The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge Page 8

  “They’ve never been heard of since. But—Mu Ting!” he raised his voice. “I thought I heard her stir,” he added.

  WE WERE both silent for a moment then, waiting. I had, of course, plenty of food for reflection. There was one—no, there were two things I knew that Hazard didn’t concerning the little metal image and its possible connection with the Forbidden City in the time of the Boxers, and both these facts rather tended to lend his tale the light of possibility.

  But, while I mulled things over, I purposely watched the occupants of a junk that was just about to pass us, going downstream. It could be no coincidence that in this, as in the last three craft that I’d observed, all chattering and chanting stopped as it approached us, and every oblique eye, usually so incurious, was turned on us fixedly as if marking us by command.

  Truly, whatever the cause, the conjurer’s warning hadn’t been an idle one.

  Then I heard the curtain behind us rustle, and I rose and turned rather eagerly to greet the woman.

  She came out of the cabin smiling prettily, rather engagingly. If she was astonished at seeing me there, she didn’t show it. She bowed gracefully and looked inquiringly at Hazard. There was a suggestion of complete trustfulness in the way she regarded him.

  Ceremony was rather slighted, owing to the circumstances and Hazard’s inadequate command of Chinese, but he managed to explain to Mu Ting how I’d come on board and that he proposed—it was the first I’d heard of it—to make me third partner in the expedition. That is, if she acquiesced—which she did, instantly—and if I cared to come in after hearing all the facts. To which end he asked her to tell me why she had released him, why she had come to him afterward, in brief, everything she knew. I suggested that she sit down again on the pallet, while we sat facing her. It was just as well for her to remain invisible to passing junks.

  One thing I’ve admired in Chinese women is their simplicity. Mu Ting’s words were like her smile, childlike in their directness. She answered my questions fluently, in a voice that suggested the cooing of a dove. It didn’t take long for me to get to the bottom of her belief concerning the matter.

  “I was slavegirl of the Ko Lao Hui,” she explained. “By and by I was to be wife to some great man in the West. There I would be like—like a monkey on a string. I read in a book that in America even Chinese women are free. So I think I want to go.

  “So,when Li Fu Ching bring in the Megwa scholar for the torturing irons, and I hear my masters say that where the little iron devil was found there would be found the pearls of the great dead Empress Tz’u-hsi, they—”

  Well, that was it, in a nutshell. She had conceived the idea that, if she saved Hazard, he would help her to find the pearls, would share them with her and would help her escape to a land of freedom. Her trust in him she explained on the grounds that most Megwas are good men and that this Megwa had faced the threat of the Chinese torture most bravely, it was noticeable that she’d dubbed him “scholar,” than which her race knows no higher title of respect.

  But the Ko Lao Hui was involved—that tremendous tong! And Li Fu Ching—I’d heard of him vaguely before as its Peking head. Such things are hard to discover. But more and more clearly I understood why and how the news of Hazard’s coming was being relayed ahead of him—understood, too, the ominous silence and sullen looks of his crew and the menacing stares that were cast at us from every passing junk.

  “Well, it’s considerable story,” I said. “Admitting it’s all fact, then this is the situation, eh? Somewhere up-river, where that image has lain on the bottom for nineteen years, are pearls worth several fortunes. But wait a minute; the image was found floating. If it’s lighter than water—”

  “Why did it stay on the bottom?” Hazard anticipated my question. “Well, to begin with, we know it did by the rust pits that cover it. Obviously, then, it was attached to something heavier that held it down. Why not the pearls? The image barely floats. Why, it’s plain,” he cried eagerly. “It was part of the loot, and it and the pearls were tied together in a sack of some sort. With the passing of years the sack rotted, the image floated away, the pearls remained behind.”

  I THOUGHT it time to tell him what I knew.

