (upper curve) and single largest (lower curve) states through history, measured in million square kilometres with a semi-logarithmic scale. The Umayyad Empire is marked at c. 740 CE. Based on a chart by J. Myrdal in Alf Hornborg, Brett Clark and Kenneth Hermele (eds), Ecology and Power (Routledge, 2012), 38.
Map I.1 The Umayyad Empire at its greatest extent, in c . 740 CE . Based on Hugh Kennedy, ‘The Umayyad Caliphate circa 132/750’, in An Historical Atlas of Islam , edited by Hugh Kennedy. Brill. Consulted online on 25 April 2020.
Umayya, Mu‘awiya’s great-grandfather. The Umayyad Caliphate remains the largest ever Islamic empire in terms of land area, and the only trans-regional empire in history to be dominated by a military elite who came from the Arabian Peninsula and its northern extension, the Syrian Desert and Steppe. The Umayyad era was also the last occasion when the entire Islamic world was politically united – notionally at least – under one ruler; thereafter it began to fragment into separate emirates and, eventually, separate imperial caliphates.
Shi‘is, Sunnis, and the Reputation of the Umayyads
In order to understand why neither Mu‘awiya’s status as a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad, nor his political achievements and those of his dynasty, are enough to protect his name from the anger of modern vandals, we must look beyond the Umayyad period itself, at the history of the first 300 years of Islam and the formation of the two sectarian positions known today as Sunnism and Shi‘ism. Ultimately, the ambivalent and sometimes negative image of Mu‘awiya and his Umayyad successors among many (but by no means all) Muslims is a consequence of the close connection between political leadership and religious authority in the formative era of Islam.
In 622, the Prophet Muhammad had established a new community at the oasis now known as Medina (in modern Saudi Arabia). This community identified as ‘faithful’ (Ar. mu’min, pl. mu’minūn) monotheists in the Jewish and Christian tradition, emphasising the idea of one God to the exclusion of all others, and the importance of loyalty to that God over other loyalties to family and tribe. By the time of Muhammad’s death, in 632, his political influence reached across much of the Arabian Peninsula. Muhammad’s immediate successors presided over the dramatic conquest of the Middle East, North Africa and western Central Asia. The two great empires that had dominated the temperate lands of West Eurasia for centuries – the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean and the Sasanian Empire of Iran – were overwhelmed in one decade, in the 630s and 640s. By 650, the Sasanian Empire had collapsed, and the Romans had surrendered control of Egypt and Syria. (According to widespread convention, Greater Syria – Bilād al-Shām in Arabic – is here simply called ‘Syria’, by which is denoted modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan and parts of southern Turkey.) The Romans fought hard for the North African lands west of Egypt, which they abandoned after 700.
With these vast conquests by the Arabian monotheists came bitter internal political conflict over resources and legitimate leadership. Because political leadership was also leadership of the new religious community, these conflicts generated passionate and often violent disputes that were at once political and religious. And because the leadership of the new empire of the ‘Faithful’ stayed in the hands of close relatives of the Prophet Muhammad, these religio-political
conflicts also had the character of family, or ‘tribal’, conflicts (see Chart I.1). In the wake of two major civil wars in the seventh century, in which they were victorious, and then a third war in 744–50, in which they were defeated and deposed from power, the reputations of Mu‘awiya and his Umayyad relatives suffered especially badly. By the mid-tenth century, when most of the defining characteristics of the two main sectarian traditions in Islam – Shi‘ism and Sunnism – had taken shape, the Umayyads’ image was entirely negative for the Shi‘is, and often somewhat ambivalent even for Sunnis.
The Shi‘is had come to believe that things had gone very wrong from the moment of Muhammad’s death, in 632. Muhammad should have been succeeded immediately by a son-in-law and cousin, named ‘Ali, whom the Shi‘is believed had been nominated as heir by Muhammad himself. ‘Ali was unique in that he was the father of the only male descendants of the Prophet who survived into adulthood, via his marriage to Fatima, one of Muhammad’s daughters. Hence, had ‘Ali led the Muslims, he might have established a ruling dynasty of male descendants of Muhammad. But, instead of ‘Ali, three others of the Prophet’s Companions had seized power in sequence. When the third of these was assassinated, in 656, ‘Ali was able finally to claim his right as leader of the Faithful. However, the violent and controversial circumstances of his accession to the caliphate made him politically vulnerable, and he was never universally recognised.
Among those who had withheld their allegiance was Mu‘awiya, claiming a right to avenge the murdered ruler’s death. When ‘Ali was in turn himself assassinated, in 661, Mu‘awiya proclaimed himself caliph, intimidating one of ‘Ali’s sons, al-Hasan, into surrendering any claim to power. Twenty years later, when Mu‘awiya died, the other of ‘Ali’s sons by Fatima, named al-Husayn, made a bid for power, only to be slaughtered alongside his family by a commander loyal to Mu‘awiya’s son Yazid. This massacre, which took place at Karbala in Iraq, is commemorated by Shi‘i Muslims every year during Muharram, the first month of the lunar Islamic year. Many of the tombs of al-Husayn’s family are in the same Bab al-Saghir Cemetery as Mu‘awiya.1
For the Shi‘is of the tenth century and after, the rightful leadership of the Muslims had resided in a line of leaders descended from ‘Ali and the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima. The line includes ‘Ali himself, then the Prophet’s grandsons, al-Hasan and al-Husayn. In the majority ‘Twelver’ Shi‘i tradition, there are nine more individuals, making twelve in all, one in each generation. These men are the true spiritual leaders of Islam, or Imams, though none after ‘Ali held
1 Stephennie Mulder, The Shrines of the ‘Alids in Medieval Syria: Sunnis, Shi‘is and the Architecture of Coexistence (Edinburgh, 2014), 114–85.
Chart I.1 Simplified genealogy of the Prophet Muhammad, the first two caliphs, the Umayyads, the Abbasids and the Shi‘i Imams.
the caliphate. The twelfth of them, named Muhammad, disappeared in 874, to return – in much the same way as Christians believe Jesus will – at the end of time. All but this last of the twelve Imams are believed in the Shi‘i tradition to have been murdered by the ruling caliphs. Mu‘awiya’s refusal to recognise the caliphate of ‘Ali or his son al-Hasan (whom Shi‘is believe he later assassinated), and Yazid b. Mu‘awiya’s association with the killing of al-Husayn, have given Mu‘awiya, his son Yazid and the Umayyads in general a profoundly evil reputation in Shi‘i thought.
For tenth-century Sunnis, in contrast, legitimate Islamic political leadership on earth was a reality, and existed in the form of the caliphate, which had been established by Muhammad’s first successors and sustained first by the Umayyads and then by the Abbasid dynasty. The Abbasids were the branch of Muhammad’s tribe who had replaced the Umayyads in a bloody revolution in 747–50. The Abbasids went on to hold the caliphate legitimately (in Sunni eyes) for over 500 years, until the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258.
The Abbasid caliphs had come to align themselves with Sunni religious scholars, opposed to the Shi‘i understanding of authority in Islam. For these Sunni scholars, the caliph was the proper political leader of the Muslims, and necessary for legitimate (that is, divinely favoured) political organisation in Islam, but authority in matters of religion and law was to be found in the memory of the era of the Prophet Muhammad, as transmitted and interpreted by the religious scholars (‘ulamā’, sing. ‘ālim), and not in the person of any one Imam, or individual leader, of the later Muslims.
