The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge Page 28

  “So,” murmured Ko Tien Chung softly. “It is good that you know these things. Now, this store of wealth which the patriotic Li Tzu Ching carried away with him to the west—has it ever been recovered?”

  “Concerning that there is darkness of opinion. There is no knowledge of its recovery save that some say it was given to the monastery in which Li Tzu Ching died.”

  At that Ko Tien Chung smiled with polite incredulity, for which I did not blame him, for my suggestion was really unbelievable in the light of my own knowledge. There is no more poverty-stricken monastery in China than that in the Anfu district of Honan in which Li Tzu Ching took refuge after his defeat and where he finally died, and his chief attribute of merit among its priests is that he who had been ruler of the Middle Kingdom had come there without a copper tungtse.

  After our habit of picking up stray bits of information wherever we found them, Hazard and I had noted these things during our chance visit to the monastery; also we’d noted the suggestive inscription on the wall of the dagoba in which Li Tzu Ching is buried—

  The Buddhist priest whose religious designation is “The Jewel of Heaven’s Grace.”

  To Ko Tien Chung’s smile I replied something to the effect that if Li Tzu Ching’s monastery had profited by his monkhood there was certainly no evidence of it at the present day. Whereupon he bowed gravely.

  “It is, of course, the talk of idle tongues. The wealth of no capital was to be compared with the wealth of ancient Peking. The annals tell of gold vessels being melted down into plates of solid gold. There were a thousand plates and each weighed a thousand ounces; there were also jewels beyond price. All these Li Tzu Ching carried away and not even the devils of Manchus have ever found that treasure. Now, I will tell you the remaining truth.”

  He paused a moment, seemingly concerned at a slight change in the junk’s course. He turned and looked up-stream and I followed his look. A cargo boat heavily loaded with rice and rape had showed ahead in the middle of the stream and our laodah had instantly swung in toward the southern bank to avoid it widely. If I’d not been so intent on what was coming from Ko Tien Chung, I would probably have given more thought to the seeming furtiveness of that action.

  The mandarin settled back in his former position and resumed impressively as if nothing had happened.

  “The gold was Ming gold, gathered from the Chinese people; Li Tzu Ching was a patriot and, as he had willed, so he acted. The jewels and other treasure, which were insignificant as compared with the value of the gold, he divided among his closest followers, that poverty might not tempt them to avarice. But he hid the gold, making provision in his exalted wisdom that when the Chinese returned to their own, driving out the Manchu usurpers, it should return to them again.”

  “What!” I gasped, so startled at the acumen which this statement implied on the part of Li Tzu Ching, who would have had to have his will extended over three hundred years of troublous history, that I broke unthinkingly into English.

  Ko Tien Chung’s face didn’t change and I felt I might be mistaken in my impression that he understood my exclamation perfectly. After a moment’s pause he went on calmly:

  “It is that great treasure of which I spoke in the beginning. It is that gold over which the Ko Lao Hui even now stand guard, waiting till their brother devils shall come to bear it away. My miserable folly is to blame, but surely the foreign mandarins will lend their strength and the light of their wisdom to the undoing of so great a mischief.”

  HAZARD remained immobile, as if even this hadn’t the power to stir him. As for me, my pulse quickened considerably. I recalled that the Chinese annals did actually mention this million ounces of gold in connection with Li Tzu Ching’s last exploit. Even if the story were fiction, it so far had not been made by Ko Tien Chung. It was an enormous sum and, in the hands of the Ko Lao Hui, was full of enormous potentialities for evil. Ko Tien Chung was right in believing that Hazard and I would do our utmost to help him, and I understood why, in his last sentence, even his Oriental imperturbability had broken down a little before his anxiety.

  But all along I’d been noticing something that wasn’t quite so easy to understand. That was the manner of his men. They were still silent, still attentive and, in some of the glances that were flung at us, it seemed to me I could catch a suggestion of duplicity, of hidden intent, almost of menace. I reflected that, being men of lower breeding, they were probably less skillful in hiding their real thoughts than was the mandarin. Truth lay in their looks if I could but read it, but Ko Tien Chung was waiting for his answer.

