The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge Page 20

  “He who rules will not consider what the yangyen says!” cried Ho Whan, a great fear in his voice. “Shen Yun has the tablet and will be here with it. It was my duty to bring this man; his to bring the tablet.”

  “Should he not be here by now?” asked Hazard evenly. “Should he not, in fact, have come with you?”

  The thrust seemed to have force, for I heard Ho Whan catch his breath. Evidently he was by no means sure of himself; in fact he was terrified, and when I remembered his nervousness in the yamen, his apparent expectancy of some one who hadn’t come, my heart leaped with a half-realization of the situation. What if he had lost the tablet? What if—

  Koshinga, still glowering at Hazard, was speaking with a forced resumption of calmness.

  “If the tablet is not forthcoming, Koshinga will know whom to hold responsible. Now I have this to say to you. There is the slow torture and the swift death. You will choose. It does not matter, for in the end you will do as I say. There is no man who can hold out against the slow torture.”

  “I’ve said we have nothing to tell,” replied Hazard steadily. “We, like yourself, have no masters. You will gain nothing by all this but the knowledge of a faithless servant.”

  He couldn’t, it seemed, stay away from that point.

  “The foreign devil may have his own reason for prolonging the talk,” suggested Ho Whan in Shensian.

  “Why should I?” asked Hazard sharply, shooting a glance at me. “Now, this tablet,” he went on; “you will never possess it.”

  Why, I wondered, the peculiar inflection on the word “this”? Could it be— Ah, I had his message.

  “Because,” continued Hazard slowly, thrusting both hands inside the bosom of his loose Chinese robe, “I have it here. And I have—”

  His hands reappeared and in the right one he held the tablet that had been described to us—the tablet of Shun! And in his left.

  “Devil!” Koshinga’s great voice snarled hoarsely.

  From Ho Whan behind me came a terrible cry.

  Hazard had swiftly lifted the pint bottle he held in his left hand to his mouth, pulled the cork with his teeth and, as he spat it out, concluded his sentence.

  “Nitric acid, which will destroy it.”

  As he started to pour the fuming, colorless liquid over the face of the tablet, Ho Whan, forgetting everything in his eagerness to save that tablet and so avert Koshinga’s anger, leaped for Hazard, as Hazard had hoped he would.

  By the time he came in front of me, I had pulled my revolver out of my gown and, leveling it, I shot him dead.

  IV

  I TURNED my gun upon Koshinga. I started to pull the trigger but stopped.

  It wasn’t because he waited the bullet in seeming passivity, watching me closely with his basilisk eyes. The natural instinct against shooting a man who is seemingly both helpless and unafraid would have held me only a moment, long enough to remember the magnitude of the evil I could end with one twitch of my finger.

  The instant that realization came, I perceived something else, too, something that explained Koshinga’s composure. The moment Ho Whan had leaped for Hazard and died, Koshinga’s left hand had lifted sharply. His index finger now rested on the black button which projected from the wall—the button controlling the infernal machine which threatened Hazard’s life.

  What was it Koshinga had said? “—by pressing on this button—the swift death by the falling weight.”

  Hazard looked up from his work of obliterating with the whitely fuming acid the already time-worn and almost undecipherable inscriptions on the face of the tablet. He saw me hesitate, saw the reason for it, and he cried out—

  “Shoot, Partridge, in Heaven’s name!”

  “You can not shoot me,” said Koshinga calmly.

  “Never mind me, Partridge!” cried Hazard in such excitement as I’d never seen him before. “Shoot and then finish this job for me—destroy this Tablet of Shun!”