  “What keeps that from sounding too extravagant,” I said, “is the fact that the Boxers of 1900 were really an offshoot of the more ancient Ko Lao Hui and that this troublesome image was sacred with them. It’s a combination of the fabled face of Koshinga, the Coming One of the Ko Lao Hui, and the iron body which was the Boxers’ symbol of the invulnerability they claimed to possess. I happen to know these facts.

  “Well, it’s a matter of history that the Empress Dowager half believed in the Boxers and encouraged them until bullets ended their pretensions. So it’s quite plain why this image might have remained in her palace when she fled to the hills before the relief expedition. And it’s quite plain, too, why looters intending to flee to the sea might take it, figuring that its possession would save them from injury at the hands of the fanatical Boxers.”

  “Now, that’s good,” said Hazard. “Mu Ting, do you hear that?”

  He tried to tell her, but muddled it up so that I took the matter out of his hands.

  “Ko Lao Hui and Boxers are all the same men,” corroborated Mu Ting.

  “Now,” questioned Hazard, eyeing me intently, “in the light of all the facts, just how close can you come to the location of those pearls?”

  It was, of course, a problem I’d been considering for several minutes and one of the sort I like to try to untangle.

  “The image was found floating about twenty li above Kucheng,” I repeated his statement. “Which means about thirty li below this point.”

  “Yes. In the early morning.”

  “Of course. Ten minutes of daylight would have discovered it to some one. For that very reason, it couldn’t have floated down-stream more than a night’s journey. Then, too, the Chinese drag the stream continually; so it couldn’t have been lying in the bed of it. It would have been found long ago. Everything’s dragged, in fact, but the bottom of an occasional cave. That’s probably the answer.”

  “Good!” cried Hazard. “Now, as to placing that cave—”

  “Why,” I replied, “I’ve noticed you’ve been watching both banks of the river; so I’ll assume it’s not below here. And it can’t be very far above. The image couldn’t have traveled more than fifty li in a night. Thirty from fifty——”

  “Leaves twenty li, or about seven English miles,” completed Hazard, “which is the extreme distance up-stream that we should have to look for the cave. It took me somewhat longer to reason all that out.”

  Of course, I wasn’t at all certain that he had reasoned it out. Perhaps he’d only played me for my conclusions. In other words, my first doubt concerning him was still in my mind; only to the possibility that he was a conceited fool was added the suspicion that he might be a liar. But, to do him justice, he looked like neither. And he’d come far!

  ALL this talk had taken no more than half an hour, and we were just approaching the next village above Sz-Chuen. Our trackers abandoned the dike for the shallow water and extended the line in order to swing our junk around the collection of sampans, which were floating in front of the village all in a cluster, like a flock of half-submerged beetles.

  Hazard and I turned to look at the brown dirt walls and the dusty street of the town. The visible life of it consisted of the very young children, the decrepit old, lean-looking hogs, mangy dogs and well-fed fowl. Every one of working age was in the fields.

  “Well, you have it all,” said Hazard. “If it’s loot, it’s fair loot. Tracing the ownership of those pearls would be a puzzle worse than even a Chinese ever could invent. But loot and death seem to be usually linked. You’ve noticed the attitude of the passing junks and even of our own crew.”

  “Well, it’s perfectly plain that Li Fu Ching has traced you down here and is sending out the word against you,” I told him. “The reason that there’s no ord
er to attack you is that he wants to let you find the pearls first. Even then, of course, for his own sake, he’ll hold off the attack till he can be present in person. But you’ll be watched every minute. You see, he really has two strings to his bow. One is the ancient law of the junkmen’s guilds, by which they claim everything that’s taken from the river and forbid any outsider from working on it or in it. The other is his position as member of the Inner Circle of the Ko Lao Hui, which makes all the headmen of the guild subordinate to him.”

  “So you think Old Man Death waits up there for us with a club,” suggested Hazard quizzically.

  “Why, there’s no escape,” said I.

  “There’s always escape,” declared Hazard, but in a rather detached way, as if he was stating a formula.

