The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge Read online

  “——!” Lomond reverted to English as—so it seemed to me—he followed a revealing glance of Ho Shih Chang’s. And instantly, as if warned of a great danger, he took a swift step sidewise.

  As I have said I was fortunately already poised for a leap. It appeared that by now I was the only one in the room who was utterly in the dark as to what was likely to happen; but the visible strength of the enemy’s position lay just now behind the black muzzles of Lomond’s revolvers. Lomond’s agition opened just the faintest chance in the direction, and I was swaying slightly forward on the balls of my feet, when—

  There came from somewhere a faint sound, a swift, sliding noise. Or rather there were several of these sounds, like the slipping of wood in smooth, oiled metal grooves.

  Simultaneously, and so quickly that Lomond’s face had no time to register the terror that must have been his, everything went dark as if a curtain had been flung over the room. Lomond’s two targets disappeared in blackness; and his revolvers belched fire just as I launched myself at his knees.

  My reaction to the unexpected darkness must have been much swifter than Lomond’s, for he had not moved when I reached him. My arms went loosely around his legs and I came up bearing him backward and trying for his wrists.

  Two more shots rang out; but just as they were fired I had thrust at his arms with all my force. The next instant I had his wrists, and we were struggling like two wild beasts.

  I was however able to keep his hands over his head and his revolvers useless; and presently I back-heeled him and flung him to the floor.

  Behind me I heard another fall, and I knew that Hazard and Ho Shih Chang had also gone down. I had no fear as to the result of that struggle.

  Without any compunction I struck Lomond’s head back against the floor and he went limp just as Hazard called over to me—

  “Have you got him, Partridge?”

  “Yes. Knocked out.”

  “Well then, bind him.”

  I heard Ho Shih Chang breathing in the manner of one upon whose chest there is a heavy pressure—doubtless the weight of Hazard’s knee.

  Tearing strips from the front of Lomond’s coat, I began trussing him hand and foot. The tables were completely turned; our two opponents were entirely in our power—a transition so sudden and startling that for a minute I could realize nothing else.

  But when my work with Lomond was half over a fresh terror came to me—a terror of the inexplicable. The darkness of the room was no more complete than the darkness of my mind concerning what strange means had been used to give us the mastery and by whom it had been given us.

  One thing was almost certain—this I reasoned swiftly—Death still lurked very close to us, for what had happened could hardly be other than what Lomond and Ho Shih Chang had planned to happen, except that they also had been caught in their trap for us. They had planned to imprison us in that room, and there we were imprisoned; and the memory that four men had already met unexplained deaths there struck my mind a chilling blow. I tied my last knot in Lomond’s bonds and got to my feet.

  “Well, Hazard—” I tried to keep my voice steady—“what is it?”

  “What indeed?” echoed Hazard tonelessly. “Do you hear that sound?”

  I had not noticed it; but now I heard a loud continuous hissing from somewhere overhead—a sinister sound, suggesting the hissing of a great serpent, which impinged upon what was otherwise an utter silence. Which silence, I now remembered, had been complete all along save for the sound of our voices, so remotely situated was this room of mysterious happenings.

  “It’s gas,” said Hazard. “Asphyxiating gas.”

  “It’s death,” chuckled Ho Shih Chang raucously, and yet I thought without quite complete conviction. “The honorable foreign mandarins have not saved themselves. They will die as—”

  He choked on the gag that Hazard thrust into his mouth. Rapidly tying it, Hazard continued rapidly but with his calm unshaken:

  “Yes, it’s death; or at any rate it’s meant death for others. The place is a gas chamber with walls pretty nearly soundproof, and air-tight—and I don’t suppose you noticed as we entered how the edge of inch-think planking lay flush with the surface of the stone embrasure just inside the door. Nor did the governors who died apparently notice it, though they had more opportunity; but Chinese officials aren’t an observing tribe.