For Sunnis, the key point was that the majority of the Muslims had remained within a single religio-political community – a point emphasised in the longer name from which the label ‘Sunni’ derives, ahl al-sunna wa-l-jamā‘a (‘people of tradition and unity’). In contrast to Shi‘i claims, the Sunnis held that the Companions of the Prophet had not acted in error when they chose their leaders. Among Sunnis, the special status of these first four caliphs, Abu Bakr (r. 632–4), ‘Umar (r. 634–44), ‘Uthman (r. 644–56) and ‘Ali (r. 656–61) is marked by their being remembered collectively as ‘The Rightly Guided Caliphs’ (al-khulafā’ al-rāshidūn).
This idea of the ‘Rightly Guided Caliphs’ can be seen as an attempt at détente with the Shi‘i view of history, making retrospective sense of the violent conflicts of the Muslim past (see Chart I.1). The Shi‘is were correct that ‘Ali had been a legitimate leader, but they were wrong to claim that Muhammad had nominated him specially, and that the first three caliphs had been illegitimate. Criticism of ‘Ali for taking advantage of the assassination of the third caliph, ‘Uthman, in order to become caliph himself, was now overlooked; both ‘Uthman and ‘Ali had been rightly guided and were models for the present. Indeed, for the ninth- and tenth-century Sunnis, the contemporary Abbasid
caliphs were legitimate political and military leaders, ruling with divine sanction. The Umayyads held a liminal and somewhat ambivalent status; they had successfully ruled the Muslims as caliphs, but Mu‘awiya’s accession marked the end of ‘rightly guided’ rule. Furthermore – almost as much for some Sunnis as for Shi‘is – the killing of al-Husayn, the Prophet’s grandson, together with many of his family, was a deep stain on the Umayyads’ reputation.2
This Sunni idea of the ‘rightly guided’ caliphate being brought to an end by the assassination of ‘Ali and the accession of Mu‘awiya has continued to exert a powerful hold over the way that Umayyad history is perceived. For Sunni Muslims, Mu‘awiya’s place in history, and that of his Umayyad successors, has always been placed just beyond the line that divides the exceptional era of God’s most important intervention in the world, through Muhammad and his leading Companions, from a more mundane historical time, where the caliphs were the legitimate dynastic political figureheads for the Muslims, but righteous authority in religious matters lay in looking back to the prophetic era. In contrast, for Shi‘i Muslims, Mu‘awiya and his son Yazid are emblematic of the tyrannical oppression of God’s chosen righteous family and, by extension, of true, Shi‘i, Islam. If the damage to Mu‘awiya’s tomb that I saw that summer was indeed something more than an accident or mindless vandalism it was probably an expression of Shi‘i hostility to the man who had kept the Prophet’s family out of power and so became a lasting symbol of injustice.
Re-framing the Umayyad Empire
Most of the Arabic narrative sources about these events were composed in their extant form in the ninth century or later. Hence, it is difficult to assess what we can know of how and why things happened at the time, in the seventh and eighth centuries, and how they were perceived by contemporaries. As we have seen, one question that concerned the compilers of our sources was whom among the Muslims’ leaders had rightfully held power, and with whom religious authority rightfully resided. Associated with this question was the correct way to rule God’s people, and so the personalities of leaders, their management of the affairs of state, and their interactions with men of religion, are all also prominent themes. So too is the question of their relationship to the proper interpretation of the religious tradition; as we have seen, the later Sunni and Shi‘i perspectives on the Islamic past were quite different, and there were many other topics where the perspective of the scholar composing the text shaped the narrative. What most scholars shared was a focus on how God’s
2 On the ‘four caliph thesis’, see I-Wen Su, ‘The Early Shi‘i Kufan Traditionists’ Perspective on the Rightly Guided Caliphs’, JAOS 141 (2021), 27–47.
will had been manifested in the history of the Muslims. Above all, Islam was presented as a break with the misguided traditions of the past and – especially among Sunni scholars – the unity and coherence of the Muslims, and continuities within their history, tended to be emphasised over conflict, diversity, hybridity and discontinuity.
Until recently, the perspectives of the later Islamic tradition have shaped the treatment of early Islam in modern scholarship, and they still have significant influence today. The break with the pre-Islamic past is reflected in the tendency of many modern histories to begin with a short preliminary discussion of pre-Islamic Arabia and the Middle East, before turning to the narrative of the expansion of Islam from Mecca and Medina in Arabia and then development of the Caliphate. This can lead to the impression that the Islamic empire formed in something of a vacuum, with developments internal to it being far more important than the interaction of Arabians and Muslims with the world around them, and where the pre-Islamic history of the Middle East counted for little in the face of the new Arab culture and the religion of Islam.
Recent scholarship has broken with these teleological views by investigating continuities with the pre-Islamic past and the history of Islamic belief and practice before the consolidation of the Sunni and Shi‘i perspectives outlined above. Such reframing of early Islamic history is often expressed by the idea that early Islam belongs within the period of ‘Late Antiquity’ (often c 200–750 ce). Late Antiquity was the era of the transformation of the power structures of the Roman Empire, including the adoption of Christianity as the empire’s ruling ideology, together with the replacement of Roman rule by new elites from the margins of the former empire, who also took up Christianity as their legitimating belief system. Reframing the history of early Islam in this way has led to the questioning of many assumptions that might otherwise be adopted from the later source material, including the religious and ethnic identities of the rulers of the Umayyad Empire, and the power structures upon which they depended.3
This book similarly seeks to reframe the Umayyad Empire by moving beyond the narratives provided by the ninth- and tenth-century sources. It seeks to explain how the empire came into being and how it functioned, as well as the forces that brought about the fall from power of its ruling family and their allies. In so doing, it is necessary to uncover the social, economic, military and ideological forces that shaped the history of the Middle East, North Africa
3 In English, the literature begins with Peter Brown’s World of Late Antiquity: From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad (London, 1971). For a recent discussion, see Harry Munt, ‘The Transition from Late Antiquity to Early Islam in Western Arabia’, in Andrew Marsham (ed.), The Umayyad World (London and New York, 2021), 357–73.
and western Asia in the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries. Vast new empires do not simply come into being because of the ideas of a single person, nor even because of the actions of a small group of people around them. Ideas and people do of course matter – and the case of Islam, where a tiny religious community was a crucial element in the formation of a new ruling elite, and ultimately of something that can be called a new civilisation, is a particularly eye-catching example of this. But ideas and people have their moment. Or, to put it another way, ideas have a context; social structures, economic patterns and, in the case of empire, the ability to marshal military force, must all be aligned to allow them to flourish. This book seeks to pay sufficient attention to all these dimensions of the era of the Umayyad Empire, and to take account of the long pre-Islamic context that gave rise to it and the forces that shaped its evolution.