  “Consider the situation,” I argued. “We need look for no help outside ourselves. We’re as alone as if there were no other white men on the continent. And you know the implacable temper of the Chinese mob, once it’s aroused. You know how small the mere accidents of existence, living or dying, killing or being killed, are to the Asiatic mind. No, we need expect no mercy.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Hazard quietly, “I’ll repeat my statement: I’ve taken account of all chances; I’ve provided against everything. That is, everything except that unescapable Fate which we call accident. I’m sorry you’re leaving me here.”

  We had come opposite the town, and he waited my word to make a landing.

  I smiled at him rather constrainedly and shook my head. Frankly, at that moment, my feeling toward him was decidedly frigid. His cocksureness irritated me, and I couldn’t cast off the impression that I’d been trapped. For, of course, it was quite impossible for me to abandon the adventure now. There remained too many problems unsolved—not the least of which was the perplexing riddle of the elusive personality hidden behind Hazard’s unremarkable face.

  “I suppose you could also explain how the pearls and the image found their way into the cave in the first place and why they were abandoned there?” I remarked, with a touch of sarcasm. “And no doubt you’ve planned out fully how you’re to recover them from under this muddy water? Have you brought a diving-suit along?”

  “Hardly,” he said, with a smile. I took it for an answer to the last question only.

  So, in a silence that was the slightest bit awkward, we swung past the town and on up the river. Now the country through which we passed grew less populous. Here and there black rocks jutted above the level of the farming land, which was itself of a rocky subsoil and hard to till.

  The brown-skinned humans, ant-like in their industry, still worked the fields, but they were less numerous here. The banks of the river gradually rose till they were far over our heads, and finally it was only at intervals that we could catch sight of the surrounding country at all.

  Still the string of trackers, enduring as machines, writhed on ahead of us pulling the boat, now wading through the shallow water at the edge of the stream, now winding along narrow paths cut in the side of the bank.

  Still, while from up-stream and down-stream came the chanting of other trackers, a weird, age-old song of labor, a sort of unifying chorus, half dirge and half paean—of men who had been born on the river, and who lived of the river and would die on the river—these men of ours worked in a silence that set them apart, that advertised the unwillingness with which they served us.

  And still from every passing junk came that answering silence, that slant-eyed, curious stare, unfriendly inquisitive, portentous of trouble.

  It’s hardly to be wondered at that, by the time we came upon that for which we were looking, a depressing sense of unreality had begun to afflict me. Belief in the stories of Hazard and Mu Ting had been easy while I listened to them, but now they seemed far-fetched and extravagant as a dream.

  Equally so seemed the reasoning by which Hazard and I had builded upon those stories, locating to our imaginations the long-lost jewels of the long-dead empress. And in this trip itself there seemed a touch of the grotesque—two white men who were strangers to each other and a woman of an alien race, encompassed by danger, drawn by unfriendly hands into the maw of the unknown.

  “Here it is,” said Hazard.

  With something of astonishment, I looked upon the fulfillment of our imaginings. The opening in the bank was on our side of the river; it was about fifteen feet wide at water level, and in the center was a little more than man-high. Hazard stopped the junk when we were directly in front of that opening. Looking back through it, into the depths of the cave, we could see nothing but blackness, shot through by ripples of light reflected from the surface of the water.

  “Now,” I said half-scoffingly, “to get to the bottom of that water—”

  Hazard picked a bamboo splinter from the bottom of the junk. He tossed it into the water and watched it drift into the cave with unanxious and unsurprized eyes.

  “We’ll simply build a dike or dam across the mouth of the cave,” he completed my sentence for me, “and wait. It’s as I expected—the cave will drain itself.”

  III

  BRIBED by the promise of more silver than they had ever before possessed, half an hour later the crew of our junk had procured shovels from neighboring farms and were engaged in pitching earth from the bank above into the stream. Their faces were yellow masks, but there was sullenness in their every movement. Plainly they worked against their wills, and plainly they resented our power to force their wills by purchase.

