The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (15 page)

“Ah the gray earth!

Gone is the good of it.

Deadly the earth for the children of Kwang-Ho.

Dark was the sky,

Darkened with sable wings;

Now the white fruitage for Kwang-Ho the Good.”

Immediately upon Hazard’s incomprehensible exclamation, the street singer, who had evidently watched the passing of the vultures, began his song again, simple as the lives of his people, deep with sadness as their sorrow.

“That’s their only point of difference,” resumed Hazard. “Come, let’s walk.”

I NEVER have known whether Hazard had already divined the solution of the mystery. A sudden horror had seemed to possess him, driving him to activity, but I myself felt the same desire. If we were already marked for slaughter by the Ko Lao Hui—as we would be if Li Ming Shan’s message had gotten through—let them strike swiftly, let us come quickly to grips! The last half-hour had immeasurably increased my feeling in the matter, had turned my hatred into loathing—a change I’ll not try to explain. But, as I started to say, Hazard was no man to claim credit after the event; and almost immediately after we left the courtyard the Ko Lao Hui betrayed itself.

Fumes of cooking and low-hanging smoke filled the narrow street into which we passed from the courtyard. Though the morning was yet dim, the village was waking, in a sad, unusual silence. A few faces glowered out from the doorways at the “undesirable aliens with no settled habitation”—such we had become over night. It wouldn’t be long before, harassing their brains for the cause of their troubles, they would blame us.

We had started north from the inn into an unfamiliar neighborhood. Indeed, a few steps and we were in an
impassé.
The narrow crooked street had dwindled into an alley, terminated suddenly by a crumbling old wall. Only doorless and mostly windowless backs of houses bordered this alley. It was as lonely a place as one could hope to find in Kwang-Ho—which I afterward suspected was the reason Hazard led the way into it. And I followed eagerly, though I’ve never courted death. The queer, vindictive passion into which the sight of the vultures had thrown me made me reckless in my desire to give assassination its chance.

So when I heard the lightest of footsteps behind us I didn’t turn immediately. I did slacken my pace, however; and Hazard, whose ears were at least as keen as mine, dropped back until he was abreast of me. Presently we stopped and faced about. Not over six paces from us was a very ancient and ragged beggar, stumbling after us in a half-trot, holding his left hand up beseechingly. The right arm swung loosely by his side as if palsied.

“Mao chi’en! Mao chi’en!”

I flung him a few coppers. He stooped stiffly and painfully and fumbled up from the ground.

“
Cheeba!
Be off!” I said.

He edged closer, bent and decrepit, squinting up at us, mumbling thanks. But immediately he recommenced his persistent beggar’s whine—greedy, insatiable, demanding after the fashion of his kind the more for that he had already received beyond expectations.

“
Mao chi’en!
You are rich men, I am poor beggar; you give me a silver dollar.”

He played the part of a beggar well but he was no beggar. He had neglected one part of his make-up. Long fingernails are much esteemed by the Chinese; and for a moment I smiled inwardly at the thought that this man’s pride had betrayed him. But it wasn’t pride. Long fingernails may sometimes be useful.

“No more. Be off!” I repeated harshly.

For answer, the fellow leaped.

He shed his decrepitude like the cloak it was. His meanly vindictive face smoothed magically under the dirt and his twisted body straightened itself. He was really a young man. His right arm, that had appeared palsied, flashed upward. He struck as a serpent strikes, in midspring. He struck at both our faces. His fingers were like talons, spread-out, curving, horrible.

“ ’Ware his nails—his nails,” cried Hazard.

The warning wasn’t needed. I don’t know how I escaped that swift attack, don’t know how I caught the wrist of the hand that thrust at me. If we hadn’t been expecting some such thing I suppose we would both have died. And our death at the hand of an unarmed Chinese beggar would have been as great a mystery as, up to that moment, had been the mortality among the children of Kwang-Ho.

For, after all, even if Hazard had got a hint of the truth at the passing of the vultures, he needed this attack which he had invited to lend it definiteness. In other words, he still needed to know the weapon, that terrific weapon which was capable of killing silently, invisibly, from a distance, with which the false beggar, agent of the Ko Lao Hui, had hoped to destroy the two of us.