  “You can not shoot me,” Koshinga repeated in his icy voice. “You know that your shot will kill your friend, that with the last flicker of my will I would press this button and send the knives and the weight behind the knives down upon him. So, slave of your emotions and of a worn-out creed—”

  “He’s not a man, but a devil incarnate! Hazard cried. “Shoot him while you’ve a chance. Do as you’d want me to do if we could change places. Haven’t both of us chanced our lives a dozen times—”

  I don’t remember all Hazard said in his wild urging that I should do what I suppose I should have done. Cold-bloodedly and for the larger good, there’s no doubt I should have shot Koshinga and let Hazard die. There was no estimating Koshinga’s power for evil in the world—Koshinga with his fiendishly clever brain and his millions of followers. After all, if there were nothing but cold logic in the world, if all the warm and unreasoning passions of humanity were wiped out, how long would humanity itself endure?

  Hazard was my friend. I edged toward him, keeping my gun upon Koshinga. With my left hand I reached into a side pocket of my gown for my pocket-knife. It surprized me that Koshinga offered no objection to my movements.

  “Poor fool!” he scoffed. “It is your sentimentality that dooms you to mediocrity—you and your class, while I—”

  There was a sort of prescient triumph in his voice now, as if he foresaw not only escape, but the kingdoms of the world at his feet. Fascinated, I stopped and watched him narrowly. He had raised his right hand and it was now on the knob of the wooden door in the wall.

  Very slowly, with all the dignity of confident deliberation, he drew the door open, shifted his hold to the inner knob and, still keeping his finger on the fatal button, began to back through the opening.

  Beyond that door I could see the black beginnings of an earth-walled passage—a passage that led riverward. Wondering a little, I remembered the fifteen steps by which we had come down to this place, remembered that we were far below the surface of the river. How was it Koshinga meant to escape?

  “While I—” his voice rang out in a tone of utter conviction—“I will rule the world.”

  His finger had left the button but was still too close to it for me to chance a shot. His body was already half-shielded behind the door.

  Hazard still frantically urged me to fire, and by my own desire to end that embodiment of all evil, I understood his eagerness, surpassing even his instinct to live. I felt however that Koshinga would still find that button even in a last convulsion. Therefore I could not shoot. And then—he was gone.

  He had slipped behind the door like a shadow. As the door jammed shut, my bullet sent splinters flying from it.

  Flinging Hazard my knife, I sprang for the door, but midway I heard a bar jammed into place on the other side of it. I caught the knob and pulled back on it with all my weight, but the door budged no more than would the wall itself have budged.

  Wildly I looked around for a piece of iron, a heavy rock—anything with which to break it down, but I saw only that Hazard was swiftly cutting himself loose. Then I turned to the door again for I heard a sound that bewildered me.

  Beyond that door had suddenly begun a mighty rushing of water, a great gurgling and bubbling as of air caught and escaping. A rushing, gurgling and bubbling that died away almost as soon as it had begun—died away and ended with the surging impact of water against the inner side of the door.

  It began at the bottom of the door and rose swiftly to the top. Clearly the passageway beyond was filled with water. Clearly Koshinga was drowned. I cried out something to that effect.

  “Drowned, you say?” came Hazard’s calm voice close behind me. “Drowned, you think?”

  “Well, what then?” I demanded, turning upon him sharply.

  “This enemy of ours will be hard to handle,” said Hazard gravely. “I think he must always plan to hold his finger on the button of power and ever keep a safe escape behind him. We must remember that when we encounter him again.”

  “But—” I began uncertainly. />
  “Don’t you understand? The surest of escapes. A short passageway with a watertight door at the other end, which, when he opened it, let the river in and let Koshinga out. By now he has come to the surface where, no doubt, a junk is waiting for him. He thought he had us but he took no chances when he brought us here.”

  “Then we can do nothing,” I said despondently.

  “Nothing but get away, which shouldn’t be difficult. But with Ho Whan dead at our hands and Koshinga well able through his agents to raise the authorities against us, Sian-fu will hardly be healthy for us for some time.”

  WE MOUNTED the steps, climbed the wall of the ornamental garden to the street and, within an hour, were leaving Sian-fu behind us. So hurried was our departure that it was not until we were trudging behind our donkeys along a narrow road worn deep by the traffic of ages, between fields fertile as in the days of Confucius, that I remembered there was one thing in our adventure that remained unexplained.