  “But after we’d learned that it was in this room that the governors had been killed it was easily presumed that it was the edge of a sliding inner door which had been used to imprison them, and that the windows could be closed in the same way. Yes, we’re trapped—but as for dying here, we’ll see.”

  “But who,” I cried rather foolishly, for by now I should certainly have understood it, “who trapped us? Who—”

  “Liu Po Wen’s daughter, of course. For—don’t you see?—it must have been she. I had that all figured out—it was our only chance. Of course, I hoped to find her with Ho Shih Chang—that was the reason for my hurry in getting here—and his manner convinced me that we had surprized him with her.

  “Where had he placed her? That was obvious—behind that other door.

  “That was why I tried to give her a hint in that last speech of mine to Ho Shih Chang—and succeeded. But where is that other door?”

  I had felt my way over to Hazard, and together we started to grope for it. Our struggles with Lomond and Ho Shih Chang had lost us all sense of direction, and the darkness was absolute, so we made our way to the wall and began to feel around it in opposite directions. Already the air was sickeningly thick with gas; but I continued to question nervously—

  “But how did you know that she could do this, could work Ho Shih Chang’s trap against him?”

  “Know! Lord, Partridge, I didn’t know. But Ho Shih Chang was afraid—that meant something. And a villain’s usually a boaster; wouldn’t it have been like him to boast to her of what he had done and how he had done it, and the reward he expected to get from Koshinga?

  “And the place she was hidden was the natural place for the lever or button, or whatever it is that controls this infernal contrivance, to be, for the room behind that door must be at the extreme end of the yamen, where the assassin could work and wait unobserved. Besides, I repeat, it was our only chance; and you know my creed that there’s always a chance somewhere.”

  “But,” I continued, working swiftly around the wall, “even now, if it is she, and if we are able to communicate with her and convince her that we’re friends—”

  “Three things are possible,” Hazard took the question out of my mouth. “There’s the door, which she may be able to open; there’s this whole devilish mechanism of death, which she may be able to reverse; and there’s a bare chance that if these things fail she may be able to escape and carry the tale to her father in time for him to save us.

  “It’s lucky that we know him to be all that’s good in Chinese officials, for with the governor’s office temporarily eliminated he’ll be the main power in Nanchang, and we’ll have to depend upon him—”

  That was like Hazard, to be already looking forward to the completion of our work against Koshinga. Indeed, I thought our triumph might be very great if only— But just then I found, not the door for which we were looking but an unbroken wooden surface which must be the thick plank panel that Hazard had said would be found over the one other exit. Straight across the room then must lie that other door; and I turned quickly, judging my course. But just then came Hazard’s voice:

  “Here! I’ve found it, Partridge.”

  And I was at his side in a moment. He was already pounding on the door heavily and intermittently, listening between times for that response upon which so much depended—certainly our lives and very possibly that which was vastly more important, the imminent mass movement of Asia, for good or ill.

  For if we did not escape, if Koshinga’s conspiracy were not fully exposed, he might easily find other instruments, he might easily carry his plot to its comple
tion.

  AND then the response came, the thin and almost inaudible but well-poised voice of the educated Chinese woman, of that woman whose part in this affair had been as an invisible thread running from beginning to end, but which had nevertheless been perceived and traced by Hazard step by step to this culmination—the voice of the daughter of Liu Po Wen, chief magistrate of Nanchang.

  “I have heard the talk of the foreign gentlemen. There is no escape from this room, for the windows are barred; but if the Megwas will have the patience to wait I will try—”

  The air in the room was becoming deadly. The interchange of a few swift sentences informed us that though Ho Shih Chang had by his boasting made known to the woman the manner of his process of murder—the working of a lever cleverly concealed behind the drawer of a desk—she had yet to learn how the system of weights which controlled both the gas outlet and the sliding panels of plank could be reversed.

  Moreover the door between her and us was also fast shut and could only be opened by that same unknown means. Since death was their end in any case there was obviously no way for Hazard and me to force the secret from the sealed lips of Lomond or Ho Shih Chang.