  “Your Excellency honors your servants by telling them this great secret,” I replied. “But it puzzles my mean intelligence to think how the great Li Tzu Ching could have contrived to hide the gold so long and how he now restores it. It is a great sum and even the dead talk, where gold is concerned.”

  “It is true. The dead talk and the living lie; great is the evil of money and great the good. But the answer to your question is easy. No man save his helpers, who were true Chinese patriots and whom he also made satisfied with many gifts, knew where Li Tzu Ching hid the gold. And the restoration of the gold was planned even before he left Peking, on the one day that he was emperor, before the Manchus and the traitor, Wu San Kuei, drove him out. He planned it cunningly, so—”

  And Ko Tien Chung went on to tell the plan, rather slowly and carefully, as if he were repeating a lesson he’d hardly learned. Stripped of all details, this was the way of it:

  Knowing his downfall imminent, Li Tzu Ching had picked from his memory of this country of northern Yunnan-fu, over which he had marched as a rebel leader, the exact place in which he was to hide the gold. He had then inscribed the secret on nearly imperishable parchment and had hidden that parchment in what was an accessible and probably the safest place in the world—under the seat of the emperor’s chair in the Temple of Heaven.

  Then he had fled and hidden the gold and, having retired to the monastery, had waited there for the coming of death. But, just before dying, he had written upon another parchment a letter to the first Chinese ruler of the empire, directing him to search under the emperor’s seat. And he had laid it as a duty upon the monastery that this apparently meaningless scroll should be sent to the northern capital upon whatever distant day the Chinese should again come into power.

  Now that day had come; the Chinese republic had been born; the parchment had been sent; and the long-lost golden hoard was at last to be recovered from the grip of the past.

  It had indeed been a simple enough plan, thus explained, but it made a strange story for all that, a story which would have been incredible in any land save China. But in China nothing seems incredible, that is nothing that relates to concealments, to the working out of long purposes, to continuity of hidden and subtle designs.

  In the heart of every Oriental, I’ve sometimes thought, are such altars to silence and secrecy as Carlyle proposed should be raised in stone. Every face is a mask upon which intentions express themselves only when the owner wills it, or when projected by the flame of a very powerful emotion indeed.

  I do not know yet whether the anxiety and fear which occasionally broke through Ko Tien Chung’s composure as he told this story were really such flashes of the truth, or whether his face were but saying what he wished it to say.

  “And then?” I questioned as he finished the tale of Li Tzu Ching.

  “Then I in my unworthiness was sent for the gold,” he explained gloomily. “The governor of Yunnan furnished me with men, these and as many others. The others are dead, having been slain by the Ko Lao Hui when they attacked us. All who fell died; there was no mercy.”

  His story had worked around to the starting-point. I asked him how the Ko Lao Hui had become aware of his mission.

  “That I know not, but for seeing they are as cats and their eyes are everywhere. I know only that I had reached the place of the gold when they set upon me like many devils. In the fight darkness came to me because of a blow
on the head. The valor of my men preserved me from death, but when my mind came back we were in flight. It was then that I discovered I had lost even the parchment, it having been torn from the lining of my gown. But that mattered not, for the gold was already found.

  “A million ounces of gold—about thirty-five tons as we Megwas measure it,” I mused. “The Ko Lao Hui will hardly be making away with it at once.”

  “They are too few in numbers to carry away so great an amount and the fight is but a few hours old. Doubtless they will remain on guard over it until a messenger brings help in the form of men and mules. That is as I had intended to do after having found the gold.”

  WITH the air of having finished his story, Ko Tien Chung folded his arms and leaned back against the mast. Hazard remained in his condition of quiescent vigilance and for a few minutes nothing was to be heard but the plashing of the oars, the ripple at the junk’s bow, the gurgle astern and the low muttering of the idle men on the forward deck as they alternately talked and pulled at their long brass pipes.