What is perhaps hardest of all to recover is a full sense of contingency: in the seventh century, that Islam would both shape and be shaped by a lasting empire, let alone a huge world civilisation, was unknown to everyone; furthermore, Islam itself was different from what Muslims of later decades and centuries would know. Indeed, there is no evidence that the conquerors of Rome and Iran at the time of Mu‘awiya usually called themselves ‘Muslims’, nor is the term ‘Islam’ widely attested. Rather, it was during the later Umayyad period that the label ‘Muslims’ (Ar. muslimūn) became a more prominent label for the group whose precursors seem more often to have called themselves the ‘Faithful’ (mu’minūn) or ‘Emigrants’ (muhājirūn); at the same time, this successful new community’s religious tradition (or, rather, diverse competing versions of that tradition) changed and developed; by the latter decades of the Umayyad period, it becomes more straightforward to refer without qualification to various forms of ‘Islam’ as a religious tradition, as well as to ‘Muslims’, as its adherents. Although, even then, much of the doctrine and practice we consider intrinsic to Sunni and Shi‘i forms of Islam today had yet to take shape.4
Another anachronism in many modern narratives about the Umayyad Empire is the emphasis on the history of the Muslims, to the exclusion of other groups. This tendency reflects the concerns of medieval Muslim historians with the history of what they saw as their community – the Faithful of Arabian origin, who had conquered Rome and Iran. Of course, the Arabian armies were a tiny minority among the people they encountered in the territories
4 For the idea of an early community of the ‘faithful’ as a more ecumenical ‘believers movement’, see Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, MA, 2010). On muhājirūn and other labels, see Ilkka Lindstedt, ‘Muhajirun as a Name for the First/Seventh Century Muslims’, JNES 74 (2015), 67–73. See further on both points, below, Ch. 2, pp. 61–3.
they conquered – Romans, Persians, Aramaeans, Copts, Nabataeans, Kurds, Armenians, Albanians, Berbers, Khazars, Sogdians, Goths, Indians and Turks, according to some of the labels used in the sources. The languages, religions and cultures of these groups persisted far beyond the Umayyad period. Indeed, many still exist in in the Middle East of today.
While the conquering Arabian armies articulated their unity in religious terms, notably through pledges of allegiance made before God, they did not usually expect the populations they ruled to change their religious practices so long as they acknowledged the suzerainty of God and His community of the Faithful. Comparatively large-scale conversions to Islam among the conquered populations happened only towards the end of the Umayyad period and, even then, Muslims remained a tiny minority. By the best estimate, about 90 per cent of the empire’s population at the very end of the Umayyad period were neither of Arabian heritage nor Islamic faith.5 Conversion then accelerated significantly in the ninth century. Hence, most of the Muslim historians of the ninth and tenth centuries were descendants either of the conquered peoples or of both Arabian migrants and people from the lands they had conquered. Their ancestors had converted to Islam and adopted Arabic as the lingua franca of the world in which they lived. These shifts in identity were reflected in the concerns of their historical writing. When they discussed the histories of their own, non-Arabian, non-Muslim, ancestors they tended to do so within a framework provided by Islam – situating their people’s preIslamic past in relation to God’s creation of the world and the prophecy of Muhammad.
Thus, the Umayyad world was in many respects an as it were ‘pre-Islamic’ world, insofar as ‘Islamic’ is often shorthand for a majority-Muslim, Arab civilisation and its various Persian, Turkish and other successors. Instead, in Umayyad times a diverse conquering elite, led by a ruling group from West Arabia but composed from the various peoples of the Arabian Peninsula and the Syrian Desert, were dominant in the former lands of Rome and Iran. Like many of the other new elites of Late Antiquity, the conquerors’ leaders articulated their political unity in religious terms. For the West Arabians, the example of the Prophet Muhammad and a sense of their own faith tradition as distinct from and superior to those of the conquered peoples were both important. However, much remained in contention, and many of the features of Islamic belief and practice that became core to the later tradition had yet to develop or gain widespread acceptance. Moreover, converts retained some previous beliefs
5 Richard W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge, MA and London, 1979).
and practices, which in turn shaped the development of Islam. Indeed, the context is still recognisably Roman and Sasanian: Greek, Latin, Syriac, Aramaic, Coptic, Middle Persian, Sogdian, Bactrian and other languages were employed by the diverse peoples of the empire and the ideas, structures and institutions of Roman and Iranian rule shaped those developed by the Arabian conquerors.
Among the peoples of the conquered territories were Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews, Buddhists and others, who attained high office in the service of the new imperial rulers or ruled themselves as allies of the new empire. Most definitions of empire depend upon the idea of a dominant ruling group, with a distinctive cultural or religious identity, exerting various forms of power over other, diverse, groups, but also co-opting some conquered peoples into the new hegemony. This definition holds true for the Umayyad era. The distinction between ‘conqueror’ and ‘conquered’ was often critical – with the former extracting tribute and taxes from the latter. The ‘conquerors’ defined themselves by shared faith, in God and one another, as ‘the Faithful’ or, increasingly, also as ‘Muslims’. However, they also shared somewhat similar languages and cultures, as peoples from the Arabian Peninsula and its northern extension, the Syrian Desert and its steppe. Indeed, Arabian heritage and membership of a military elite were closely connected, and so non-Arabians serving in the army or the administration tended to be given a distinctive status as ‘clients’ (Ar. mawālī, sing. mawlā) of the Arabian person or group to whom they were affiliated. However, just as much of what came to form the later Islamic religious tradition had yet to take shape, so too had some of the later ideas about ‘Arabs’.
The more geographical ‘Arabians’ is usually used here to describe the conquerors and their descendants instead of the ethnic ‘Arabs’. This is because, ‘the Arabs’ (Ar. al-‘arab) only began to gain widespread currency as a label for all the peoples who traced their heritage back to the Arabian Peninsula (or, alternatively, for all the people who spoke Arabic) during the Umayyad era. Out of the migration into the conquered territories came new questions of identity and belonging and it is in this context that ‘the Arabs’ began to gain its inclusive, but still contested, collective meaning among the migrants and the other members of the new imperial military elite. As a result, the term ‘Arab’ became inflected in some contexts with the idea of status and rulership; sometimes ‘the Arabs’ came to be used as a label for the imperial military elites of the Umayyad era. Meanwhile, many of the rebel movements in the later decades of Umayyad rule drew in part upon non-Arabs’ resentments of the Arabs’ privileges and power.6
6 Peter Webb, Imagining the Arabs: Arab Identity and the Rise of Islam (Edinburgh, 2016), esp. 85–8, 126–56. See further below, Ch. 1, pp. 40–2. On ‘Arabs’ as the imperial elite, see Patricia Crone, ‘The Significance of Wooden Weapons in al-Mukhtar’s Revolt and the Abbasid
This is not to say, however, that there were not already some shared cultural characteristics among the various groups who comprised the first conquering armies. Indeed, the Arabian backgrounds of the West Arabian leadership and their armies are crucial to understanding the unique characteristics of their empire – a settled leadership, who could claim a sacred status by virtue of their association with the shrine at Mecca, led armies drawn primarily from nomadic pastoralist Peninsular and Syrian steppe groups. The strategic mobility of the pastoralists helps to explain the vast scale of their conquests, which anticipate in some respects the far larger thirteenth-century conquests of the Mongols. Moreover, the religious and governmental traditions established by the Meccan leaders, in combination with the Arabian backgrounds of their armies, meant that their empire developed a new and distinctive religious and cultural character. Much of this religion and culture took shape in new garrison settlements where many of the Arabian groups settled after the conquests, retaining and developing their sense of separateness from the non-Arabian populations around them.
An Umayyad Empire?
