The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (21 page)

But our guide had turned to the door at the head of the stairway. To this door, which opened inward, was cleated a heavy wooden bar, secured at one end by a staple and padlock—the whole of which seemed to have recently been put into place. His yellow face immobile, his eyes expressionless, the Chinaman pulled from his tattered blouse a bundle of keys and fitted one of them to the lock.

The moment we saw those keys Hazard and I exchanged a swift glance. They were the same that we had seen half an hour before hanging on Sadafuki’s girdle. Whether the discovery was important or not, whether we could turn it to our advantage, it was impossible to know; but at least it appeared that Sadafuki, secure in his power, had done an injudicious thing. It was but natural to believe that the key which opened the lock Sadafuki had placed over the refuge of his recalcitrant wife would be kept in company with other important keys.

The door opened, and we entered. Immediately the door was shut and locked behind us, and we were face to face with the woman whom we had been sent to betray.

I do not know which was the most surprized. Hazard and I hadn’t known what to expect, but certainly we had not expected what we saw. I still think that not the least curious thing in the valley was that woman’s presence there. And still, on the other hand, it was only a phase of our modern world which, whatever else one may think of it, is fuller of interest, oddity and mystery than any age that has preceded it. From racial separateness we have passed to the melting-pot. This fact really underlay our whole experience; it accounts no more fully for Sadafuki’s education and for the white woman’s union with him, than for the existence of the Hidden Valley itself.

At sight of us the woman, who had watched the door open in dead silence, gasped in amazement.

I think that at one time she had been strikingly beautiful. Even now, in her middle age and with ten years of life with Sadafuki behind her, she was alive, vital and not at all unattractive. Her Chinese clothing of brocaded silk but emphasized the defiant erectness of her figure. In her dark, flushed face, her dilated eyes, the backward fling of her well-shaped head, there was still a suggestion of the wildness of nature that no doubt explained, as well as such things can be explained, the attraction Sadafuki had for her in the beginning.

“Hush!” I said. “We are friends.”

“What! Where did you—”

Her right hand had been half-way to her lips. As she slowly lowered it, I saw that it had contained a small bottle filled with some dark-colored liquid. On the floor at her feet was her little stock of husbanded food—brown corn-and-millet bread and uncooked rice. Evidently she was really prepared to die, either from poison or slow starvation, rather than yield herself as a subject for—

For what? I think that Hazard, whose imagination is inclined to outrun facts and in some cases to overleap them, already knew the magnitude of the threat conjured up from her by Sadafuki’s monstrous dream.

“We’re prisoners, too,” said Hazard swiftly. “Don’t be afraid; we’re white men—how could we be anything but friends? But—”

In three sentences, using a tone that couldn’t possibly carry through the door, Hazard told her of Sadafuki’s plan to seize her.

As he did so, I thought I saw signs of an approaching collapse on her part, of overstrained nerves breaking at last. Her face grew pale and her bosom heaved; whether she was on the point of fainting or sobbing I couldn’t tell, but either would have been very awkward, so I put a bit of sharpness into my voice.

“We’ve got to have your help, if we’re to help you escape. Don’t think you’re out of it yet. We’ve no arms; we’re as helpless as you, but there must be a chance with your knowledge of the place.”

“There’s always a chance,” said Hazard, “but you’ve got to do some acting right now. Remember, you mustn’t seem to trust us. Warn us in a loud voice to keep away.”

This, of course, was for the benefit of the man in the hall and any other possible listener. Thereafter, the dialogue was conducted in a peculiar dual-toned fashion, but most of what we wanted to know the woman was able to tell us openly, in a seeming effort to win our sympathy, the while, pretending not to be sure of us, she kept us at a distance. The necessity of keeping her mind on the game seemed to restore her composure. She acted her part admirably, as most women are capable of doing under stress.

But that unfortunately left the conversation largely under her control. Hazard and I, menially computing the time it would take for that ambiguously constituted party we’d seen approaching to arrive at the
dagoba,
were, of course, anxious to get at more essential facts; but one of the first things she insisted on explaining was her presence in this place. Under any other circumstances that would have been extremely interesting.

