The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (11 page)

“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,” he 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—”

Truly, the gathering of the junkmen illustrated that principle, but I couldn’t believe it was our danger of which Hazard was thinking.

“It’ll be night by the time the dike is finished,” said I, with a look at the westering sun.

“Yes,” said Hazard.

We ate—crammed ourselves at Hazard’s suggestion—from a supply of hard-boiled eggs, corn bread and plantains Hazard had cached in the cabin. The laboring coolies didn’t stop to eat. They were in a hurry to get through with their work and with us.

It was about sunset when they patted smooth with their bare feet the top of the dike, which rose about a foot above the surface of the water. At that sign of completion, Hazard rose, went to the prow of the boat and from under the forward thwart drew a large roll of blankets. He brought them back ’midship and began to make another bundle of Mu Ting’s bedding, which was inside the cabin.

“Sometimes it pays to travel like an immigrant,” smiled Hazard. “The dike’s our home from now on.”

The crew of the junk, their work completed, were gathered in a knot on the nearly leveled bank. They were discussing something. When the knot broke and they started singly over the plank bridge to the junk—veritable mud-larks, almost entirely naked, like creatures of another world—I knew Hazard was right.

Dull animosity sat with a scowl upon each man’s face. They had determined to be done with us after the payment. As for us, of course, it wouldn’t have been safe to have spent the night on the junk with them.

“We might buy those planks,” I suggested to Hazard. “They’d keep us out of the mud.”

“We’ll try it.”

But the
laodah,
master of the junk, developed absolute incapacity to understand me when I made the offer. And, when Mu Ting herself addressed him, at my request, he refused in sudden hot anger and motioned us off the junk.

Standing on the dike, we watched our late servants paddle swiftly away to join the ever-lengthening line of our enemies. Then Hazard and I laid down our blankets, and, while the purple and gold died out of the haze that covered the land and in the west the sun sank with a last flare of crimson, we carried some rocks from where the dike joined the bank so we could at least sit dry through the night.

We spent the night there, Mu Ting, Hazard and I. Hazard and I arranged a sentry go, for it was possible we would be attacked before morning. It depended, we agreed, upon when Li Fu Ching arrived. Until then the junkmen evidently only had orders to watch us while we traveled, close in upon us when we stopped and prepare to destroy us at command. Naturally, Li Fu Ching himself must be present at the dénouement, else where would be his chance of attaching the pearls?

I think for Mu Ting the night passed most easily. Most of her race could sleep quite soundly standing on their heads in sugar barrels, which is a quality worth considering. But Hazard also demonstrated that he had learned the trick of sleeping under difficulties. I did quite well toward morning, but most of the night I spent watching the lights of the junks, like evilly vigilant eyes, extend to right and left, in peering into the black depths of the cave, where water no longer glimmered in the moonlight, and wondering what riddle the morning would read.

Hazard would have me think he had already read that riddle. I doubted it. I doubted his every pretension. Particularly I doubted his pretended knowledge of a way out of this predicament. I hoped that he and I, and brave little Mu Ting, too, would live to understand the mystery of the cave, but I felt that for the three of us this understanding would only be preliminary to exploring, before another sunset, the greater mystery of Death.

IV

BUT morning is a miracle, in the way it brings us strength. Perhaps the sun has seldom risen on a trio more depressingly situated, but, as the east paled and the light came, something like cheerfulness came over us.

At least we were still alive. The center of the line of junks was no nearer to us, although up-stream and down-stream it curved in until its ends impinged against the shore. And every minute we could see further into the mysterious depths of the cave.

We could see further into it, for the rays of the rising sun, increasing in strength, shone directly through the opening. From the front of the cave, at least, the water had entirely receded. As far as we could see, the nearly dry bottom sloped downward steeply, its own rock surface covered with other rocks of all sizes, some of them shattered into fragments, as if they’d been flung forcibly into that cave and dashed against its floor.

“Now,” said Hazard, who had viewed all this with a peculiar air of satisfaction, “let’s get busy. Mu Ting, are you ready?”

The Chinese girl, who had been placidly rearranging the end of her long, black braid, rose smiling the eternal smile of the East.

“Whatever the honorable
Megwa
scholar wishes,” she murmured in her musical voice.

“It’s best to hurry,” I agreed. “Li Fu Ching can’t be long coming, if he’s not already here.”

Hazard nodded agreement and began helping Mu Ting down the steep, muddy side of the dike. We all moved with some difficulty, being still chilled and stiff, from the night’s exposure. But my own physical hardships, at least, were easily enough disregarded. Also, once I’d turned away from them, I found it not hard to force to the background of my mind thought of the vulture-like junks outside.

Ahead of us was treasure, perhaps, but certainly knowledge. Perhaps we’d find there all that we hoped, justification of our reasoning, fulfillment of our dream—but more probably, I now thought, we’d learn that we had conceived a wild chimera and that our carefully worked out plan but led into a blind alley of destruction.

If I’d permitted myself to think of it, I should have known that, once we had disappeared into the cave, the junkmen would unquestionably close in upon the mouth of it and take our place upon the dike.