In what senses, then, can we speak of ‘the Umayyad Empire’? Few, if any, Muslims in early Islamic times would have thought of the Muslim polity as an empire in the sense that the label is now used. Political power was described in more personal terms, as ‘sovereignty’ or ‘kingship’ (mulk). Where it was abstracted from a person, it was often simply the ‘command’, ‘affair’ or ‘affairs’ (amr, pl. umūr). Moreover, the conquering Faithful often deployed the rhetoric of suspicion of worldly power that was also widespread in Jewish and Christian cultures of the time. Indeed, the nascent religion of Islam came to be defined in part against the ‘idolatry’ (shirk) of Roman and Sasanian imperial rule. (Of course, the Roman and Sasanian rulers themselves had made very similar claims to divine sanction against the claims of their enemies.) The new political dispensation established by the Arabians was amr Allāh or mulk Allāh – the ‘government’, ‘rule’ or ‘sovereignty’ of God. In this, too, their language echoed that of their Roman and Sasanian opponents.7
From 661 at the latest, and quite possibly earlier, the ruler of the new empire used the formal title amīr al-mu’minīn, ‘The Commander of the Faithful’ (as noted above, ‘the Faithful’ is a more common term than ‘Muslim’
Revolution’, in Ian R. Netton (ed.), Studies in Honour of Clifford Edmund Bosworth Volume I: Hunter of the East: Arabic and Semitic Studies (Leiden, 2000), 178–80, 183–5.
7 On mulk, see Sean W. Anthony, ‘Prophetic Dominion, Umayyad Kingship: Varieties of Mulk in the Early Islamic Period’, in Andrew Marsham (ed.), The Umayyad World (London and New York, 2021), 39–64.
for the adherents of Islam in early Arabic texts). ‘Command’ (imāra) was held by him (and hence the residence of the ruler or his governors was the dār al-imāra, ‘the House of Command’, or ‘Government Palace’). Occasionally, in panegyric poetry, in some speeches and public letters, and on rare coins, the ruler was also khalīfat Allāh, ‘God’s Caliph’ – that is, ‘God’s Deputy’. From this, a name for his office – the Caliphate (khilāfa) – came to be derived. (‘Caliphate’ did not tend to be used to refer to the territorial entity of his dominions, in the way that it is today.) He could also be described as a malik (king), but this was not a formal title, and is found only in the panegyric poems performed at the caliphal court, in some graffiti or informal inscriptions, and in Syriac Christian texts. Again, much of this political titulature echoes that of the Christian Roman emperors, who were the Umayyads’ main rivals for dominance of the eastern Mediterranean and against whom the Umayyads came to define themselves.8
Thus, the Umayyads had much in common with their Roman and Sasanian imperial rivals. Moreover, there is a second reason for referring to the Umayyad Empire as an empire. This is to use the word empire not as a straightforward translation of a label that might have been used by its inhabitants, but rather as a term with analytical and descriptive utility. The vast domains of the Umayyads, comprising numerous religious, linguistic and ethnic groups, under the notional authority of a single monarch fits most modern definitions of empire. The exploitation of the resources of a conquered or subordinate population for the benefit of an elite or elites is another a defining feature of empire, and in the Umayyad Empire, tribute and taxation were collected for the benefit of a small ruling elite of Arabian conquerors and migrants and their descendants, together with their (often non-Arabian) administrators and allies. In the world of Late Antiquity, narratives of universal monarchy under universal divine sanction – Christian, Jewish or Zoroastrian – were the explanatory frameworks for such political arrangements. The institution of the caliphate and the religion of Islam developed as a distinctive iteration of this late antique pattern of imperial thought.9
8 Andrew Marsham, ‘“God’s Caliph” Revisited: Umayyad Political Thought in Its Late Antique Context’, in Alain George and Andrew Marsham (eds), Power, Patronage, and Memory in Early Islam: Perspectives on Umayyad Elites (Oxford, 2018), 3–37; EI3, ‘Commander of the Faithful’ (A. Marsham).
9 On defining empire, see Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2010), 8–22; Peter F. Bang, ‘Empire – A World History: Anatomy and Concept, Theory and Synthesis’, in Peter F. Bang et al. (eds), The Oxford World History of Empire: Volume One: The Imperial Experience (Oxford, 2021), 12–49.
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feet trod upon the ashes. Well, that is good, so far as it goes. It tells me where he was, and also the kind of footwear he had. But he didn’t come in by way of this flue, wide as it is.”
The room was at the back of the house, and heavy curtains were drawn over the windows. Nick Carter flung one of the curtains aside and peered out. He saw that there was a long balcony outside, which passed both windows, and he knew it had been arranged thus for a fire escape.
It was not like the ordinary contrivance of that kind, such as is seen on apartment houses and some business buildings.
It had been built by the owner of the house, and was of an ornate description, with no ladder leading to the ground. Instead, there was a rope ladder, with steel crosspieces, which could be let down if desired. The ladder was out of reach of any burglar who might get to the back of the premises and seek to get in by way of the study window.
The windows were both fastened with spring catches. These fastenings were heavy and of modern pattern. But Nick Carter smiled sadly, as he reflected how easy it would be for a professional cracksman to negotiate them. A thin-bladed knife would be the only tool required. The fellow who had murdered Anderton may not have been a professional burglar, but assuredly he would be ingenious enough to get one of these windows open, and close it again when he had finished his work.
The detective, flash lamp in hand, stepped out on the balcony. The floor was of painted steel, and solid. Most fire escapes have a railed floor, but this had been put up under the eye of the dead man, and he wanted it like the floor of a room.
Directing the strong, white light of his lamp on the floor of the balcony, Nick Carter did not discover anything that would help him for the first few minutes. Suddenly a low ejaculation of satisfaction escaped him.
“By George! Here it is! But what does it mean?”
He had found a slight smudge of wood ash at the very end of the balcony. It was so small that it might easily have been overlooked by any but the sharpest eyes. Even the detective had passed it over several times.
He knelt down and put the light close to it. Beyond question, there was a gray-white mark, but it bore nothing of the shape of a human foot.
“Well, I’ll have to try something else.”
He took from his pocket a powerful magnifying glass, and, adjusting the light properly, again stared hard at the ash mark. This time he was rewarded for his patience by a discovery. Clearly defined, was the shape of a foot. In the one place where the smudge was pronounced, as well as around it, the detective made out the impress. It was very indistinct over most of its area, but certainly was there, now that he had the magnifier to help him.
“So far, good! But how did he get up here, and again, how did he get away. If he didn’t get up from the ground below the balcony, which way did he come?”
Nick Carter still held his magnifying glass and flash in his fingers, as he reflected, his gaze fell upon the top of the railing at the end of the balcony.
“I see now, I believe!” he murmured.
The flash had thrown its light upon the railing, and quickly he brought his glass into play at the same spot. A smile of satisfaction spread over his keen features, and he carefully looked all along the railing.
“He stood on this railing. But apparently with only one foot. What does that mean? Where did he go? How did he get here? Hello! What are these splinters of wood? There has been a plank laid on the railing. Yes, here is some of the paint scraped off.”
He turned off his flash, and stood in the darkness, considering. The voice of Chick came from below:
“Hello, chief! Are you there?”
“Yes,” answered Nick guardedly. “What have you found?”
“Nothing much. But it may have something to do with the case that the next house to this is empty. The people who live here are away—gone to California for two months. Went a week ago. Ruggins told me.”
“Ruggins? Oh, yes—the butler. Well? Has anybody been seen in the house since the family went? I suppose there is a caretaker?”
“Yes. There is an old man who lives there by himself. But he hasn’t been seen for three days. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”
“Any lights in the house?”
“Yes. The light in the room the old man uses, in the basement, has been going to-night. Before that it was dark. Now it is dark again.”
“Come up here, Chick, to the study. I’ll open the door.”
Nick Carter went through the window, carefully closing it and pulling the heavy curtains back into place. Then he opened the door, and, as soon as Chick was inside, closed it again.