WHEN she had married Sadafuki some ten years before, she said, he had been very different than he was now—a statement not hard to credit. Indeed, he had been at that time an underpaid professor of physics in a certain Western university, rather distinguished than otherwise in that small college town by his mixture of bloods. But opportunity in the shape of a trust fund had come to him; he had stolen, been found out and had fled to China. There, four years ago, the Ko Lao Hui had recruited him, offering him, I suppose, one of the kingdoms of the world. His rise in their councils had been as rapid as his moral descent. Three years ago he had been given the mastery of this valley. The woman had come with him even here, as women will, and from that day till the present she’d never seen the face of one of her own race.

“But he was kind to me,” she justified him, “till, till—”

“Until he went mad,” I said roughly, sensing another threatened breakdown, “and you with him, seemingly, considering what you’re most afraid of. That cursed discovery of his—sheer insanity, as one can tell by the way he talks about it.”

“Mad!” she cried. “I would have been mad. It was that I was afraid of. I’d rather die. Did he tell you he got it—how he drove the Chinese into paroxysm of terror and then segregated the—the contagion? Did he—”

“Nonsense!” I interrupted. “Control yourself and tell us something that’ll help us to get out of this infernal place.”

At that she did steady somewhat, and gave us a fairly good idea of an organization as perfect, I suppose, as was ever conceived. It was really the work of a genius in fear-compelled discipline—not Sadafuki but the man who had hired him, Koshinga, head of the Ko Lao Hui. And it seemed to confirm our impression that the valley was as proof against escape as a close-meshed net.

Mainly it was a system of guard and counterguard, of playing men against each other in incessant watchfulness. Thus was explained the two lines of sentries who surrounded the place. These were never permitted to intermingle. Guarding the workmen, they were no less guards upon each other; day and night they paced their posts in fear of each other, watching each other for neglect of duty. The punishment for neglect of duty was death; the punishment for not reporting such neglect was also death, but preceded by torture. All chance of affiliation or conspiracy was destroyed by separate housing. Thus slaves guarded slaves; there could be imagined no more perfect autocracy.

And the object of it all, she told us, the purpose for which men were brought to this valley never to leave it again till they died, was the manufacture of wooden rifle stocks.

“In three years there hasn’t been an escape,” she said hopelessly. “At first there were many attempts.”

“But there’s always a vulnerable point,” cried Hazard characteristically. “There’s always a way out. Now this discovery of his—”

“Listen!” I interrupted.

For perhaps a minute I’d been hearing something that interested me. I had, however, been weak enough to do my hearing the injustice of discrediting it, for if it were true that there were English speaking voices coming faintly up through the silent floors of the
dagoba,
then they could hardly be other than the voices of the men we feared.

Hazard, with his mind on that chimerical discovery, glanced at me a little impatiently, but his own ears caught the sound. His voice and eyes turned cold as chilled steel.

“Do you think it’s—” he began.

“I’m afraid so.”

“Then we’re— Well!”

His first words expressed the beginning of despair; his last word was a reaffirmation of supremacy over circumstances. There are men who, carrying their fight to the grave with them, will in this world at least never know defeat. I’ve never admired Hazard more than at the moment.

But the next moment I was forced to conclude that his courage was greater than his judgment, for he turned to the woman again and pursued his senseless inquiry.

“What is it? What does he think it is—that invention?”

“Why, it’s—it’s fear!” she faltered, staring at my disturbed face with evidently increased alarm.

“Fear!” repeated Hazard with a curious light on his face.

“Fear—a contagion! What do you—”

But then came a sound that shook even him to the soul, so that his question went uncompleted. It was a hoarse, inarticulate, animal-like cry, the cry of a man in rage, the voice of Sadafuki.

“My ——, Hazard!” I began protestingly. “Let’s—”

But Hazard turned swiftly to the woman again.

“What
is it? Liquid, gas, or—”

“It’s—it’s both.”

“Where is it, then? Never mind that noise. Answer me!”

“It’s—it’s in the cave—at the end of the bridge.”

There were feet pounding up the stairs. There was another voice than Sadafuki’s—a voice that I well remembered.