  And so at the end of what might have been fifteen minutes of increasing asphyxiation Hazard and I began to feel that our faces were at last turned toward the final adventure of man.

  In a little while more I, for one, was floating softly down into billowy depths of blackness; nor was I fully conscious of the exact moment when, the woman having found that second hidden lever, the revivifying air and the light of day flooded into the room again.

  TO DESCRIBE our departure from the yamen, our visit to Liu Po Wen, and his amazement at sight of the agreement possessed by Lomond and the further documents which we discovered in the effects of Ho Shih Chang—documents which involved in the Ko Lao Hui conspiracy some of the names most prominent in Kiangsi politics—would be but a recital of the commonplace and the instant wholesale arrests that followed under the direction of Liu Po Wen are merely matters of last year’s history. History also records in a negative fashion the complete subsidence of the Kiangsi ferment, from which an empire-wide harvest of death might so easily have sprung.

  But concerning the inner details of the affair history is as usual silent; and the first account has been here given of Hazard’s and my part in checking what Koshinga intended to be his final blow against the stability of New China. It was a postponement we had gained, not a decision; but until Koshinga’s pretensions were exposed and his gullible followers undeceived a decision was hardly to be courted.

  The Shu King

  A CHINESE crowd is a mystery with many tangents—one that I, John Partridge, who have named myself in moments of candor a “searcher after the unusual,” never tire of watching.

  Each passing yellow face has its separate challenge for the curiosity, unreadable, so that it has sometimes seemed to me that the real deity of the East is a Secret-Keeping God, with fingers upon lips. The inner mind of the Chinese is known to no white—that is my conviction. Yet sometimes the veil is stirred by the wind of a strong emotion and one gets a glimpse of what is behind it, as I did on one very dusty morning in Peking, where I was loitering for a purpose.

  I had passed in a cloud of that soil-making dust blowing in from the Gobi Desert—blacker, stickier and more insistently penetrating than any other dust that ever was—from the foreign section in the Tatar City to smelly Ch’ien Men, where old China still holds fast. Here was a district I like to wander in, a district of amazing confusion, hubbub, dirt, endless industry, admirable cheerfulness, incessant chattering, and, I was convinced, of incredible adventure. Adventure that had so far, however, kept just around the corner of my imagination.

  Walking down Pipe Street, I came to where the stretch of wooden-fronted shops with fantastic signs blend into the mud-walled middle-class compounds, and slackened my steps in the vicinity of a street-juggler’s stand. The street was fairly blocked with the inevitable crowd, watching him with curious intentness, and as indifferent to the dust storm as it was to the jostling of the passers-by—brown-legged and heavily laden coolies, dignified fat mandarins and merchants with fans on their wrists, beggars with starved, bare chests and women with mincing steps and brightly incarnadined cheeks.

  Also there were bare-pated and long-coated Mongols—hawkers of venison, these; water-carriers and barbers from sturdy Shantung; cooks from epicurean Canton; wealthy traders from Shansi. I could pick out men from all over the sprawling empire; and I was regretting the recent government order, “Mo t’an kuo shih” (eschew all political discussion) and thinking that what this motley crowd knew might be worth many years of life for me in the solution of the problem that had brought and held me to China, when I saw one certain face distorted with the passion of fear.

  It belonged—and this was the most curious part of the thing—to a very old man. He was shabbily robed in the solid black gown of the scholar class—that most honored class in China. He had a magnificent forehead and almost unnaturally bright eyes, and his fine beardless skin was like wrinkled saffron parchment over the bony block of his face.

  He tottered rather than walked uptown from the residence section; but his eagerness was so great that he came forward almost as fast as a run. His breath came in sobs; the black dogs of terror seemed to drive him; but the only clue to his panic was that his lean right hand seemed to hold something concealed under the breast of his gown.

