The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (18 page)

So we waited while Ma An Liang performed innumerable prostrations before Laotzu, chanting mystic invocations the while. Hazard fidgeted a great deal, his sharp, microscopically observant eyes distended and uneasy, but he delighted in disarming suspicion by playing a commonplace rôle. Inwardly he was, doubtless, cool enough. I felt, however, much as he looked, for I knew too much of the wizardry of the Taoist priests to expect any commonplace outcome to the affair or to think that our part in it would be devoid of danger.

Finally Ma An Liang concluded his ceremony of worship, stood for a moment in a receptive attitude, head close to the idol’s evilly grinning face, and then turned and announced in his high-pitched, chanting voice the god’s acquiescence to the proposal.

“Laotzu the all-knowing, father of a thousand gods, worker of a thousand miracles, guarded by a thousand guards, has said that he will pronounce judgment, and his sign of guilt shall be the sign of the stricken face.”

MacDonald muttered something under his breath. I think it was a prayer to be forgiven for lending himself to the impiety. As he stepped forward to his place before the idol I braced myself for swift action and I saw that Hazard did the same. Ma An Liang, through whose racial immobility of feature gloating triumph was breaking in spite of himself, withdrew until he had placed the image of the god between him and his intended victim. Over the credulous mass of humanity that crowded the temple behind us came an awed and expectant silence.

That silence was more impressive than any continued incantation would have been, and just before Laotzu struck his inexplicable blow I was shivering in anticipation of what might happen if in the slightest respect we had been wrong in our conclusions. As the Chinaman is in his ordinary mood the most peaceable of men, so in his rare moments of frenzy he is the most uncontrollable and dangerous, and if we couldn’t justify the sacrilege we were about to commit it would be strange if either Hazard, MacDonald or I lived an hour longer. I still think we were chancing more on the correctness of our judgment than was altogether wise.

MacDONALD was standing very stiff and straight, with a strange dignity about him that made me wonder we had ever made jests at his expense. He seemed to be looking squarely into Ma An Liang’s eyes, from which the fanatic’s light had passed, leaving them dead, cold and malicious as a serpent’s, when suddenly his body twitched convulsively from head to foot.

I saw that and heard a hoarse cry of astonishment and rage burst from the missionary’s lips, but it wasn’t till I’d followed his left hand to his cheek, that I recognized the cause. He brushed his check and for an instant looked bewilderedly at his fingers, which were covered with blood. As if struck by an invisible talon, the skin of his cheek had been ripped upward from jaw to brow.

The thing was so astounding that for a moment longer Hazard and I stood in our tracks. A low, excited cry went up from the Chinese behind us. The malignancy on Ma An Liang’s face increased to a devil’s measure. He opened his mouth, I suppose to announce the judgment that had been passed, and remained with it open, staring fixedly at Hazard.

A strange look of dismay had quite eclipsed the priest’s evil ecstasy of triumph. Out of the corner of my eye I was able to see that Hazard had pulled from the front of his hunting coat the potent suicide cord Chang Pei Ying had loaned him, and seemed to be holding it toward Ma An Liang. I didn’t understand it and had no time to figure it out.

The instant I glanced at Hazard, MacDonald, recovering from the paralysis of astonishment, leaped toward Ma An Liang. This was my cue, but I was an instant late in reaching the image of Laotzu, which I had been detailed to overturn. As I buckled my shoulder under the half-raised arm, I saw a peculiar thing—the loop of the silver-and-dragon cord, skillfully flung by Hazard, had settled like a noose over Ma An Liang’s head.

In my ears still echoed the cry Hazard had sent with the cord—

“Faithless official,” he had cried in Shensian, “execute yourself the judgment of
Tsi’an!
 ”

I heaved at the image. As I did so I saw Ma An Liang, with the token of death still dangling from his neck, spring sidewise and whirl with one leg swinging outward, kicking MacDonald’s feet out from under him and sending him sprawling upon the floor. This wasn’t quite as we had calculated. I knew that Hazard had turned with Chang Pei Ying to face the yellow mob which, by the sound, was rising in a turbulent mass. It was my business to find the sycees while MacDonald handled Ma An Liang, but Ma An Liang was yanking a revolver from the front of his gown.