“Those other papers prove it—that they’re imposters. Show them to us; there are signs they don’t know. We’ll make them admit—”

I never knew the truth of those other papers; probably they were papers that Hazard and I had failed to take from them, bearing the names we’d stolen.

Then again came Sadafuki’s roar. No doubt he was already convinced of our imposture.

“Hold them, Partridge—if you can—for a minute!”

That moment Hazard rasped those words at me tensely, he had leaped upon the woman and dragged her toward the door. Startled as I was by this unexpected action, she was infinitely more startled, believing, I suppose, that our talk of friendliness had really been a ruse and that she was to be handed over to Sadafuki. She shrieked wildly. This shriek and the sound of the struggle supplemented—as Hazard had intended they should—the words in Shensian that he called through the door.

“Open quickly! We have her!” The sentry had his orders and, machine that he was, he obeyed them in spite of the trouble below. The key went into the lock fumblingly, but he turned it at last, and pulled back the bar.

Instantly Hazard dragged the door open and leaped out upon him. I caught the woman as Hazard released her, put her back of me and started to follow. But Hazard had gripped the sentry about the waist, pinning his arms to his side, and so he held him for a moment, motionless. Then Hazard lifted him bodily, flung him headlong down the stairs and leaped through the outer door upon the balcony and from the balcony to the bridge. The angle of the bridge was such that in three steps he was out of my sight.

OF COURSE, in another man, Hazard’s action would have suggested flight. In his case I had no thought of desertion; rather I was filled with a certain unreasonable hope, even when I looked down the stairway and saw Sadafuki, his evil face a picture of mad, befooled egoism, running up the bottom steps. I recalled that Hazard was never a man to act blindly, without a plan; habitually he thought ahead, even in the heat of conflict. It was only that thought that kept me from utter despair and from flinging myself down upon Sadafuki and dying with my hands gripping his throat.

Without realizing I had picked if up, I found myself flinging away from me an earthen pot of dwarfed shrubbery that had decorated the landing. It struck Sadafuki on the chest and staggered him, but he came on. Behind him were the two white men whose arrival had destroyed our pretenses, behind them Sadafuki’s bodyguard, gibbering wildly, waving their revolvers, frenzied with their master’s frenzy, fearfully furious to do his will. One of them discharged his pistol, and the bullet whistled past my shoulder.

I sprang back into the room I’d just left. With a cry that I suppose was half delirious, I perceived the heavy bar that had held the door. For a moment at least I could carry out Hazard’s injunction to hold the rush. I tore the bar out and, clutching it near the end like a baseball player, swung it out across the head of the stairway.

“I’ll kill the first man up,” I shouted in English.

The rush checked itself, as a body loses momentum. It came on and stopped. At that moment Sadafuki proved himself the true tyrant; he stopped and bellowed an order to those below to advance and seize me.

There was, of course, no doubt as to their obedience. Then, they would have gone into flames at his command; they would have thrown themselves upon their own knives; they would have killed their own brothers. Such was his power at that moment. I suppose obedience, fear-compelled at first, had grown into an instinctive thing, habitual, a matter of reaction to his commands.

And that power doomed me, of course. I could kill one or two, but in the end they would get me. I would be overborne and done for without even a chance at Sadafuki whom I hated then with a berserker rage. It was very hard to keep from making a sally, but Hazard had ordered me to hold them.

Hazard! Where was Hazard?

One’s thinking processes do not dally at moments like these. All of a sudden I laughed harshly. I remembered Hazard’s credulous interest in Sadafuki’s nightmare talk of empire. I remembered that in Hazard’s hand, as he fled, was Sadafuki’s keys, snatched from the grip of his servant. I remembered that at the other end of the bridge across which Hazard had run was the door to the underground chamber in which the woman had said was stored—what?

“Fear!” she had said.

Had Hazard’s mind also succumbed to that monstrous folly?

“Altogether ignoring those other contagions—the contagion of fear—power to turn whole peoples into gibbering cowards—” Fragments of Sadafuki’s talk, and the woman’s flitted through my brain.