It didn’t surprize me any to find that Hazard was holding the would-be assassin by the other wrist. Quietly observant, I believe Hazard had read the fellow’s intentions before he sprang, and was more ready for him than I. Anyway, my companion in these affairs was capable of feline swiftness of movement.

“Watch your hold!” warned Hazard.

For the man, finding himself held off from us, had altered his attack. Now he was trying to reach the back of the hands that held his wrists, curling his fingers around, trying to dig into our flesh with those long talons of his.

“I know,” I cried. “His nails are poisoned.”

“With the same poison that killed the children,” said Hazard rapidly.

Whether the man understood our words I know not, but at that he began struggling with redoubled violence. And suddenly I found myself filled with such absolute detestation as I never before felt for a living thing. With all the strength of my free fist, I struck his arm at the elbow, and, throwing myself forward against his suddenly flaccid muscles, I dragged those clutching fingers down his left cheek. From high cheekbone to brutal jaw three streaks of blood sprang out.

My hand went over his mouth as I twisted his arm behind him. Quickly we improvised a gag, for his screams of terror and despair would, if we had allowed them to pass his lips, have brought the living children of Kwang-Ho into the death-strewn streets. A little later we lowered him, writhing, to the ground.

“So!” said Hazard thoughtfully. “So!”

“It’s
bashlai
or
catipan,
” I said. “Or some equally deadly poison. There are many known in the East.”

But while the agent of the Ko Lao Hui lay dying, Hazard stooped and searched cautiously in the gray, loose earth that lay under our feet like a mat. Presently he rose with a thin splinter of granite in his hand—a splinter not a quarter of an inch long, sharp as a needle and discolored at the point with a brown stain that matched the brown tips of the dying man’s fingernails. Lying half-imbedded in the dust, it had been as unnoticeable as would have been the prick of it on the foot of a child in convulsions. It was clear. Hundreds of these imbued with a deadly poison—a poison, however, that lost its virtue with time—with these tiny weapons had the Ko Lao Hui struck.

“But how are they scattered?” I cried.

“Well,” said Hazard, “if we can—it’s a wild hope—but if we can capture the vultures—”

WE COULDN’T. It was perhaps as well that we weren’t suffered to try. But after we had told the people of Kwang-Ho what was essential—enough to terminate the death-list—we found matters taken out of our hands. They, as well as we, had seen the vultures alight on Tung-Whan. They, as well as we, could deduce that by mid afternoon the murderer or murderers who had released the vultures in the morning would have returned to Tung-Whan to get them again. And to them as to us there was but one sure agency for their destruction.

Fire! Fire about the base of Tung-Whan. A thousand darting tongues of it, a thousand licking, leaping flames. Fire crackling angrily, hissing through the dry, brown grass, springing with white intensity into the masses of dead underbrush, fallen and decaying trees, the debris of centuries. And behind that fire advanced an implacable cordon, silent as Chinese seldom are, filled with a settled and measured purpose. Variously armed were they, with clubs, rakes, hoes and long and deadly knives; but they never needed to use those arms.

The firebrands were enough. In the beginning there was no wind and the thin, pale smoke, shot through with white flames, rose wraithlike straight up toward the heavens. But soon the superheated air in the center of that circle of flame drove upward, and from all directions was the vacuum filled. The ravines became as flues. The mountain became the white-hot core of a great wind which poured in from all sides, and whirled to the sky in a blast of shriveling flame. I suppose that whatever fled before that encircling death died of the heat and smoke and oxygenless air long before the actual fire reached them.

But the Chinese took no chances. All night they watched around the still smoking mountain. All night, and in the morning Hazard and I, beating them up the side of the mountain, found what we found.

In the center of a circle of barren rock, on the very summit of the mountain, we found the charred remains of four men who would never again work the criminal will of the Ko Lao Hui.

“But, look here,” cried Hazard. “We’re lucky. They must have kept them till the very end in hopes of escape.”