  Whether they divined the meaning of their work, that the completed dam would shut out the river and thus permit the water in the cave to pass out through the subterranean drain indicated by the ingoing current, we could not tell.

  But they were a small part of the danger that would presently confront us. Shortly after they had begun the work, during the progress of which Hazard, Mu Ting and I stayed on the junk, we were startled by a rattling like a succession of pistol shots. Looking out into the stream, we saw that a passing junk had dropped its bamboo-cleated sails, loosed its anchor and swung idly by in the current.

  Then the one that had followed us close all morning, taking its trackers on board, pushed out into the middle of the river and joined its fellow. Thereafter not one junk passed that point; from up-river and down-river they gathered like a collection of evil birds. Then they waited. They did nothing but wait. There was something cynical in that silent waiting, something implacable and monstrous.

  “We’ll have witnesses to our triumph—or our obsequies,” I observed, after about a dozen river boats had thus arrived and stopped.

  “Obviously,” he replied rather cheerfully.

  He was engaged at that moment in carefully trimming with his pocket-knife the ragged ends of a piece of bamboo, about four feet long, which he’d picked up somewhere.

  “Li Fu Ching’s behind this,” I reminded him unnecessarily. “We’ll pay for the work and find the pearls; the coolies will do the killing, and he’ll collect.”

  “Pshaw!” said Hazard lightly. “He’ll have a hard time collecting from drowned men.”

  I’m afraid I flashed at him a rather impatient glance. The humor of the remark didn’t impress me, and, if his tone indicated a hidden significance, I failed to grasp it. There was truth in it to this extent, at least, that we had as good a chance of drowning as any other form of death.

  “Cheer up,” grinned Hazard, catching my look. “We live but once and die but once: that’s elemental.”

  “The more reason,” I replied dryly, “for postponing that latter inevitable event.”

  “You have me there,” he admitted. “I take it your confidence in me is being rather strained. I might as well say now that I took a week to think this thing out, and every detail is accounted for. Would it add to your expectancy of life if I were to tell you exactly what we’ll find at the bottom of that cave, besides the pearls?”

  “It would be interesting,” I admitted skeptically.

  “Well, we’ll find bones there,” h
e said. “The skeletons of men. Both white men and Chinese, likely. And at least the metal parts of rifles—the wood may be rotted away—both foreign and native. Ammunition, too, of course. And rocks scattered about, as if carried into the cave by a rush of water.”

  I made no reply. His assured forecast of something that would so soon be proved or disproved impressed me, but I was mainly interested in wondering just how we could avoid leaving our own bones there. And his assumption of superior knowledge rather irritated me, although I knew that irritation was uncalled for. He himself admitted that his insight was merely the result of long thought. I should be the last man to deny the efficacy of that.

  SO PERHAPS two hours passed, very nearly in silence. Occasionally Mu Ting hummed a song under her breath, not unmelodiously, very self-possessed and brave. And our Chinese worked steadily. Their race knows but one way of doing a thing, whether for friend or foe—that’s the thorough way. They were building us a good dike. Thousands of shovelsful of earth descended over the bank into the slow-moving current. The muddy water grew even muddier from the little particles that floated off. But most of it settled to the bottom, and very slowly that bottom, thus continually added to, rose up to divide the waters of the river from the waters of the cave.

  But not so slowly did the junks gather, coming in silently, sullenly, as with a fixed and measured purpose. The line of them, jammed close, prow inshore, in the middle of the stream, extended steadily in either direction. Presently the ends of that line began to curve toward the shore. It was their evident intention to hem us in.

  “The individualities of those men,” Hazard mused, seemingly to himself, “aren’t developed. The race itself is an individual. The mass can be trained into the unit—to obey like the unit. There’s the great danger—”