“The servants are kind of scared,” said Chick. “But I think that is only because they know Mr. Anderton is lying dead in his bedroom. Only Ruggins and one of the maids know he was killed, and they are keeping their mouths shut.”
“I hope they are,” remarked Nick coldly.
“You can depend on that. Ruggins is a close-mouthed fellow, and he has the girl hypnotized, I think. She has an idea he is the greatest ever, and he can make her do anything. I heard some of the other maids talking about Ruggins and Amelia going to be married next spring.”
Nick Carter smiled at this story of romance, which he regarded as a lucky thing, if it would have the effect of keeping the maid from talking. But he made no comment. He only asked Chick how he had found out about the house next door.
“Ruggins told me,” replied Chick. “Oh, yes. And he said something else. There is a tall Japanese professor, who used to visit there sometimes.”
“How do you know he was Japanese?” interrupted Nick.
“Ruggins. He said so. I told him Japanese men were not generally tall. He came back at me by saying this one was, so there was nothing more to be said. The professor’s name is Tolo. That’s all Ruggins could tell me— Professor Tolo.”
There came a knock at the door at that moment, and Chick, at Nick Carter’s request, opened it. He confronted Ruggins, who had come up with a card in his hand.
“Gentleman would like to speak to Mr. Carter,” he announced.
Nick looked at the name on the card. Then he started, as he told Ruggins to send the gentleman up.
“Chick,” he whispered, when the butler had gone. “Who do you think this is, wants to see me?”
“I don’t know. Who?” asked Chick.
“Professor Tolo,” was Nick Carter’s unexpected reply.
CHAPTER IV.
THE NEEDLES AGAIN.
The man who came into the room, bowing low and smiling with the suave courtesy of the Oriental, was more than six feet in height, but not stout. He looked as if he might have a great deal of strength in his wiry frame, and his high forehead, which showed extensively under the narrowbrimmed felt hat he wore far back on his head, was that of an intellectual man. The color of his skin suggested that he might be a Japanese. This was confirmed by his wiry black hair.
He appeared to have very sharp black eyes, but Nick Carter could not see them very well, because they were behind large, thick glasses, with heavy, tortoise-shell frames.
“I must ask your pardon for intruding, Mr. Carter,” began Professor Tolo. “But Mr. Anderton was a warm friend of mine, and I have just heard that he is seriously ill.”
“He is dead,” returned Nick simply.
Professor Tolo threw up both hands with a gesture of horror and sorrow. As he did so, Nick Carter noted the powerful sinews of his arms, which could be seen up his sleeves, moving like snakes under the yellow skin.
“Dead?” repeated Tolo. “Why, this is dreadful! How was it? Did you hear? Wasn’t it very sudden?”
“Very,” returned Nick. “It was an affection of the heart.”
“Heart failure! Well, I always thought my poor friend has something of the appearance of one who might be carried off in that way. Can I see him?”
“I am afraid not, professor. The coroner has his remains in charge. When did you see Mr. Anderton last?”
“About a week ago. We met at the home of a friend of both of us. I had never been in this house. You know, he only lately returned from China. He had gathered up there a mass of valuable information for this government, I understand.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” said Nick shortly.
“I have heard so. In fact, Mr. Anderton made no secret of it. He even told me where he kept the data he had gathered, and offered to let me look it over. Part of my reason for being in this neighborhood now was to see Mr. Anderton and ask him to show me those records.”
“It is eleven o’clock at night,” the detective reminded him. “Isn’t it rather late to come on such a mission?”
“It was the habit of Mr. Anderton to work at night, and I have often met him away from home at a later hour than this. Students pay little attention to the time of day or night when they are interested in any subject they may be discussing. Did Mr. Anderton leave those papers where they could be seen, I wonder. They deal only with scientific subjects, of course.”
“Did I not understand you to say that they were intended for the government?” asked Nick. “It would hardly be proper for anybody else to see them, I should say.”
“They were to be sent to the Smithsonian Institute, I believe. But I was told by Mr. Anderton himself that there was nothing secret about them. He intended the facts he had gathered to be given to the world at large. My understanding was that they were to be published simultaneously with their being sent to Washington.”
“You’re a liar,” muttered Chick, under his breath. “And you know it.”
Chick had been gazing steadily at the tall professor without being observed, and the result of his inspection was that he did not like the look of the stranger. It occurred to Chick, too, that Professor Tolo was too sure of Nick Carter’s name after hearing it for the first time that night.
“I could not interfere with any of Mr. Anderton’s papers, professor,” said Nick. “I am sorry that you have been disappointed. I should think the best way for you to see these records you want would be to communicate with Washington.”
The professor bowed and shrugged his shoulders, while a smile spread over the yellow face beneath the large spectacles.
“Probably you are right, Mr. Carter. I thank you for the suggestion. Any suggestion from so able a detective as everybody knows you to be cannot but be valuable. I am right, am I not, in supposing that you are the Mr. Nicholas Carter whom all the world knows? Your home is in Madison Avenue, is it not?”
“Yes. That is where I live, and my name is Nicholas.”
Nick Carter said this in the cold tone in which he had conducted most of his part of the conversation. It was easy to be seen that he was not favorably impressed with the rather too smug Professor Tolo.
They were interrupted by a knock at the door. It was Ruggins, who announced that a man, who seemed much excited—a young man—wanted to see Mr. Carter on an important matter.
“Which Mr. Carter?” demanded Nick.
“Both, ’e said. ’E asked if you were both ’ere, and when I told him yes, ’e said that was what he wanted. So I came up and left ’im in the ’all till I could find out whether you would see ’im.”
“It might be Patsy,” whispered Chick to his chief.
The same idea had occurred to Nick Carter, and he hurried out of the room, followed by Chick and Ruggins, who closed the door behind him.
Instantly the Japanese professor became active. He carefully laid a heavy chair on its side against the door. Then he ran across the room, to where a tall bookcase stood against the wall in a corner, opposite the windows.
Professor Tolo had a remarkable knowledge of its arrangements. Throwing open one of the large glass doors of the case, he hastily removed four or five heavy books and placed them on a chair by the side of it. Then he fumbled inside, feeling the back wall.
“Curses!” he growled. “Where is that button? The chart I have gives it just about here. Let me see.”
He thrust his hand into the long black coat he wore, and felt in a pocket, from which he drew forth a peculiar-looking little volume, whose covers were made of some sort of shiny green substance, and which was held together by a metal clasp.
“If they will only stay away long enough,” he muttered, while the perspiration came out on his forehead in large drops. “The jade book will tell me. But I’ve got to have time to look it up.”
He stepped back from the bookcase, so that he could see better by the electric light just behind him, and opened the metal clasp of the greencovered book with a click.
He was still turning the leaves—which seemed to be of parchment— when he heard footsteps outside the door.
“Too late this time,” he mumbled. “But I’ll get it yet. That infernal Nick Carter! Who would have thought he would mix himself up in this? And his man, too! I’ll have a reckoning with both of them in due time. They’ll find out that the crossed needles can reach anybody!”
Hurriedly he thrust the jade book, as he called it, back into his pocket, and opening one of the big volumes he had taken from the bookcase, seemed to be deeply absorbed in reading. In fact, he was so taken up with it that he did not heed a racket at the door, when somebody outside pushed it against the overturned chair.
It was not until Nick Carter had forced his way in, and Chick was picking up the chair, that he turned, with a far-away expression, and smiled.