Laotzu gave way at my second great effort and toppled and tumbled backward. I dropped behind the base of the image just in time to escape a bullet which Ma An Liang sent at my head. So, on hands and knees, my head over the edge of the hiding-place which had been under the idol, I found the thing we had been seeking, the shoe-shaped silver coins. The hole was filled to the top with them.

“They’re here, Hazard, they’re here!” I cried out as I came to my feet again.

“Of course,” rasped Hazard over his shoulder. “Watch Ma An Liang.”

I’d pulled my revolver as I spoke, and at the same moment I observed that Hazard was standing with his own gun swinging like a snake’s head, covering the front of the shifting, hot-breathed but irresolute crowd, through which about twenty
shimbos
were already forcing their way toward us. MacDonald was getting to his feet—altogether, things were coming our way.

But, just as I thought that, there happened what was very nearly, while it endured, the most terrifying experience of a life that hasn’t been commonplace. Still, it was an experience that I deserved in a way, for I had remained standing just in front of the opening in the floor over which Laotzu had rested. I should have known that there was some foundation to the many stories I’d heard of the punishment with which the god smote trespassers. Besides, the strength of Laotzu had already been intimated in the mysterious blow that had been dealt MacDonald.

All of a sudden I was enveloped. I was enveloped in the almost imperceivable—in something that had descended swiftly from above. From head to foot I found myself suddenly enshrouded in filaments little larger than a spider’s thread, blending with the air almost invisibly. When I thrust out my hands, those filaments gave way with absolutely no resistance. But when I leaped away—or tried to—they caught me as with hundreds of tearing talons.

They held me. I saw Hazard turn his head and knew that sheer terror had fetched a cry from my throat. Then the hundreds of needle-like points that had penetrated my clothing and bit into my skin dug deeper; the next moment I was dragged upward and off my feet. The innumerable filaments, tightening, had proved to be wires—the finest of wires, controlled from above and tipped at their ends with some sort of hooks.

I heard Ma An Liang laugh madly—a shrill, exultant laugh that had something of desperation in it, too; it pealed through the temple like the ringing of a knell. Then I flung my head back—much pain it cost me, for one of those hooks had caught into the base of my skull—and saw at least who operated the infernal device.

From behind one of the great cloud-like folds of silk and through the maze of fine wires above me, a Chinaman peered down, his own face distorted by terror at the confusion he saw below. I could only see his head and shoulders, but he seemed to be standing upright on some support, and his right shoulder was hunched back as if he held his hand on a lever.

“Partridge, oh, Partridge!” I heard Hazard cry; and there was even more fear and agony in his voice at my predicament, than I was feeling. I looked down and saw that he was running toward me.

Crack!

Ma An Liang had fired again. He had not fired at me—I was out of the game—but at Hazard. The instant he had pulled the trigger, however, MacDonald had struck up his hand. So happened a thing which may have seemed to Ma An Liang—professed miracle-worker that he was and probably, in spite of his mechanical aids, more than half self-deluded—a direct intervention by an unfriendly Justice stronger than his own god.

His bullet, thus diverted, sped upward and through the brain of his coworker above.

Swinging now with my feet well above the floor of the temple, I saw the yellow face that peered through the purple folds of silk suddenly disappear behind a spurt of blood. The man fell backward and for a moment the silken curtain that roofed the place was violently agitated just below where he had stood. Then it was still.

MA AN LIANG, seeing what his shot had done, seeing that Chang Pei Ying’s soldier
shimbos
had by now lined the front of the altar and that even the Taoist acolytes were over-awed, realizing that with the discovery of the stolen sycees and of the methods wherewith he worked his trickery his power in Cheyung had passed, and perhaps already feeling, in anticipation, the racking pains of the punishments that might soon be his for these and for another, greater, crime—with all these things upon his mind he wrenched away from MacDonald again with leopard-like agility and leaped toward a door in the rear of the chamber.

Simultaneously I felt the deadly mesh in which I was enveloped give way. It gave way suddenly, as the Taoist acolyte who had controlled the hidden mechanism above had died, and I hit the floor on my feet. I hit it, of course, struggling to free myself from the torture-tipped wires that now were loose and dangling, and I succeeded quickly, for their purposes of magic had required that the hooks at the end of the wires which had held me be not barbed but straight-edged, like bent pins. However, Hazard and MacDonald stopped to help me and so we lost Ma An Liang.

