The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge Page 26

  I’d heard it once before, and even then it had suggested the graveyard; it had been like a voice speaking over the long centuries from an ancient sepulcher. But—and I remember even then noting that fact as a curious one—now that graveyard quality seemed to be increased. His words seemed to have something of the actual physical properties of an echo, as if they came up and were reflected from some unimaginable depth.

  PRESENTLY, whether it was because his voice gained power or because my ears grew accustomed to the weird sound, I was able to understand him. I followed him through deft and flattering references to the history of all the clans that were gathered there—the Nga-gai, the Lomi-Loko, the Alu-Ma, the Atu, the Ashu, and many others.

  Then he passed to a eulogy of the Lolo race as a whole, its bravery and its military accomplishments—stroking softly the panther he meant to master at the end. From that it was an easy transition to his offer to them—to make them, in return for their submission, leaders in the unholy war he promised them to wage, military leaders and masters of their ancient enemies, the Chinese.

  What, indeed, would better suit the Lolos, who care not whom they fight as long as they are fighting? And what, also, would better suit Koshinga? In the ingrained non-aggressiveness of the Chinese race, which quality was at present making easy the establishment of Koshinga’s yoke over them, Hazard and I had long read the one great weakness of Koshinga’s scheme.

  But the yellow people have also the dangerous gift of coalescence; the mass may be made into a unit and driven like a unit; and the Lolo officers would be Koshinga’s harness and reins. As Koshinga passed into a description of his qualifications as super-leader—and, of course, into hyperbole—even my own imagination, which Hazard calls so sluggish, was stirred by the thought of what this day meant to Koshinga.

  “I am the One Great One,” he was saying in that voice which had grown hypnotic from very monotony. “I am the proof of that which needs no proof, the one that was prophesied, the one that has come. I am He Who Commands and He Who Will Be Obeyed, Mingler of the Bloods, Master of the Kingdom-That-Is-to-Be, whom death can not touch, whose eyes pierce solid rock, whose mind foresees—”

  It was a fulsome panegyric; but after all he was only repeating what the Ko Lao Hui had for ten generations been taught to believe of their coming Koshinga, whom he claimed to be. I wondered if it was but a coincidence that the latter two qualifications, which were the only ones susceptible to immediate proof, squared so accurately with the Lolo requirements for leadership.

  Whatever other qualities he lacks, the Asiatic at least knows how to plan ahead and wait for results, and it wouldn’t be the strangest thing in the history of the Ko Lao Hui society if its founders had themselves sowed the seed of their propaganda in Lolo legend.

  However that might be, the present-day Lolo leaders seemed to be rapidly falling under Koshinga’s spell. From the intentness with which they listened and the way their bodies leaned forward toward him, I could imagine how their wide lips parted and their savage eyes squinted and their thin, cruel nostrils dilated at the idea of having such a man as he claimed to be as their leader.

  But among them their must have been some who resented his assumptions as endangering their own prestige; and at this point in Koshinga’s speech one of these barked out:

  “The Test! Show us the Test.”

  Koshinga paused, drawing himself up arrogantly; but the demand was strengthened by other challenging voices, starting up everywhere.

  “The “Test! The Test of the Five Arrows! The Test of the Seeing Eye! Show us the double test.”

  I suppose it really wasn’t curious that it was at that moment—when, if ever, Koshinga might have been expected to show some sign of emotion—that I first realized that his features had been throughout as immobile as yellow parchment. Only his thin lips moved, and his eyes seemed to flame with a mote terrible light as he held up his hand for silence.

  “Aye, the tests! Gladly will I take the tests, and gladly should you witness them, for only so it will be proved that your prophets have not lied, and that the ‘one greater than man’ whom they prophesied has come. And that none of you may be hurt by those that would slay me—”

  The eager, anticipative murmur that rose among the Lolos at this made me miss the rest of Koshinga’s speech; but I saw that one abnormally long arm was extended toward the smaller platform that stood just to the right front of Koshinga’s black-curtained stage. With an authoritative gesture he seemed to order some one to mount that platform.

