The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge Page 7
“What, indeed?” snarled Damron.
“Oh, yes—about Sanderson’s condition the night he bought Consolidated Air Power. Would you say, now, that he was in fit shape to exercise sound and proper judgment? Then you,” I laughed deprecatingly, “are so full of natural enthusiasm—while he’s an old man! Don’t you think you rather overrode him? Why, ——, Damron, what do you say to giving him back his bonds, which are at least a perfectly safe investment, and taking back your stock, which is no doubt of greater—but, well, shall we say, ephemeral—value?”
Damron’s face fairly blazed with the helpless but venomous anger of the discomfited crook. He raised his voice—
“I’ll see you in ——.”
“Come, come,” I said; “the play’s ended. Shall I ring this bell and send for the captain? Sanderson, what do you think of your investment now?”
“Why, why—” began Sanderson plaintively. His quick old eyes had been flitting between Damron and me, and he’d followed our talk anxiously and with growing depression. Now he was sitting with his head bowed and a broken look on his face. “I guess I’ve been bilked, Mr. Partridge, and I think I can figure out how it happened. But I’d rather have stood it than—”
“Than what, Sanderson?”
“Than have him arrested. Lord, man, have ye yourself a wife and that wife a family name, that ye can feel what ’twould be like?”
As it happened, his personal appeal to me was a high miss, but I’m no policeman. Curiosity is my principal motive in these affairs—strengthened in this case by regard for Sanderson. And I saw that the word “arrested” rather feazed Damron.
“How about that little bargain now, Damron?”
Damron’s eyes had flickered sidewise to a tiny, almost unnoticeable aperture in the wall of the stateroom, just at the level of the floor—an aperture just large enough to contain a rubber tube, through which the telltale scent, released by Damron himself, was flowing. He brought them back to mine with a frightened jerk.
“——, yes, if that’s all,” he wilted.
Which, of course, wasn’t exactly the way I wanted the thing to end. Landing penniless on the China Coast was too good a fate for Damron, but there really was room for quibbling concerning the purpose and use of the three steel cylinders of liquid oxygen Damron had brought with him on board the Antioch. Otherwise I might merely have notified the captain of my find in Damron’s stateroom.
However, it was vastly more interesting to half empty the last of the cylinders, add essence of violet to the odorless, colorless and tasteless liquefied gas and watch the effect when that volatile perfume cried out “discovered” to Damron’s guilty brain.
Fair Loot
KNOWLEDGE is, I think, most often found in unfrequented ways, which is the one reason I was standing that morning on the Pei-Ho River dike of the farming village of Sz-Chuen.
Perhaps once a year a white man came that way, but I’d spent the night there annoyed by no other sign of curiosity than the surreptitious piercing of a peep-hole in the wall of my room—the mask called Eastern phlegm had slipped a minute.
And no one had followed me from the little, brown, mud-walled town except a ragged conjurer, who squatted before me on the dike with his earthen bowl and magic wand.
I’d seen the trick of my fellow itinerant many times before. It was the old one of transforming dry earth into mud by means of the wand, which was apparently solid, and a singsong formula. But it was well done, and at the end I handed him a tungtse. Then I turned to the river, which was a wide and lazy stream at this point, dotted with brownish-white junk sails, which stood out very plainly against the light green of the paddy-fields reaching back from the opposite bank.
More interesting to me, however, because I intended to hail one presently, were the junks with bare masts being tracked up-stream against wind and current. They were muscular fellows, these trackers, and powerful-voiced, their primitive chanting carrying to me in bursts of song from at least two li away—but I was brought back to myself by an apologetic shuffling on the part of the conjurer, whom I thought I had dismissed.
“What do you want?” I asked in Pekingese.
He ke’towed almost to the earth, his soiled China-blue blouse falling open with the movement, showing a lean, starved chest.
“Master goes to the north?”
It was an impertinent question, and needless besides, for in that country a white man’s course is marked out before as well as behind him.