“Ah, Mr. Carter! Back again? I took the liberty of looking at this book when I found myself alone. It is by my dear friend Anderton, written several years ago. I have heard of it, but never happened to get hold of it before. Do you know the work? It is called ‘The Orient and Orientalism.’ A splendid treatment of a great subject. Masterly, in fact. I have often thought——”
“Why did you barricade the door?” demanded Nick, his eyes blazing. “I don’t understand this, Professor Tolo.”
There was no chance to ignore the anger in the detective’s tones, and the professor came to himself with a jerk. He shut the book and put it on its shelf, while he looked from Nick Carter to Chick, and back again, in a most edifying bewilderment.
“I don’t understand,” he faltered.
“You placed a chair against that door, didn’t you?” insisted the detective.
“Did I?” asked the professor vacantly. “I—I don’t know. I was thinking about something else. Why, I—— Oh, yes, so I did. I remember. As I passed a chair, I accidentally knocked it over. I intended to pick it up, of course. But I saw the title of this volume in the bookcase——”
“Away across the room?” growled Chick.
The professor disregarded the query, and continued: “When I saw that this book was here, I forgot everything else. All I saw was this work, that I have longed for years, to hold in my hand, and I forgot all about the chair. How I wish my dear Anderton were alive! He would lend it to me, I know. As it is, I must try and get a copy somewhere else.”
“It would be advisable, I think,” said the detective, as he picked up the other volumes and replaced them in the bookcase. “Is there anything more I
can do for you, professor? You will pardon me if I say that I am very busy, and that it is getting late.”
“My dear Mr. Carter, I am sorry I have disturbed you. I apologize most sincerely. Good night!”
He walked to the door, opened it, turned to bow and smile, and went down the stairs.
Nick Carter waited till he heard the front door close after the professor, and turned to Chick. But it was unnecessary for him to say anything. Chick nodded comprehendingly, and leaped down the stairs three or four at a time. Then he dashed along the hall and out to the street.
“I’ll go, too,” muttered Nick, as he also ran down the stairs and to the outer air.
He had only just got off the stone steps and turned to the darkness on the left, when he heard a muffled cry from somebody, followed by a scraping on the sidewalk and the sound of something falling heavily.
“Chick!” he called.
There was no answer, and Nick Carter felt a strange premonition of evil. He ran down the avenue for perhaps a hundred feet. Then, as he stumbled over something soft that was lying across the sidewalk, he knew that his premonition was not without foundation.
Chick was stretched out, unconscious. The detective turned the light of his pocket flash upon him and gave vent to a shout of horror.
Sticking in the sleeve of his insensible assistant were two long needles, crossed!
“Great heavens!” cried Nick. “Is it possible they’ve got Chick? Is no one safe from these fiends?”
CHAPTER V.
IN AND OUT.
It would be hard to express in ordinary words the wave of relief that surged through Nick Carter as he knelt by the side of Chick, and, looking closely at the sleeve of his coat, saw that the crossed needles had not gone in far.
“They haven’t reached his flesh, I’m sure,” murmured Nick. “They only just catch in the cloth. The wretch who did this hadn’t time to finish the job. The needles got entangled in the cloth, and before he could drive them in, he heard, or saw, me coming.”
Cautiously, the detective withdrew the needles and laid them on the walk, by his side. Then, picking up the unconscious Chick, he threw him over one shoulder, and carried him into the Anderton mansion.
Nick Carter was blessed with extraordinary strength, and although Chick was solid and of good weight, the burden was nothing to the detective.
“Merciful ’eavens!” squeaked Ruggins, as Nick came up the stone steps. “What’s that, Mr. Carter?”
“Fainted, I think,” replied the detective briefly. “Let me put him on this sofa in the hall.”
When Chick was laid out on a long leather settee that had been encumbered with a raincoat and other garments untidily left there by Ruggins, and which Nick Carter unceremoniously swept to the floor, the detective hastily removed Chick’s coat, and pulled up his shirt sleeve on one side.
“This was the arm,” he muttered. “There is no mark of the needles in the sleeve, and I could not find any through the coat. I don’t think there’s any danger of his having been struck. But I want to find out.”
With his flash lamp and magnifying glass, he went slowly and minutely over the whole length of Chick’s arm. The skin was perfectly smooth, without a prick or abrasion of any kind on it from shoulder to wrist.
“Just what I hoped. The needles never went through. If the point of one of them had touched his flesh, he would be dead before this. A more powerful
poison I never came across, judging by its effects on Brand Jamieson and poor Andrew Anderton.”
“Hello, chief! What’s the matter?” interposed a feeble voice.
“What, Chick? Are you all right again?” asked Nick, smiling, as Chick raised his head. “I was just going to ask you what was the matter? Ah, I see! You’ve been rapped on the head.”
“Oh, yes,” was the response, as Chick sat up on the settee and let his feet fall to the floor. “I remember now. I was following the professor—a few yards behind him, so that he shouldn’t see me. Then I had a feeling as if a crowbar had come down on top of my head, and that was all I knew.”
“It was a sandbag,” declared Nick. “There is a little mark on your head, made by that metal initial you had put in the crown of your hat. The sandbag came down on top of your derby, crushed it in, and caused the brass letter to cut your scalp just a little. There is no mark on your hat, however. It was merely slammed in by something bulky and yielding, and the inference is that it was a sandbag.”
“ ’Oly ’eavens!” mumbled Ruggins, who had been listening. “ ’Ow easy it seems when you know.”
“I guess you’re right,” agreed Chick, speaking to Nick. “But it was so sudden and unexpected that I did not get a chance to see who did it, or how.”
“It wasn’t the professor?”
“No. He was some distance in front, and I don’t think he knew I was following him. He did not turn his head. He walked along as if he wasn’t thinking of anything except to get to where he was going. I believe he had a taxi. I saw one waiting about two blocks from the house.”
“There was none there when I went out,” observed Carter reflectively. “I guess you’re right. But wait a minute. I have something to look after outside. Go up to the study and wait for me.”
As Chick got up to obey, Nick Carter hurried out of the house and to the place where he had left the crossed needles. He had put them close to the iron fence of a house, so that there was no danger of their being trodden on —even if anybody should happen to pass that way.
“I don’t think there has been any one going by since I left them,” he muttered. “Anyhow, here are the needles.”
He put them carefully between the leaves of his notebook, which he carried in his hand back to the house, and up to the study. When he got there, he laid the book on the table and opened it.
“You see, Chick, the person who knocked you down belonged to the Yellow Tong. That is proved by the fact that he tried to kill you with the crossed needles.”
“What?” cried Chick, turning pale.
“Oh, it’s all right now, my boy!” laughed Nick Carter. “I wouldn’t have told you otherwise. The needles did not get to you. But that is no credit to the blackguard who knocked you down. They were sticking in your coat sleeve when I found you on the sidewalk. I satisfied myself that the points had not reached you, even before I picked you up. But I don’t understand what the object was in attacking you, unless——”
He paused and walked several times up and down the room before he spoke again.
“I have it,” he declared at last. “It is simple enough. Somebody saw you following Professor Tolo—somebody in his employ. To prevent your finding out where the professor was going—and perhaps in fear that you might hit on the professor’s real identity—this stranger knocked you down and tried to kill you with the needles.”
“Then you believe Tolo is connected in some way with the Yellow Tong?”
“I certainly do.”
“If that is the case, it ought not to be hard to get at the secret of Mr. Anderton’s death.”
Nick Carter smiled slightly and shook his head.