  There was a stir among the Lolos; some of them were getting to their feet. But something—I suppose it was Koshinga’s words—had given me a new idea, a half-glimpse of the truth that I like to think I should have divined long before had my mind not been bewildered by the strangeness of the whole affair.

  I turned to Hazard, and saw with relief that Shen Yun had slipped away somewhere while we’d been intent on the spectacle in front. As for Hazard, the muscles of his face had relaxed a little and he was leaning lightly against the uneven rock surface in front of us in an easy attitude that somehow irritated me.

  “Hazard,” I whispered tensely, “we’ve played into Koshinga’s hands too far. The second test, the test of the ‘invisible enemies’—don’t you understand? Why, we’re those enemies, Hazard. Let’s get away from here, where he’s put us—”

  “Yes,” said Hazard quietly. “I thought you would soon get it. And the fact that Shen Yun’s deserted us is another evidence of the scheme, for naturally it wouldn’t be part of the game for him to be caught with us.

  “But do you fancy he hasn’t his eye on us from somewhere? Wherever we go, he’ll signal Koshinga.

  “But— Look, you’re missing something!” he broke off. “Something that I don’t understand. And yet, perhaps—”

  I looked and saw an amazing thing, but again a thing that I really should have known was coming. Five magnificent Lolo warriors had mounted the smaller platform, each of them bearing a bow nearly as long as his body. Against the taut string of these bows they were already fitting their arrows, and the direction of their glances left no doubt as to their target.

  Koshinga’s pretension to immortality was to be tested indeed. A child could have hit him at that distance—a child!

  AND with that thought came a certain memory that emphasized the seeming deadliness of that test.

  “Five arrows!” I murmured to Hazard. “——, I don’t understand how he’s to escape. Do you remember what we were told, back there in Yunnan-fu—that the Lolos use five different deadly poisons on their arrow-tips?”

  “Aconitin, bashlai, catipan, and two others that I’ve forgotten,” corroborated Hazard. “Yes, it may be that, though it seems to me one poison five times repeated would be as deadly. But the arrows themselves would kill without poison. Partridge, it must be—”

  “Mail!” I suggested as his voice trailed off. “Some sort of chain armor that would—”

  “Impossible! Just the force of those five arrows, at that distance, would knock down an ox. And besides— But see!”

  It was significant of the respect for his powers that Koshinga had forced upon us, that not all our keen desire for his death impelled us to an even momentary hope that we should witness it then. But already the Lolos were bending their bows, their dark faces twisted scowlingly, great ridges of muscle standing out on their powerful arms, clearly advertising by the care with which they aimed and the strength they put into the arrow-pull, the deadly intention of their minds.

  So for a moment they stood like figures carved out of rock; and in that moment I do not think that there was a single breath drawn in any one of the four groups in that amphitheater—neither among the Lolos before the platform, nor the Ko Lao Hui guardians of munitions back of them, nor by Hazard or me, who were forgetful for the moment even of the fact that that extraordinary intelligence of Koshinga was next to be turned against us; nor by the Chinese slaves who were huddled down there below us.

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p; And then the picked bowmen released their arrows.

  Twang! A whistling, hissing sound. Five faint streaks, streaks that were but instant shadows flung upon the air, beginning at the edge of the bowmen’s platform and ending at Koshinga’s body.

  Four of those arrows struck his chest—I would have sworn it. The fifth, more shrewdly aimed, impinged squarely upon his thick throat.

  For the fraction of a heart-beat they were even visible, sticking, as it seemed, in his yellow robe and yellow skin; and then they disappeared somehow against the dark background. By the sharp report that came back to us from that dark-curtained platform, the arrows had spent their force and shattered themselves against the wooden frame of it.