  We were still keeping well in against the northern bank, beyond which the land stretched away in a succession of black crags and spires of rock, sparsely coated here and there with underbrush and brown under the semitropic sun. Midstream the river was now fairly crowded with craft huddled together after the queer gregariousness of the Chinese race, which will always sacrifice comfort for close company.

  There were great cargo boats, smaller junks and kwadses, all with their curious square sails billowing before the favoring breeze from the west. Here was even a green native house-boat covered with beautiful hangings and bedizened with much giltwork, doubtless a pleasure craft from Li-Kiang on a short voyage.

  But most of these boats would not discharge their cargoes of silk and porcelain and fans and even more precious freight of gold and silver until they reached Canton, China’s greatest market-place. A rich traffic it is and I remember thinking how fair a field for piracy, from which Chinese waters are never free.

  I did not know why that thought connected itself somehow with Ko Tien Chung’s second in command, that ugly, one-eyed Chinaman who had already stirred my memory so disagreeably. I looked for him and found him seated on a thwart well forward, plainly in view.

  Again I prodded my mind to recall those strangely familiar features more plainly and again came the contradictory feeling that I’d never seen him before. But queerly enough that moment of silent observation filled me with a sense of uneasiness, of hidden danger, of a peril that was not so much ahead of us as resident in the very atmosphere of that presumably friendly junk.

  It was in vain that I reminded myself that the governor of Yunnan would never have furnished Ko Tien Chung, engaged on such a mission, with men that were not thoroughly reliable. They did not appear reliable to me. And it was with my desire to see the end of this enterprise at once, strengthened by increased curiosity and dampened by an unreasonable fear that had nothing to do with the Ko Lao Hui, that I turned to Hazard who, all of a sudden, with a jerk of his agile body forward, had cast off his pretense of semi-somnolence.

  “Will you tell your servants—” Hazard addressed Ko Tien Chung in his neutral-toned and unimpressive voice—“as nearly as you can, where this great wealth is hidden?”

  “I am fortunately able to do more. From this point the place is visible.”

  Ko Tien Chung turned until he was facing almost forward and pointed out a nearly conical peak which lay directly under the westering sun, at a distance of about ten li up-stream and perhaps half that distance inland from the southern bank.

  “It is written,” he said, “that the gold lies in a cave in the heart of that mountain and that the way to the gold is from an opening on the west side of it. So I found it, even uncovering part of the gold. Then the Ko Lao Hui rushed in upon us like tigers unchained.”

  “So!” replied Hazard. “Then you must know the place well and must even have formed a plan for the attack. Without a plan courage is useless; those who fight blindly are easily slain. Moreover, the Ko Lao Hui will be on their guard.”

  I was glad that Hazard said that. Inwardly I was accusing Ko Tien Chung of an exaggerated idea of our prowess in expecting that our slight addition to his force would enable him to overcome enemies that had already defeated him so handily.

  But a few minutes later he had partially redeemed himself by describing with the utmost attention to detail the cave as it had been portrayed on the centuries-old parchment which his investigations that morning had proved still accurate. As he spoke he even illustrated his words by a rude sketch of the cave scratched with a stick on the grimy cover of the hatch.

  The feature of the cave upon which Ko Tien Chung not unreasonably pinned hopes of a successful attack was that there was a second very small entrance to it from above—an entrance which the mandarin wouldn’t have found if it hadn’t been mentioned on the parchment, and which therefore, it was to be presumed, the Ko Lao Hui wouldn’t discover.

  It was around the fact of that second entrance, which according to Ko Tien Chung was like a great gopher’s burrow, opening at the bottom into a small second chamber which widened from the main cave, that the plan for the attack was accordingly built. Rather uncharacteristically Hazard took everything out of my hands from the moment of his entrance into the conversation.