“My dear Chick, don’t jump hastily to conclusions. What evidence have we got against Professor Tolo?”
“Plenty, I should think. Wasn’t he snooping about in this room when we came back to it, after going downstairs to see a man who had disappeared when we got there? Then, doesn’t he hide his face with those big spectacles? And wasn’t I following him when I was sandbagged and struck at with the crossed needles?”
“All that is suspicious, but not proof, Chick.”
“Do we know where he lives?”
“That is easily found out,” replied Carter. “But even then, we shall have to learn a great deal more before we can show that he is associated with the Yellow Tong.”
“But you believe he is, don’t you?”
“I do. Only we haven’t anything conclusive with which to back up that belief—yet. For the present, I want to find out how the person who killed Andrew Anderton got into this room. When I have reached that point, I shall have something from which to start on other inquiries. It would give us a base of operations.”
Nick Carter picked up a small pasteboard box from the table which had been filled with brass paper fasteners at one time, but was nearly empty now. He threw out the three or four fasteners that remained. Then he placed the crossed needles in the box and fitted on the lid. To make it still more secure, he put on two thick rubber bands. Then he dropped the box into his coat pocket.
“Going to examine those needles, I suppose, chief?” asked Chick.
“Yes, when I have leisure, at home. They are so dangerous that I don’t like to handle them until I can do so carefully. I would not even trust them in an envelope. The points could easily come through, and one touch might mean death.”
Chick shuddered, in spite of himself, as he thought how easily he might have been scratched when the ghastly instrument was thrust into his sleeve, as he lay on the sidewalk.
“What are we going to do now?” he asked.
“Come out on that balcony, and then we will see. But first we’ll turn out the lights in this room.”
This was done; then Nick went to the window he had gone out by before, and the next minute he and Chick were standing outside, in the pitch darkness. Just as they got out, a distant tower clock chimed twelve.
“Now, Chick, I have a theory. It isn’t anything more than that, but it is a strong one. I want you to climb into that next yard. You see there is a high wooden fence dividing it from this.”
“About fifteen feet, I should say,” put in Chick.
“Not quite that, I think,” returned Carter. “But high enough. Anyhow, I should like you to climb over, if you will. Then look about and see if there is
a long plank over there, or a ladder. I will stay here, on the balcony, where I can look over, in case of any interference with you, and be ready to help. You will get over with this rope ladder.”
He turned the flash on the ladder already referred to, which was intended by Andrew Anderton for use as a fire escape, if necessary, and showed that it had two powerful and large steel hooks at the end.
“I see,” said Chick. “I’ll climb down to our yard by this. Then you’ll drop it to me, and I’ll throw up the end to the top of the fence and hook it on. Is that the idea?”
“You have it exactly. Now, are you ready?”
“Sure! Let her go!”
It did not take Chick long to carry out his instructions. In a very short space of time he was astride of the high fence. This brought him almost level with Nick, standing on the balcony, and not more than ten feet away, for the window was almost at the corner of the Anderton house.
“Careful, Chick!” whispered Nick. “Better drop your ladder into the other yard and go down that way.”
“All right! Then what am I to do?”
There was a short pause, while Nick Carter considered his next move. Then he said quietly:
“If there is a ladder, or plank, push it up to the top of the fence. I want to see whether it could have been used as a bridge to get to this balcony from the yard. Do you begin to see what I’m driving at?”
“I’d be a bonehead if I didn’t,” replied Chick, as he went to work.
For perhaps a minute there was silence. Then a gruff voice broke out, demanding to know who was there. This was followed by a sound of fighting, with Chick’s voice mingling with the gruff tones heard before.
“You’re a burglar. That’s what you are!” roared the gruff person. “I’ll have you pinched as soon as I can get you to the front door! Come on! You can’t get away! Lend me a hand here, Bill!”
“I’m here,” responded a voice that was strangely squeaky, and might have been that of a Chinaman, except that it had not the Mongolian accent. “And the others will help.”
“The durned, sneaking thief! Out with him!”
There was a little more noise. Then a door banged, and—silence!
Nick Carter hurriedly went through the window to the study, and, without taking the time to close it, rushed to the door, down the stairs, past the mystified Ruggins, and out to the street.
There he met Chick, very much ruffled, and with his battered hat in his hand, coming along from the next house, and occasionally looking over his shoulder, as if he expected to see somebody come out.
“Well, chief, they bounced me!” he said, in a rueful tone. “Chucked me out on my head.”
“Who?” asked Nick Carter.
“I don’t know. I didn’t see anybody. I only felt that there were at least three men, and they were all huskies, too. We were in the dark. They shoved me clean through the house and out of the front door before I had any chance to fight back. It was the quickest bounce I ever had—or ever gave any one else. What shall we do? Break down the door and go in?”
“No. We’ll leave them for the present. The caretaker had a right to throw you out if he thought you were a burglar, and, naturally, if he had any friends with him, they would help. We can’t break in, unless we want to bring the police. I am glad he didn’t call the police, as it was.”
“Do you think he would dare do that?” asked Chick significantly.
“No,” was Nick Carter’s slow reply. “I don’t think he wants the police to get into that house. That is where, I think, we have them.”
“You mean——”
“I mean that I am convinced the murderer of Andrew Anderton came in from that house. But we can’t do anything more now. We’d better go in and close that study. Then we’ll go to bed. Do you feel like walking?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. We’ll walk home.”
CHAPTER VI.
PATSY’S STILL-HUNT.
“I believe I’ve found him,” was the assertion with which Patsy Garvan greeted Nick Carter, as he opened the door of his own library. “I’ve heard of a chink with a sore mudhook and a listener branded from the top edge down to the flap where you’d hang an earring, if you wore such a thing.”
Patsy jumped from behind Nick’s desk as the detective and Chick entered the room, and it was obvious that the enthusiastic second assistant had been about to write a report for his chief when he was interrupted.
He had thrown his hat on a chair, taken off his coat, rolled up his shirt sleeves, and thrust the fingers of his left hand through his hair, as a preparation for literary labor. Writing was one of the occupations that he seldom took up by choice.
“Where is he, Patsy?” asked Nick, as he took the chair the young fellow had vacated. “Can you produce him?”
“Sure I can,” replied Patsy. “That is, after we’ve laid out three or four other chinks who’ll maybe stick in the way.”
“In Chinatown?” asked Chick.
“Naw!” was Patsy’s scornful reply. “That isn’t any place to look for a chink who’s traveling on the ragged edge of the law. That’s where you’d naturally look for him, and he wouldn’t be a chink if he didn’t have cunning enough to be somewhere else. Gee! They’re a wise bunch, and don’t you forget it. Why, I——”
“Where did you find him?” interrupted Nick. “Get down to business.”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” returned Patsy, in a half-apologetic tone. “When I went out of the house to-night, to look for this chink, I didn’t know where to go. It wasn’t likely he’d be down near Mott or Doyers or Pell Street. Those are Chinatown, of course, and there are more chinks to the square yard around there than you’d find in square miles anywhere else in New York.”
“That’s so,” commented Chick.
“Of course, it’s so. Everybody knows that. Also, there was a possibility that this crooked-eyed geezer might be there. But I didn’t think so. The
question was, where should I look? I know a lot of chink laundries in Greater New York, and some more over in Jersey City. But it would take me a week to look into them all, and I wouldn’t be sure of landing my man, at that.”
“Great Scott! Why don’t you tell your yarn right off the bat, Patsy?” begged Chick. “Where is this Chinaman?”