  The air was still vibrating with that cracking sound and with the gasp that came from every one who witnessed this thing, when Koshinga—who had not even wavered—raised his right hand and called out in an absolutely unchanged voice:

  “You have read the lesson; tremble and obey me, who am immortal. Death can not touch me, neither the visible death of the poisonous arrow, nor the invisible death of the kwei tzu’s (foreign devil’s) talking tubes. I hear the unheard and see the invisible, even the invisible faces of my enemies; I smell out my enemies and the enemies of Lololand; I smell—”

  His immobile face, empty of all possibility of good, evil incarnate, had turned our way. His eyes were staring straight at the rampart of rock and tangled shrubbery behind which we were hiding. With craning necks and excited faces and credulous eyes that saw nothing but that rampart, the Lolos, leaping to their feet, were following that look.

  And I, with the certainty of Koshinga’s triumph and our doom upon me, and yet with something of unreasonable hope, too, turned to Hazard, who had foreseen this thing.

  “Come!” breathed Hazard sharply, jerking me down the runway of rocks the way we had come.

  “But there’s no escape,” I argued against my hope; “there’s no escape. Here’s the place to fight. We’re going straight into the open, straight into their arms.”

  “There’s always escape,” said Hazard. “And we’re going straight to the Chinese slaves, and straight to the arms of the Ko Lao Hui.”

  I suppose I was very much confused. The long suspense under which I’d been held had had its effect; the seeming miracle of the thing I’d just witnessed still befuddled my mind; and the piercing cries and clashing arms of the Lolos as, urged by Koshinga, they broke into a wild rush for the place where we’d been hidden, made coherent thought impossible.

  So it was not until we’d burst into the mass of shuffling Chinese, hesitant upon the brink of their greatest adventure, that I understood the meaning of Hazard’s words.

  But with that understanding came, of course, the realization of what Hazard had been doing among those Chinese while he had been separated from Shen Yun and me, just after we’d entered the amphitheater.

  “I wanted to tell you,” Hazard found time to gasp to me apologetically. “But it was the vital point, and rocks have ears.”

  Across the amphitheater the Ko Lao Hui, still watching over the guns that were to have armed the Lolos, were staring unguardedly at the Lolo rush. Since Hazard’s talk with them the enslaved Chinese had had the time which their race always requires to work themselves up to mutiny and a fighting pitch.

  They were already surging toward the guns when we reached them; and a moment later the Ko Lao Hui—men of their own race, indeed, but standing in the way of freedom—died very suddenly.

  THE Lolos, utterly confused by this unexplainable action on the part of their slaves, turned in disorder just as they reached the far side of the amphitheater. They paused and hesitated fatally. For that pause gave Hazard and me time to throw ourselves flat behind two ammunition-cases, to seize a rifle each, and to rip open two bandoleers of cartridges.

  So close was the shave that if the rifles had not been of a familiar type, the type we’d seen in the Ko Lao Hui rendezvous in Shensi, we might have been lost while we fumbled with the mechanism. But as it was we opened fire upon the Lolos just as they started against us.

  The Chinese, of course, spurred by their imagination of what they could perform with the white man’s marvelous “talking tubes,” had achieved their greatest usefulness. Perhaps half a dozen were able to catch the meaning of the hasty explanations Hazard and I flung at them, and these at least added to the volume of our fire.

  The majority merely wrestled with their weapons, failing even to get the cartridges into place, which was for the most part a fortunate failure. A few were hit by the Lolo arrows; and then the desire for self-preservation came upon them all, and they flung themselves flat behind the convenient ammunition-cases.

  But Hazard and I emptied our magazines as fast as we could work the bolts, and there was no reason that either of us should miss a shot. It was close-range work, against men who had no idea of modern firearms, who, when panic came upon them, huddled behind each other for protection, not knowing that the same bullet would penetrate four in a row.

  It was murderous work indeed, work that I didn’t like; but there was no help for it. I consoled myself with the thought that Hazard and I were fighting for more than our own lives—for the destruction of Koshinga’s power in Lololand.

  And with that thought came the thought of Koshinga himself, and a guilty sinking of my heart that I’d forgotten him for even a moment. The incipient rush of the Lolos was already broken; the hasty shower of arrows they’d loosed had dwindled away; panic terror of our magic arms had seized them; and already they were breaking for the ravine that was the one exit from the place.