  “But the tablet?” I cried suddenly. “It was really your possession of the tablet that saved us. How in the name of wonders did you happen to have it?”

  “Very simple,” replied Hazard. “When I left you this morning I went to see Shen Yun, the fast one. As you remember, we suspected Ho Whan and him of playing much the same game that they did play. I had discovered that Shen Yun was about to be seized for debt, so I offered him a thousand taels for information concerning the tablet. It turned out that he had it and he gave it to me. He intended to fly to the coast, and I hope for his health’s sake he’s well on the way.”

  “And I think that also explains,” I said slowly, “how you came to have that very convenient bottle of acid.”

  “Certainly,” replied Hazard. “Shen Yun also told me the story of the tablet, and I intended to destroy it as soon as you’d seen it. The acid method struck me as the simplest, and I managed to get some at the Mission School where they use it in teaching the process of making aniline dyes. Under the circumstances, it was only natural I’d keep both tablet and bottle hidden inside my gown. It’s not so remarkable, considering the unintelligent membership of the Ko Lao Hui and their one rule of implicit obedience, that those who drugged me and carried me to Koshinga discovered neither. Koshinga had given them no orders to search me, and they didn’t.”

  “Well,” I reflected, “though we’re in flight, we’re hardly losers. If Koshinga escaped us, so did we escape him and he lost in Ho Whan a valuable agent. Then there’s the tablet—”

  “The tablet of Shun,” said Hazard meditatively. “In whatever hands it happened to fall it was an anchor cast too far into the past. That’s why I was going to destroy it—it isn’t good for men to be governed by their ancestors. Yes, it’s well for New China that the tablet of Shun is gone.”

  Ghost-Ruled

  THERE still remain a few journeys to be made on this round earth where the traveler seems to pass not only through space but through time as well. All the way southwest from Shensi to the southern edge of that twisted and tormented mountain country where the Lolos rule and the Yang-tse has its mysterious beginning, Hazard and I had the impression of returning to the Middle Ages. It’s true that we kept at a safe distance from the Lolo country itself, and also true that just then there was supposed to be peace between that hard-bitten race and the more pacific Chinese. But the fear of the Lolos was in the air; the talk of the Yunnan villages was all of their slaving forays, and every now and then we encountered bands of their free-riding warriors.

  It was queer, in this twentieth century, to find a people whose whole disposition was reflected in these warrior bands—a people who, despising agriculture and all occupation save that of arms, lived wholly by the sweat of a captive population. Nzemos, nobles, serfs and slaves—such, we learned, were the four rigid castes of Lolo society, solving handily the Lolo economic problem. The latter two classes were, of course, made up of captured Chinese. All slaves became serfs after three generations of good behavior, but, in spite of that politic arrangement, it seemed that this captive population suicided rapidly and was unreasonably disinclined to reproduce its kind, showing that preference for death over slavery which has been one of the mainsprings of human action since the beginning of time.

  Hence, of course, the dreaded slaving forays; hence the fact that the Lolos were willing to pay much good gold, which they dug up somewhere in their forbidden mountains, for the delivery of Chinese children. But the modern Chinese, from selling their offspring, had passed to defending them and themselves savagely, and Hazard and I half-circled Lololand without discovering even an indication of planned aggression.

  That is, except for the story of the miraculous government of the village of Ning-Po, further south, and that I at first connected with the Lolo menace only from a habit I have of spinning a hypothesis around every unexplained circumstance. There is, as Hazard would say, only one possible cause of every accurately determined effect, and I had the additional theory that balked force naturally turns to trickery to accomplish its ends. The tale itself, which was that a dead mandarin continued supernaturally to rule his village, was such strong bait to my curiosity that I perforce spent much time mulling the matter over.

  Consequently, when I discovered that Ning-Po lay below the point at which Hazard and I had planned to separate for a while, I worried a little over the possibility of losing the chance for investigation. Ordinarily we flipped coins when it came to taking different routes, and I was grateful enough when Hazard, knowing my desire, voluntarily resigned Ning-Po to me.