“I’m coming to that, Chick. Don’t be in such a hustle. When I’d walked around for a while, thinking it over, I found myself back in front of our house.”
“Yes?”
“I was on the other side of the avenue, in the shadow, when I saw two men come out of this house.”
“You did?” shouted Chick. “Did you know them? Who were they? Why didn’t you say so at first?”
“Of course, I knew them,” replied Patsy, to Chick’s first query. “They were the chief and you.”
Chick snorted in disgust, while Nick Carter laughed, for he had suspected what Patsy would say.
“What did you do then?” asked Nick.
“I followed your taxi in another one that I picked up on Thirty-fourth Street, and I told him to keep yours in sight. It took me to Andrew Anderton’s house.
“When I saw you and Chick go in, I paid off my taxi driver and told him to beat it. Then I took up my post on the other side of the avenue and watched. You see, you’d told me that it was the Yellow Tong that had laid out Mr. Anderton, and I know the ways of chinks.”
“Go on.”
“You hadn’t been in there more than a minute before a chink came strolling past the house, and he met another one at the corner. Then two more came, and two more after that. They did not all stay in a bunch, but I saw them all speak to each other.”
“What about the man with the scar that the chief wants?” put in Chick.
“I’m coming to that. The chinks were all watching the Anderton house in a casual kind of way, but all at once I found two of them were missing. What was funny about that was that they did not walk away. I saw the whole six in
front of the house at one moment, and the next, when I went to count them, there were only four.”
“What had become of the other two?”
“I don’t know. But that wasn’t all of it. While I was wondering where they had gone, I’m a chink myself if two more didn’t vanish the same way.”
“But they must have gone somewhere,” interposed Nick Carter impatiently. “They weren’t swallowed up by the sidewalk.”
“That’s what they seemed to be,” insisted Patsy. “However, I wasn’t going to stand anything like that without trying to call the bluff. So I walked down the avenue for a block, under the trees, against the park fence, and then crossed over. I came moseying along past Anderton’s, and there was my two Mr. Chinks.”
“What were they doing?”
“Just coming slowly along, chattering to each other. I don’t know much chink lingo, but I’m on to some of their words, and I heard one of them say he’d had another fight. The other one asked him what about. Then came something I couldn’t make out, but I caught the chink word for smoothing iron.”
“Yes?”
“Just then they came into the light of an arc lamp, and I got a flash at the ear of the one who said he’d been in a fight. I saw the white scar. At once I piped off his right hand, and I saw that he had a finger tied up in a white rag. That was enough. I kept right on past them, as if I wasn’t interested. But I knew they were suspicious.”
“What did they do?”
“They waited till I’d got to the corner, where I turned around. I know that part of the avenue pretty well, and I made for a vacant lot with boards built up around it. There’s one loose board that I’d noticed when I was past there last week, and it had struck me then that it would be handy if a fellow happened to want to hide.”
“That’s right, Patsy!” commended Nick. “A good detective is always careful to take note of everything. The most unimportant things—or things that seem unimportant—may mean a great deal at some other time.”
“Exactly the way I’d figured it,” said Patsy, his freckled face flushing with pleasure at his chief’s words. “And it just hit the spot to-night. I slipped
through the hole—just wide enough for me to squeeze through—and pulled the board back into place.”
“It’s a good job you’re slim, Patsy,” smiled Nick.
“Yes. That’s been a help to me many times. Anyhow, as I was going to say, I hadn’t more than got behind the boards, when the chinks came to the corner and peeked around. There’s a big arc light there, you know, so that I could see them quite plainly. They waited a minute, and then they walked past the place where I was, and hustled around into Madison Avenue. I was out of the hole and at the corner just as they boarded a street car.”
“Did you get on the same car?” asked Chick.
Patsy shook his head emphatically.
“Not me, Chick. I was too wise for that. But luck was with me, for another car came along, close behind the other. There had been a blockade downtown, and there was a string of five or six cars in a row.”
“Well?” put in Nick.
“There was nothing to it after that,” replied Patsy, grinning. “The chinks got off at Hundred and Twenty-fifth and walked east. I was a block behind them. They turned the corner when they got to Third Avenue, and then another corner. I landed them at last. They went into a chink laundry that was all dark. One of them knocked at the door. It was opened right away. I guess there was a peephole. But after a while the door swung back and the two went in.”
“And that was all?”
“Not quite. I hung around for a while, and, sure enough, four other Chinamen came and got in. I couldn’t see whether they were the same four I’d been watching on Fifth Avenue, and who got away from me, but it’s a gold watch to a rusty nail that they were.”
“You know just where this laundry is, of course?” asked Nick.
“Gee! Yes. I can lead you right to it. But there’s a little more I haven’t told you yet. I thought, if I hung around for a while, I might find out something else. So I crossed the street, a little way below the laundry. Then I came back and got into a doorway right opposite. I hadn’t been there more than two minutes, when a taxicab came up and a tall man got out. I got only a glimpse of him. He had a long black coat and soft hat, and he wore spectacles with big black rims.”
Nick Carter betrayed the first excitement that had marked him since Patsy began to tell his story.
“Was he a Chinaman or a Japanese, Patsy?” he asked eagerly.
“Search me. I couldn’t see in the dark.”
“Where did he go?”
“Into the laundry. The door opened as soon as the taxi stopped. There wasn’t any waiting for him. It was all done up in a flash. He’d gone in and the taxi was on its way in less time than you could take off your hat. I did not stay any longer. I thought I’d seen enough. I jumped an elevated train and came home. The name on the sign over the laundry was ‘Sun Jin.’ ”
“That will do,” said Nick Carter shortly. “We’ll all go to bed. In the morning we’ll go after the man with the scar on his ear and the rag on his finger.”
CHAPTER VII.
CHICK FINDS HIS MAN.
If Chick had a fault, it was an excess of enthusiasm in his work that sometimes led him into indiscretion. That is what Nick Carter told him sometimes, although the admonition never had any particular effect. Chick would go ahead on his own responsibility whenever he believed he could get results.
It was because of this disposition to do things on his own judgment that he did not go to bed when told to do so by his chief. He went to his bedroom obediently enough. But he did not stay there.
“The chief believes I’m tired,” he muttered, as he sat on the edge of his bed, waiting till the house should quiet down. “That’s why he fires me off to bed. Well, I feel just right for work, and I’m going to do it.”
He chuckled to himself, as he thought of how quickly Patsy would be in his room, to go with him, if he knew what Chick contemplated.
“But I don’t want Patsy,” he decided. “I can handle this myself. That chink with the scar probably killed Mr. Anderton, and if I could get him, I’d probably have the whole case cleared up. If I don’t get him, I’m going to interview that professor. What was he going into that laundry for? A man like him, who is supposed to be a Japanese, and who is supposed to be a professor, wouldn’t be mixing up with chinks of that kind if he was square. Well, he’s got to talk to me.”
Chick felt sure that the attack on him had been made by order of Professor Tolo, and he believed that he would be found to be mixed up in some way with the Yellow Tong.
“I don’t believe he is what he pretends to be,” went on Chick, as he got up from the bed and put a revolver in his pocket. “Anyhow, I’ll be ready for him if he tries any more monkey work with me.”
He went to the door, opened it a little, and listened. Everything was quiet. No doubt Nick Carter had gone to bed, and Patsy, of course, was in his own room. It would be safe to go out.
Chick knew the house so well that he could have gone down the stairs in darkness and let himself out without a sound. But there was a light in the