“Does the river flow south? If you do not know where I go, the naked children of Sz-Chuen are better fakirs than you.”
The conjurer bowed again; then he turned his shaved poll and slant eyes sideways till he was looking down-stream.
“From him who sees much that is hidden, plain things are sometimes veiled,” he replied in his professional drone, his eyes returning respectfully to the buttons of my khaki coat. “But I smell the coming of another Megwa who also goes north this twice memorable day. For that you put this into my hand instead of upon the ground—” he held up the copper coin—“I give you these words: beware of him, for an evil spirit is in him that must be killed.”
With that the conjurer backed three paces, bowed ceremoniously, turned and walked rapidly into the village.
Now I was rather impressed by his warning. It must be sincere, for he could have nothing to gain by it, and it was apt to be intelligent, pretenders to occult knowledge being usually well informed at least as to what is doing in this world.
If I weren’t possessed of considerable curiosity, I’d hardly have been in Sz-Chuen, pursuing a sort of saffron will-o’-the-wisp; so it was with vastly increased interest that I turned again to the yellow river and searched it as far as I could, southward.
Between me and the nearest bend, which was a third of an English mile away, there were two junks, but in neither of them was there any sign of a white man.
I reflected that there were several reasons why I wouldn’t welcome the shattering of the illusion that I was the only one of my race within at least a hundred li. Also I reflected that, if there were such a person, he would be in a bad way—that is, if the conjurer’s words had meaning. There’s no solidarity like that of the junkmen’s guilds; some thousands of years of laboring in common have fused them until they’re as capable of united action as armies. And the heads of the guilds are practically all members of the Ko Lao Hui. So, if sentence had been passed against the newcomer, it would be fulfilled.
And then I saw him. He was seated just in front of the small cabin ’midship of the last junk to come into view around the curve. A long line of trackers writhed along the dike in front of his craft, dragging it toward me at about two miles an hour, while a laodah in the stern and two polesmen in the bow guided it and kept it off the bank.
There was something peculiar about his crew. There was something ugly and menacing—but it had covered half the distance to me before I discovered what it was. It was a very distinctive and suggestive thing: alone of all the trackers on the river, his were not singing that age-old chantey of labor.
Gradually I made out the appearance of the man, for whose boat this distinguishing mark had probably been ordered. Strength and agility, I judged, lay in the slender frame beneath his loose hunting-coat and riding-breeches. But his tanned face, shadowed by a straw helmet, was harder to read. It was good-featured, young, beardless and—enigmatic. I couldn’t make out just then in what the enigma consisted.
All the way up to me he gave me but one look, and I thought he was going on.
But, just as I was about to turn away, he snapped out half a dozen words to his crew. The laodah threw the heavy helm hard over, and the trackers swung the prow of the boat inshore. The polesmen eased the prow into the muddy bank. Then, at another word of command, they dropped their poles and sprang to the top of the dike, carrying with them the end of a sort of light planking that lay in the bottom of the boat. They dragged this end toward me and dropped it almost at my feet.
AS I entered the prow of the junk, the stranger rose with peculiar ease and swiftness and bowed. Now I corrected my first impression—I saw that his thin-featured face was really in no way remarkable, merely a good-humored, intellectual college man type of countenance. True, it was distinguished by a pair of rather small, very bright, microscopic-looking eyes. The enigma lay in this very lack of the extraordinary. One hardly expects the commonplace in a man traveling alone in the heart of China and beset by such hostility and peril as the conjurer’s words had hinted.
“Good morning,” he greeted me, crisply courteous.
I clasped his extended hand, receiving a singularly wiry and powerful pressure. Then I heard his laodah shout to a junk that had just come up behind that he would be under way again in a minute. Doubtless the laodah had his instructions, and I determined to press the interview. Blood calls to blood, and, if he were as inexperienced as he looked, this fellow white man needed help badly.