  I didn’t resent this particularly. After eight such peril-filled months as Hazard and I had spent together—months during which we were continually balancing, as on a tight rope, over the bottomless pits of Ko Lao Hui deviltry—it would be odd if we hadn’t come to trust each other completely. And I admit that, when unoccupied with my hesitating acceptance of Ko Tien Chung’s marvelous story, my fascinated speculations concerning the enormous amount of gold involved and my queer, increasing feeling that dangers even greater than those of which we knew were somehow opening ahead of us, my own mind was rather in a muddle. When the plan was finally developed I acquiesced in it, but not at all confidently.

  As will be seen later, that was not wholly because it was a scheme that fully insured Hazard’s and my own destruction if either Ko Tien Chung’s description of the cave were not entirely correct or if he and his men did not play their parts exactly. It was hard enough to risk our lives entirely upon the reliability and courage of a mandarin of whose character I could make out nothing and a band of yellow men whom I liked the less the longer I studied them, but it was worse to know that, although the plan was apparently Hazard’s, he having been the first to openly suggest it, it had really been adroitly hinted to him by Ko Tien Chung.

  The mandarin had really imposed our parts upon us; the scheme had been in his mind from the beginning and I wished I knew what other things were in that subtle, hidden mind of his.

  BY THE time the thing was settled we were within an hour’s run from the point on the river opposite the mountain which was our objective. We were to put into an inlet which Ko Tien Chung stated he had found there, conceal our junk as best we could and then make our way inland as secretly as possible. Three hours of daylight were left to us; by dark we should be making camp quite near enough for a swift blow at the treasure-vault later in the night, when the Ko Lao Hui would likely be least on their guard.

  Then at Hazard’s suggestion we ate and the crew was instructed by Ko Tien Chung to follow our example. From under the loose planks that floored the forward deck, the Chinese produced plenty of cold mien, dough-strings, and boiled rape and rice, but Ko Tien Chung joined Hazard and myself in our repast of canned stuff produced from our knapsacks. It was a silent meal marked by one peculiar incident.

  Considering that Wang had but fished the cans out of our knapsacks and opened them, it wasn’t like Hazard to be quite so solicitous concerning the state of the guide’s hands. He reproved Wang sharply, took him astern, found some sort of vessel and stayed with him while he washed himself, which took, I thought, an unwarranted length of time. Nor could I quite understand the motive for the remark Hazard made to me over Ko Tie
n Chung’s shoulders directly he had returned—a terse sentence in English followed by a shake of the head as I opened my mouth to reply.

  “I found seven fresh bullet holes in the hull of this junk,” he had said.

  Well, that was information, but what was the significance of it? What was the significance of Ko Tien Chung’s slight start at Hazard’s words and of the queer, half-frightened look that passed like a shadow over his not quite imperturbable features? For one thing it proved what I’d already suspected, that Ko Tien Chung was concealing an understanding of English. Doubtless Hazard had already been convinced of that. But what else was the mandarin concealing, of which Hazard’s discovery was evidence?

  And what, also, meant Wang’s very plain accession of fear? Whether it had been gradual or sudden I didn’t know, for I’d hardly noticed him since we’d come on board the junk, but his hands shook as he placed our food and it was evident from his face that his youthful soul was full of terror. I tried to tell myself that it was merely fear of the coming light, as he’d heard us discuss it, but I couldn’t quite believe my own conviction. It was something else and I wondered if Hazard had learned anything of moment from him while they were astern.

  If he had it hadn’t caused him to change his plans one iota. Again he went over them with Ko Tien Chung and me, with Wang listening intently. He went over them with great thoroughness, slighting no detail, but that was Hazard’s way.

  A little later and we had landed in an inlet identically as Ko Tien Chung had described it. The junk was drawn well up and made fast on the shelving beach of a little cove and we were all gathered in a silent cluster waiting for Ko Tien Chung’s word to start, when Wang came up to Hazard and began to pour out a swift jargon of words.