Sax Rohmer

“ Partly, but not entirely, he succeeded, and as he walked along the Mall his brain remained busy with this problem which struck at the very roots of his racial traditions.
Absorbed in his obscure reflections, he was on the point of turning toward Marlborough Gate when his attention was arrested by a figure, that of a woman, which seemed to belong, not to reality, but to those provoking, indeterminate memories which to-night, by dogged perseverance and sheer force of will, he had been seeking to trap and more closely to examine. ”

“ Running, ape-like, out to the roadway where a closed two-seater waited, the attacker, whom Ecko saw now to be a curiously deformed man dressed in black, lifted his victim, who had ceased to struggle, into the car, leapt in behind her, and in a trice was driving away in the direction of Buckingham Palace!
Ecko reached the scene of the outrage half a minute too late. For a moment his keen brain was at a loss. There was no pedestrian, no policeman usefully near. A genius for swift decision was his; the gymnasiums of Japan teach it even more effectively than those of the West. ”

“ Even if he should meet a policeman, the process of explaining to the representative of the law what had taken place would necessitate a fatal delay. The car would escape, and he had been unable to see its number. Already it was outdistancing him. Unoccupied taxicabs going in the opposite direction Ecko rejected, as he had rejected the idea of accosting a policeman, and for the same reason.
He must find a cab bound westward and board it without a stoppage, making the man understand the urgency of the matter; no easy thing for Ecko to do, as he fully realized. ”