“I was waiting for you,” I told him.
Perhaps I was mistaken, but I thought his right hand moved a little closer to the side pocket of his hunting-coat, the bulge of which suggested a revolver.
“You knew I was coming,” a bit tensely.
“I was told. The Chinese knew it, of course. The word’s going ahead of you. I wanted to warn you that you’re in danger.”
“Thanks!” I couldn’t understand his smile—was it foolhardiness or courage? “But, of course, I knew it. Forewarned, forearmed. I think I’ve provided against everything.”
Now that sounded rather bumptious, but much may be forgiven inexperience, and my desire to help him increased. Also—I don’t deny it—my curiosity pressed hard upon my prudence. And, by the way those sharp eyes of his were studying me, I judged he wouldn’t really be averse to a better opportunity of getting acquainted.
“My name’s Partridge—John Partridge,” I told him. “I was really looking for passage north.”
“Partridge!” Suddenly his face lit up; clearly he’d hoped for that name. “I thought it might be you. I’ve heard of you, you see. About a passage north—well, perhaps you’ll not want to come with me far. But you’ll want your baggage.”
I smiled.
“I’m superior to Thoreau’s immigrant,” I said. “You know, Thoreau regretted not that he had so little but that he required so much. I have about eight pieces of baggage—in my pockets.”
Evidently he’d expected that.
“Then—Hazard is my name. They’re getting impatient behind. You can come on to the next town, anyway, and further if you like, after you’ve heard my story.”
He turned toward the shore and gave an order. The polesmen slid back the light planking, followed it and seized their poles. As they pushed the boat off, the trackers bent to the rope again, still in that sullen and uncharacteristic silence. Slowly we got under way.
“I’ve a rather peculiar story to tell you,” said Hazard.
He hesitated a moment, and then—
“Exhibits first,” he said.
We were still standing, swaying a little with the motion of the boat. The little cabin ’midship was just at our backs. The young man with the clean, scholarly face turned half round and tapped lightly on the frame of that cabin, the doorway of which was filled merely by a curtain of dirty brown canvas. Receiving no response, he drew the curtain lightly back.
On the customary pallet inside the cabin there curled asleep a more than ordinarily good-looking young Chinese woman, well clad in a long light-colored jacket and trousers of brocaded silk. Her feet were encased in embroidered slippers, and she wore her long hair braided down her back, maiden-wise.
“Mu Ting,” said Hazard briefly, drawing the curtain close again. “My partner in this enterprise.”
I stared at him.
Then he drew me down upon the seat and, with very great care that he wasn’t observed by any of the crew, took something from inside his coat. The way he held it made it hard for me to observe it fully at first, and, when I did, I doubted my eyes.
It was a small image, not more than a foot high, made of iron, but, by the way he held it, singularly light. The iron was curiously scarred and pitted. The body of the thing was human-like, and the face was supposed to be human but fell short by several incarnations. Marred as it was by some agency I couldn’t yet guess, that face still represented intelligence without spirit, power without conscience, deracialized brutality, a devil’s nightmare.
It was a face I’d seen before and a conception that had made history.
“This,” explained Hazard, “or my acquisition of it, was the beginning of the whole affair. Which consists,” he went on, “in the recovery of the pearls of the deceased Empress Dowager, lost in 1900.”
I whistled my incredulity.
“Truly,” I remarked, “you are both mad and doomed.”
But Hazard merely smiled as he put the image carefully back again in a sort of pouch he’d made in the lower lining of his coat.
“I knew you’d feel that way,” he said.
II
SO WE went on up the Pei-Ho, past li after li of young, green rice, each small rectangular patch of which has supported its village-dwelling family since the gray dawn of history.
Even my interest in Hazard’s story didn’t prevent me from observing how like active brown ants were the tireless coolies, hoeing, weeding, planting or forcing the water through the irrigation ditches from field to field with their small wooden sluicing wheels.