“There is no escape. There is no escape,” Chang Pei Ying kept repeating as we battered at the door through which the Taoist imposter-priest had fled. “My
shimbos
watch the windows; there is no escape.”

Still, he was mistaken; Ma An Liang had made the great escape. He had escaped from life itself. For when we found him he was hanging from a rafter, and the cord with which he had hanged himself was the silver-and-yellow suicide cord which he himself had sent to Chang Pei Ying.

“I suspected it from the first,” said Hazard later. “You may remember I hinted it. As a matter of fact, the custom of the suicide cord went out with the Manchus, but to honest old Chang Pei Ying, as to most of these Shensi mandarins, even the facts of the revolution have hardly leaked and the old customs are still binding. Ma An Liang gambled on that and came near winning!”

“But the cord itself was genuine, wasn’t it, and under the government seal?”

I was lying at the moment on Chang Pei Ying’s own bed, not entirely recovered from the shock and the slight poisoning of the several hundred tiny wounds I’d received.

“Well, as to the last, it’s simple enough. You remember Chang Pei Ying expected a government courier with the tax requisitions, and the package he received was so similar in form that he didn’t know the difference till he had opened it. Ma An Liang knew it—it was a matter of routine—and it was easy enough for one with his following to have the government messenger waylaid, to melt off the government seal and substitute the cord for the papers, and to send it in by one of his own men dressed in the dead courier’s clothes. As to the genuineness of the cord, it’s a matter of conjecture, but I believe it did, at last, the work it was intended to do.”

“Meaning—”

“There have been a few Chinese mandarins,” said Hazard, “who have preferred to add dishonor to dishonor by substituting flight for self-inflicted death. I think Ma An Liang was one of them. He had probably kept the cord in hopes of using it in some such devil’s game as this we’ve thwarted.”

“Then that,” I said slowly, “was the meaning of what you said to him when you flung the cord over his head. ‘The judgment of
Tsi’an’
—of course, he would probably have gotten the cord from her, the old Empress Dowager. Well, he was a clever rascal.”

“Clever enough,” replied Hazard, “and for a while he furnished us with a perplexing mystery, but we’ve nothing to be proud of in this affair. To think that we didn’t understand from the beginning the mechanism of his mummery—invisible wires and hooks such as are used by every stage magician in tricks of levitation—and to see how they could be used to guard the image and to mark the faces of men brought before it for trial, and even to accomplish the seemingly impossible robbery!”

“Of course,” I said, rather wearily, “the canvas sacks of silver were first hooked by many of these lines, then drawn up to the window, cut open, and their contents removed through the bars by single sycees.

“Of course,” said Hazard.

The Wizardry of Fear

IT’S TRUE that in Shensi anything might happen—even that which did happen. There are certain other parts of China of which the same might be said, the vast, swarming, indefinite inertia to the east cutting them off completely from the world’s highway. The resistance of this human barrier is the more powerful because it is absolutely passive, like a morass. Indifferent, self-sufficient and inscrutable, the people vie in their attitude with their impossible roads, unrepaired for a thousand years, in heaping up discouragements for the traveler.

Behind this is a gray, dim land, weird, unknown and unknowing. Bordering Tibet there is a population of ten million who have never heard of the Great War. Not quite as isolated as this is Shensi, but the province has endured five thousand years without a post-office. The Pekingese speak of it as a foreign country. In this the wish possibly fathers the thought, for Shensi has long been a fermenting pot of trouble. Many times, great revolutions, social maelstroms have risen there, remaining unchecked and possibly unheard of by Peking, until perhaps, as has happened twice, they swept across the Empire and turned it upside down.

So in Shensi anything might be hidden—even the thing that Hazard and I indisputably found—and that in spite of the fact that civilization of a sort was ancient there when Romulus and Remus were being nursed by a wolf. And when Hazard, who is at once one of the most logical and imaginative of men, reminds me that the part of our experience that I deny would hardly be more remarkable in our day than was the use of the decimal system in Shensi three thousand years ago, I can hardly dispute it. And yet—