For scattered about where they’d been dropped as the place became an inferno were eight large wire bird-cages, and inside those cages the burnt bodies of the vultures. Still attached to each bird by tiny wires encircling it under the wings was a small cubical metal box, painted black, in the bottom of which was a long, narrow door, swinging outward. In each door and in the side of each box near the edge of the door were small circular holes through which a cord might have been passed. Thus, we supposed, the door had been held shut.

“But the cord was probably really a time fuse, with a trailing end, touched with a match when the vultures were released and just long enough to burn to the knot by the time the vultures reached Kwang-Ho.”

This was Hazard’s guess. There were of course other devices that might have been used to release the door so that the poisoned darts, the tiny, sharp rock fragments with which the boxes had been loaded, would sift down upon the offending town.

“After all,” I sighed, “though we’ve saved Kwang-Ho for the time, and Li Ming Shan, too—for of course we’ll not add to the prestige of the Ko Lao Hui by crediting them with this—after all, it’s only a skirmish, and our first. But at least in destroying these men and their trained vultures and the store of poison they must still have had in their possession, we’ve robbed the society of a very terrifying weapon.”

“But a simple one,” mused Hazard. “Indeed, what a very simple thing it was! The simplicity of a genius in crime.”

Silver Sycees

JUST why Chang Pei Ying hoped that we two aliens could save him from the complexity of his troubles was hard to determine. Perhaps some knowledge of our little exploit at Kwang-Ho had leaked through to him, as things will in China, or perhaps we were the only chance that his desperation suggested to him. The week we’d spent in Cheyung had made us quite well acquainted with the likeable, old-fashioned mandarin whom we believed to be as honest as he was evidently poor; we’d even clasped hands in the Chinese pledge of friendship, so he had grounds for believing we would help him if we could.

Anyway, his urgent, though vague, summons reached us at Pei-fu and impelled us to a three-days’ forced journey cross-country by Peking carts, which are really but boxes set on wheels. Most of the way we walked for comfort’s sake; and so we reached Cheyung in the early-darkness of the third evening, stumbling along over the deeply worn road through a shadowy collection of grave mounds outside the wall.

“Now, if it was the ‘verra godly’ MacDonald that needed help—” pondered Hazard as we neared the same gate through which we had departed from Cheyung two months before.

Recalling the zealous and rather fiery tempered missionary and the invasion of Taoism that had seemed to threaten the town then, I agreed that in that case our summons wouldn’t be hard to understand.

“At that, I’ve a feeling he’ll be mixed up in it,” continued Hazard, to whom the scent of a mystery was as the scent of a hare to a good hound, and who had busied his mind with conjectures all the way from Pei-fu.

“It might well be,” I agreed again. “Just now I admit the comforts of Chang Pei Ying’s
cheng fang
is interesting me most.”

And then, the road narrowing into a mere rut, we fell behind our two carts and followed them through the gate, which had been opened without parley by reason of the fact that we’d sent a
mafu
ahead to acquaint the magistrate of our approach. The gatekeeper, a dark blotch against the heavy wooden door,
ke’towed
low as we passed him.

The wall was behind us, but we weren’t as yet quite in the town proper. Between us and the nearest of the crowded, cluttered, mud-walled houses there lay a stretch of vegetable patches bisected by the road we were following.

The main street of Cheyung was straight ahead, zigzaggedly outlined by many colored Chinese lanterns. These candles diminished in number to right and left of the market district, but a dim radiance came even from the outer and poorest sections—a symptom of continued prosperity that was good to see. People that are hard pressed for
chi’en
burn no more tallow than they can help; and, be it said incidentally, a well-lighted Chinese village is proverbially governed by a good magistrate.

“No wonder,” said Hazard, “the Taoist mummers are coming to Cheyung—or rather,” he corrected himself, “it’s no wonder they have come.”

I noticed the evidence of their presence at the same moment—the brilliant illumination of that temple which had been vacant and dark of nights when we saw it last. It stood perhaps two hundred yards to the left of the road we were traversing, just on the edge of town. It was called the Temple of the Hundred Steps and had been built perhaps a thousand years ago, when the Taoist faith was purer; but with the gradual dying-out of the old faith it had been abandoned and had so remained for some centuries. Hazard and I had already picked it, however, as the only probable local home of the modern charlatanry that was spreading eastward from Kansu.