  I stopped just on the edge of the press around the juggler, and watched this strange thing—strange, for in China the aged at least have mostly learned to greet Death as a friend. I thought it hardly probable that it was any fear for his own life that was troubling him. And—this was rather curious, considering the outcome—there was a moment during which I identified him somehow with that ninety-year-old scholar Fuh-sang, who at the time of the Burning of the Books and the killing of the literati some twenty centuries ago feigned insanity and put out his own eyes in order that at least part of the still sacred Chinese Classics might be preserved through his memory.

  The old man came on to the edge of the crowd, seemingly unnoticed by any one but me, for the Chinese habitually regard a stranger’s troubles as his alone. I expected, since he was in so great a hurry, that he would turn aside to avoid the pack; but instead he crowded into the very center of it.

  His intention was evidently to lose himself in it, and so to shake off pursuit; but I remember thinking what a fine place for an assassin to hide himself was that same crowd, provided—which was highly probable in that district of twisted alleys—that he could have cut in ahead of the old man and reached the spot before him.

  For a minute I lost sight of him; but naturally he made a slight disturbance as he forced his way through the press, and so I followed him. Did I, when he was half-way through, hear a weak, pitiful cry from the vicinity of that disturbance?

  I thought so, but I couldn’t be sure, for just then there had sounded from a government enclosure on the other side of the Ch’ien Men gate one of those hoarse Chinese trumpets, the gurgling notes of which make one instinctively think of evil things. And he was still moving, so I turned and kept pace with him along the fringe of the crowd; and when he came out of it I was loitering in front of a chow-stand only half the width of the street away from him.

  Just then there was a particularly violent swirl of dust, obscuring the sun and everything else; and he was a little way up the street before I saw him clearly. In fact, he was as far up the street as he was destined ever to get. His knees had given way under him; and, struggling weakly, he crumpled forward and lay twitching on the very dirty cobbles.

  Now, a death in a Chinese street ordinarily causes little more excitement than the passing of a fly in a swarm of other flies—which seeming callousness may be a survival in effect of a certain cruel old law. No longer ago than the passing of the Manchu dynasty was it true in many overcrowded cities that he who saved to life a mouth that must be fed was responsible for
the filling of that mouth so long as it required food—truly a potent device for the reduction of a burdensome population. And so it was not at all remarkable that only one person besides myself seemed to notice the old man’s fall.

  Really, the remarkable thing was that there were two of us. The thing that required explanation was the motive of the other man.

  I could not see where he had come from; possibly he had followed the old man out of the crowd. Anyway the slight lessening of the dust had revealed to me, besides the falling figure, a small, evil-faced man whom I took for a Cantonese, dressed in the ragged garments of a coolie, and leaping with extraordinary swiftness upon the stricken man.

  He reached him before I had well started, and bent over the body with his back toward me. I couldn’t see what he did, save that when he straightened again the old man was lying face up. The Cantonese whirled, unfortunately for him, and came in my direction.

  I sprang—and had him.

  An instant later I had his blouse.

  I AM not proud of that particular episode. One expects small resistance from a Chinese coolie—muscles flaccid, the nerves slack from centuries of underfeeding. But this man came at me like a tiger, cursing untranslatably. A dull-colored knife, hard to follow in the whirling dust, flourished in his hand.

  It was disconcerting; and to save myself from the touch of the knife, which might well be poisoned, I flung him back. But I held fast to the skirt of his blouse, and it slipped off his brown body, covered thief’s fashion with oil, and he was free.

  Besides his blouse, I had some flat object that was hard and smooth to the touch, and that fitted almost exactly the side pocket of my coat, into which I slipped it hurriedly.

  I did not look at it. My eyes were needed for my assailant, who was coming back at me. Besides, the street fakir’s crowd was breaking up, spilling over toward us with a babel of unfriendly sound.

  It was neither the time nor the place to search into the causes of things, so I flung his blouse at the Chinaman’s head, and followed it with my fist. The blow was only a glancing one; but it shook him up and sufficiently discouraged him.