This they’d do in literal obedience to their orders not to lose touch with us. My imagination balked at conceiving how we would escape then. It was because of that I forbore thinking of them. I’d elected to follow Hazard, and I would follow him, but there are limits to every one’s courage, and I’d come to sparing mine.

We got in some fashion or other to the bottom of the dike and began clambering over the rocks, down the inclined bottom of the cave. Hazard and I kept pretty much side by side in front, while Mu Ting followed us closely. The almost level rays of the sun penetrated a long way ahead of us, but as yet we could see no end to the cave. Presently Hazard stopped and stirred something with his foot.

“Look here!” There was a slight note of satisfaction in his voice.

It was a human skull, square-jawed, level of eye-socket, arched of forehead, unmistakably the skull of a white man.

“What of it?” I asked.

He looked at me sideways, with a half-smile.

“You’ve forgotten,” he accused me quizzically. “What did I prophesy? But come on.”

I FOLLOWED him, and presently we came across that which forced to my mind Hazard’s apparently impossible forecast uttered the day before. Bones, guns and shattered rocks he’d said we would find. We were now thirty feet from the entrance to the cave, and the place was like a charnel-house. And among the bleached skeletons of white men and Asiatics, mingled confusedly as if they’d been overtaken by some unimaginable catastrophe, were ruined European rifles of an ancient pattern—Mannlichers, they were—and muzzle-loading Chinese
jingals
and matchlocks.

“How did you know it?” I cried in sheer bewilderment.

“Loot and death!” said Hazard meditatively. “Loot and death! See—” he picked up a metal button and a cap ornament—“they were Austrian soldiers.”

“But what happened?” I cried.

“Can’t you imagine it?”

I think I could have imagined it then. Confronted by that visible result, I think I could have recreated the cause: indeed, my groping mind had seized the first thread of the truth when Mu Ting, who had viewed the ghastly debris with Asiatic unconcern, recalled us to the more important object of our search.

“The pearls?” she inquired insistently. “The pearls?”

“Right enough,” said Hazard and began searching quite coolly among the gruesome relics, turning over the rocks, throwing aside the white bones, scraping out of the way the silt deposited by the river. I followed his example, but my attention was irresistibly attracted by sounds of movement and of low guttural voices behind me. I looked back, in spite of myself, knowing what I would see.

On the top of the dike, clearly framed in the opening of the cave, was the sign of our doom. It was a solid bank of sun-tanned faces, muscular trunks and yellow limbs, clothed imperfectly—for the morning was still cool—in ragged garments of China-blue.

“The junkmen have landed on the dike,” I said in a whisper.

“Obviously they would do that,” replied Hazard with irritating unconcern. “Ah, I’ve found them.”

Instantly Mu Ting and I were at his side. His right hand was filled with globules of varying shape. At his feet, in a cup-like depression in the rock floor, where they’d lain so many years, were many others—hundreds of them. I clutched a handful. In the semi-darkness their coloring was like any other pebbles, but by their weight and size and rounded, smooth surfaces we knew them. They were pearls, pearls, the treasure for which we had hoped.

Fair loot, if ever loot was fair—honorable spoil for the first finder! They’d been gathered through foul methods by a corrupt court that had fallen long ago; they’d been stolen from a long dead empress who had no manner of right to them; they’d been lost, buried and forgotten for nearly twenty years. They were ours, the ransom of a kingdom!

Now wealth is something I’ve never pretended to despise; nor have I claimed to be superior to that lust for it which has through all the ages stirred men’s blood and driven them to deeds incredible. I admit that for a moment I forgot the double bank of coolies at the entrance of the cave, forgot the walls of rock that prisoned us around, forgot the dead bones at our feet—mute and terrible prophecies of our own fate—and thrilled only to the thought of our priceless find.

“Fill your pockets,” half-whispered Hazard.

“They’ll see us.” But I stooped quickly to obey.

“We can’t help it. They can’t see us plainly, anyway. They’ll not understand what we’re doing. Hurry.”

We picked them up as fast as we could, Mu Ting helping, putting the pearls away in her jacket somewhere. It was then that I got the first intimation that something was wrong. The light was very poor, but—I remembered some other pearls I had seen, the shimmering whiteness of them, the ghostly tints of pink and amber glowing up from their hearts. Surely these were not….

“Ah! Listen!”

My half-formulated thought was interrupted, was swept from my mind by what I heard coincident with Hazard’s exclamation. There had been a disturbance among the coolies on the dike, as if some one had pushed through them roughly. Now a loud and imperative voice began haranguing them. At the first sound of that harsh voice Mu Ting shivered and whimpered aloud:

“It is my master. Now we die.”

“The circle’s completed,” said Hazard coolly. “It’s Li Fu Ching.”

Of course, the wonder was that he hadn’t come before. The word that he’d sent up and down the river to locate us and hold us had traveled fast enough. Perhaps the return message notifying him of the corner in which we’d obligingly placed ourselves had been delayed, or perhaps—but that’s conjecture.