  As I jammed home my fourth cartridge-clip I looked for Koshinga, certain that he would have disappeared. And, instead, I saw him.

  His position on the platform had shifted a little; he had moved over toward our end of it. His great, yellow-clad figure appeared even a little more shadowy and unsubstantial-looking against its somber background.

  But if his terrible face had changed by even the bending of a line or a shading of expression, I couldn’t perceive it. That immutability of features, as he looked down upon the destruction of his plans and all that turbulence, suggested again, most strongly, the omnipotence he had claimed and the invulnerability he had seemingly demonstrated.

  The winds of the East waft many strange things into the consciousness of men who venture among them; but never have I struggled with a more weakening sense of futility in the face of the impossible than at the moment that I leveled my rifle and aimed at Koshinga. But when I saw him over my sights, that feeling was swept away somewhat by the confidence a man feels who has learned to trust his weapon. This, I reminded myself, was no arrow that might be turned aside, no matchlock cheated of its bullet—it was a rifle that would shoot where it was held. When I knew my aim was perfect, I pulled the trigger.

  The crack of my rifle was echoed by Hazard’s. Out of the corner of an eye I saw by the position of his piece that he had followed my example, had fired at the same mark.

  Now, in shooting I yield to few men, but I yield to Hazard; and it was with a surge of certain and somewhat savage exultation that I looked for Koshinga’s downfall.

  When I saw him still standing there, evidently untouched, insolent in his immunity from death, and in a way magnificent in his imperturbability, I had a moment of absolute stupefaction. But the next moment came anger at being so easily balked; and that anger, backed by a certain driving curiosity and by the obsession of pursuit that had so long possessed me, brought me half to my feet with a reckless resolve in my mind.

  “I’m going to go,” I cried to Hazard. “I’m going to get him. I’m going to find out if he’s flesh and blood or—”

  “Don’t. The Lolos would cut you off. Wait until—”

  Hazard gripped me and pulled me down again.

  “But you could hold the Lolos. You might hold them. And he’s there, within reach—”

  “The Lolos need more urging,” said Hazard, and renewed his fire. “He’s
where?” he inquired alter the second shot. “Where he appeared to be from the other side of this show-place of his, or where he appears to be from here?”

  “Why,” I said bewilderedly, but yielding to Hazard’s will, “he’s where we see him.”

  “But we don’t see him,” said Hazard. “Those bullets followed the line of our eyesight.”

  “Then what,” I cried, checking my fire again, for the demoralized Lolos had broken in a mass for the exit, “what is it we do see? And what did we hear? Is he master of our senses, this—”

  “I watched him as we ran across the theater,” said Hazard, straining his voice to be heard above the triumphant yelling of the Chinese. “He moved, but he didn’t walk. He floated sidewise across that black platform like an image in a— Ah, he’s gone!”

  It was true. As he had appeared, so he had disappeared, wraith-like; there’d been no time for any ordinary departure. I stared in amazement, and yet with a faint suggestion of the truth, springing from Hazard’s words, slowly enlightening my understanding.

  “Did you ever read,” Hazard assisted me, “of ‘Doctor Pepper’s ghost,’ that so bewildered Europe in the middle of the last century until it was proved to be nothing but an arrangement of—”

  “—of mirrors!” I exploded violently, half-angry and half-ashamed at having been so easily deluded.

  “Of transparent plate glass,” corrected Hazard, “placed at an angle for reflection. But this, no doubt, is a mirror—a mirror of polished steel. Leaning forward, well back from the front of the platform and extending clear across it, with Koshinga facing it from in front and below—”

  “Of course, the floor of the platform is broken—probably nothing but a black-lined opening deep enough to conceal Koshinga, extending clear from the mirror to the edge of the platform. That’s the way I see it.”

  “And the arrows, fired at an angle to that mirror, merely glanced off,” I cried with a picture of the whole thing in my mind. “That accounts for the cracking sound we heard. And, of course, as soon as they passed across the reflection of Koshinga and came against that black background, they would disappear. While our bullets—