  “But,” I protested feebly, “the other route, by way of Sz-Chuen, is two days longer.”

  “All the better,” he smiled, “for that’ll give you time to look into this thing, if it’s worth while—which, as I’ve said, I doubt very much. You know the superstition itself is one of the oldest in Yunnan. According to belief, every dead man’s spirit is permitted to meddle with earthly things for three years for good or ill. And when you get there you’ll find the mysterious voice only the projection of some one’s imagination.”

  We had little time to debate the matter. At the moment we were standing at the head of a great ridge, on either side of which the two valleys which we were separately to explore sloped downward under the pale, turquoise heavens from the heart of the mountains, their bottoms veiled by the damp mists of the morning. We had dismounted; but behind us our four mafus, aware by reason of the shifted baggage that we were to separate, watched us incuriously from the backs of their wiry Kansu ponies. It was the thought of the country back of them, black hills wholly unconquered and almost wholly unexplored, the stamping-grounds of the Lolos, from which might come anything, that made me reply hopefully to Hazard—

  “Somehow I’ve a feeling that for once you’re wrong.”

  At that Hazard chuckled a little, good-naturedly tolerant of what he was pleased to call my one weakness—my utter inability to resist the call of the unusual. Hazard’s mind, on the other hand, was one that naturally clung close to every single problem until it was solved. Just now, of course, he was occupied wholly with the destruction of the Ko Lao Hui, that sinister, tyrannical union, millions strong, that threatened New China with ruin. I don’t think his zeal was any greater than mine, but for me there were always bypaths opening.

  “Well,” he admitted, “this particular section of the world is very much like an old curiosity shop. Take the short way, through Ning-Po, and I hope you’ll not be disappointed.”

  “At least,” I replied, remembering something else we’d heard of that town, “I’ll see another white man and a white woman. Where won’t the missionaries go—male and female? Hazard, it’s darn selfish in me, but—”

  “Oh, the devil, Partridge; go ahead! Remember what I owe you from Sian-Fu. And, as for the rest of our plans—”

  Very briefly we went over them again. There were a few mandarins in each valley who must be interviewed concerning Ko Lao Hui activities; certain other things that must be done; and at the end of the fi
fth day we were to meet at the village of Ki-Liang, where, by our maps, these two valleys joined each other again. To save time we often adopted this method of going by diverse routes to some meeting-place, thereby, no doubt, increasing our danger a trifle. But even one of only moderate courage becomes at last accustomed to danger. It’s really the fascination of such an existence, reflecting only one’s own will and preserved from day to day only by one’s own strength and cunning, that makes the explorer, and we had the additional incitement of feeling constantly at grips with the malevolent society of the Ko Lao Hui.

  Everything understood, Hazard called up his two mafus, gripped my hand in parting, mounted his pony and led off down the trail that followed a shelving slope into the eastern valley. I watched him out of sight behind a bend and then, feeling a little more the strangeness of this land, made ready to go my own way.

  I’D JUST reined up my pony from browsing the short grass when a swift pounding of hoofs came to me from behind. Looking back, I saw something that caused me to order my men a little off the trail and to take up a position in front of them, my carbine unslung and resting in the hollow of my arm. It’s always well to match the Lolo respect for the white man’s arms with an equal respect for their shorter range weapons and to keep them well away.

  They came down from the mountains in a swift gallop, about thirty of them, their small, agile ponies, sure-footed as goats, making nothing of the rough trail. With the points of their long lances, spears and tridents glittering in the brilliant morning light, sabers rattling, bows and quivers swinging on leather baldrics, red saddle-trappings dotted with little bone plates flapping up and down and long brown and blue cloaks floating out behind them, they reminded me curiously of an old painting I’d seen somewhere of a robber baron and his knights swooping down to despoil a peasants’ countryside.

  When they were almost up to me, their leader turned off along a narrow trail that led away to the west. The rest reined in their ponies and followed in single file. That is, all but a single horseman who swung out from the rest, flung his free hand up in a parting gesture and came on into the valley.