They themselves seemed touched with the magic wand of perpetuity, working there as they had in the beginning. A patient, plodding people, mainly good—and yet how incomprehensible sometimes in their passion!
I wondered how the Western races would stand the test if the dream of the leaders of the Ko Lao Hui were to come true and all these yellow people were united—but Hazard was speaking again of the image inside his coat.
“I can well imagine it,” I replied, as he repeated that it was responsible for his presence on the Pei-Ho.
“Yes!” He looked at me sharply, as if he suspected my words had more than a surface meaning. “It’s an ugly-looking thing enough, no race, morality or soul—animal individualism, that’s all. A sort of fulfillment of the Nietzschean promise.
“Well, I’ll tell you the way it was. I bought the image a month ago from a merchant in the village of Kucheng, which you may know is on the Pei-Ho about a day’s journey below this point. He held out for a secret sale, though all the village knew he’d fished it out of the river about twenty li above Kucheng a week before. It was because of its peculiar ugliness that I bought it, and also because everybody seemed rather scared of it, without knowing why.”
“Wait a minute?” I interrupted. “Was it fished from the bottom of the river, or was—”
“No, it was floating down-stream. It’s iron, but it’s hollow and considerably lighter than water.”
“But I noticed pits in it, like rust pits or erosion—”
“True,” cried Hazard rather eagerly. “That’s why I know—but let me tell you. Two weeks after I bought the thing, I arrived in Peking. And exactly one day later I was drugged in a tea-shop and carried off some way to a thieves’ hole in Chi’en Men, where I woke up bound and threatened with torture because I wouldn’t tell where I got it. I wouldn’t tell, of course, because, if I had, I’d have died the sooner. They couldn’t afford to let me escape. Death stared me in the face whether I told or not—only it was so dark where I lay that I couldn’t see the shadow of my own eyelids.”
“You’re skipping a lot,” I reminded him.
“I intend to. Unessential details are confusing. How these people discovered I had the image, I don’t know—but, then, wal
ls have eyes as well as ears in Peking. They got it; they also got me, and they’d have given me the forty-nine tortures to make me tell where I procured it. That shows how highly they valued the information.”
“Well?” The matter-of-fact way he told this wild story rather added to its credibility.
“Well, I was rescued. A little while after the departure of the Chinaman who made me those promises, the door opened again. The atmosphere of the place was pretty stupefying, and I didn’t hear it open or close, but I heard some one crossing the room toward me. Then I felt the sharp, cold touch of steel, a cutting edge, on my wrist. Of course, I thought it was death, but the knife slipped under the cords. Though she didn’t speak, I realized it was a woman who was saving me. She left immediately, but, after I got the ropes off me, the rest was easy. One mud wall of the place opened on the street—that is, it did after I’d kicked a hole in it.”
“But they had the image.”
“Yes, though I didn’t know they had it till I got back to my compound and found it gone. Then, half an hour later, Mu Ting, whom you’ve seen—” he nodded backward toward the cabin—“arrived at my compound. She brought the image with her, carefully wrapped up, of course. It was testimony to the fact that it was she who’d cut me loose in that dark room.”
“But you said something about the Empress Dowager’s pearls,” and I smiled a little at the absurdity. “How does it connect up?”
He hesitated, a moment.
“I’ve heard that you speak Pekingese,” he stated.
“Fairly well.”
“I think I’ll let you talk to Mu Ting, then. She’s the authority on that affair. You may be able to learn more than I did, for my understanding of Chinese is still pretty clouded. But first, you know there’s a chance of such a find?”
The last sentence was half question, half assertion.
“I know, of course, that the Empress Dowager was supposed to have one of the finest collections of pearls in the world and that they are said to have been left behind by her when she exited from Peking to escape the consequences of her support of the Boxers. If she did, then there’s nothing incredible in the tale that they were carried off by looters. There was plenty of it in 1900—looting, I mean.”