The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (22 page)

I laughed again. At that moment Hazard leaped in from the balcony. In the crook of his arms, pressed against his chest, he carried a great glass receptacle, like one of those huge retorts in which acids are sometimes kept. It was so heavy that he staggered with it. But, half-turning, he lifted it above his head with an enormous effort and flung it down the stairway.

IV

WHAT followed was a natural thing. It had nothing to do with Sadafuki’s wild imaginings—nothing. I admit with Sadafuki that the borderland of science is a shadowy one within which all inventions, from the flint ax to the flying machine, have lain. But it isn’t good to believe that borderland reaches farther than the limits of the physical world. In that last day when the stars shall fall crashing from the skies, there is that in man which will still hold him erect and unshaken among the ruins.

And until that day there will be no power on earth created of force that shall not fall with its creator.

The instant Hazard threw that peculiar weapon I was by his side, looking down the stairway. And so I saw my last of Sadafuki’s face.

From ferocious rage it had turned, at sight of that catapulted retort, into a living mask of terror. Then—it was not. It had disappeared. The missile struck him with the force of a cannon-ball and death took swift vengeance. He fell backward and two others fell with him—the two Chinamen who were moving forward at his command. They wriggled out from under the thing that had struck them; but he lay quivering, his arms outstretched, the shattered glass container lying with one jagged edge across his throat and pouring its reddish contents over him.

From that a fluid emerged with a boiling sound, a white vapor that was yet not like steam, for it was heavier than air, and spilled down the stairway.

I do not think that vapor reached the faces of the leading Chinese before they fled. I think they turned immediately at sight of their master’s death. It is true their shrieks were terror-filled, but it is also true that they were shot through with a great joy. And if they were wholly possessed by fear, why did the two white men, sole representatives after Sadafuki’s passing of the power of the Ko Lao Hui, fall before they reached the landing, punctured by a dozen bullets?

“He is dead. The Great One is dead.”

So the Chinese yelled as they ran; and through the sudden vagueness and turbulence that comes over my memory at this point, I recall yells from below answering them. I recall a great scampering and crashing of doors. I recall rushing with Hazard back to the store-room and fetching therefrom retort after retort of that liquid that seemed to me then so potent, and hurling them away from me. After the second trip there seemed from the silence no more Chinese left in the
dagoba,
so the rest of the containers we flung from the bridge. They smashed on the ground and added their gaseous product to the vapor that was already pouring out of every aperture in the first floor of the
dagoba.

It diffused through the air and, still hanging close to the ground, was borne by the wind up the valley.

Ahead of it, or enveloped in the front of the thin, white mist, ran the Chinese who had escaped from the
dagoba,
flinging their arms high, shrieking out:

“The Master is dead. The Great One is dead. The ocean-ghost children have killed the Master.”

HAZARD and I came back to the
dagoba,
got the now sobbing woman and, standing with her between us on the balcony, watched that madness and frenzy of flight, contagious even as Sadafuki had said, keep pace with the vapor, keep pace with the running and the shouting, as far as we could see up the valley. The men working in the fields flung down their tools, and the armed guards first stared stupidly at the confusion and then added their cries to the tumult and mingled with the mob.

They were like driftwood before a flood, a pale flood of immaterial mist. I do not know how long we watched them, nor what was said. Hazard has claimed that the last container of it was broken and that we had escaped even a whiff of it. It may be true. One says many things under excitement.

I know that at last the hum and rasping roar that came from the gunstock factory at the head of the valley died down. Then a thin, light smoke, reddened with licking tongues of flame, began to rise above its roof, and up the black and precipitous rocks, looking at that distance like scurrying ants, hundreds of figures swarmed.

And then we ran also.

There was a reason for this. If intuition hadn’t warned us, logic should have told us of our danger. For there was the burning plant at the base of the falls—a plant near which we should have conjectured the probable presence of explosives—there were the madly fleeing Chinese filled no doubt with hatred of their prison-house, and wild for its destruction; there was the dam over which the water tumbled and the great reservoir beyond.

We ran across the bridge and clambered up the rocks, dragging the woman after us. I don’t know whether there was hysteria in our flight. We had climbed perhaps a hundred yards, straight up the face of the cliff, when the valley was filled with a great booming, as if a hundred cannons had exploded.

We looked toward the burning factory, and it wasn’t there. Nothing was there. There was a great, jagged hole in the cliff behind it, a rift that extended far up, and then that was gone. It was obliterated by the falling water.

The dam had gone; the thousands of tons of water behind it was free. The sudden bursting forth of that pent-up energy was tremendous, indescribable. There seemed something angry and vindictive in that flood. It came on in a solid wall, twenty feet high, of boiling, bubbling wrath. On its surface were tossed like playthings the great timbers of the factory whose wheels it had turned so long. It swept away the village that had been the home of slaves with one sweeping gesture. It rushed down the valley, filling it from side to side, wiping away everything.

It reached the
dagoba,
swept it from its foundation, lifted it and flung it against the cliff with insensate rage. Thereafter for a while its turmoil increased as its pressure heaped up from behind and fought for the narrow outlet. Presently it subsided, but its old channel was gone, and the Hidden Valley, leveled like a floor, had become—and still remains, I believe—merely the widened bed of a swiftly rushing river.

HOW Hazard and I, hours afterward, descended from where we had watched this thing and found among the ruins of the spattered
dagoba
food to last us on our long journey through the mountains and enough silver sycees to give the woman a start toward a new life, and how we finally reached Sian-Fu, where we turned her who had been Sadafuki’s wife over to the hospitable missionaries who would keep her until an opportunity came to travel to the Coast and thence to the States, would make a pointless narrative. The story has been told of the destruction of Sadafuki’s kingdom.

Of the discovery he claimed to have made—that monstrous phantom of his brain—we learned nothing more. When the woman was fit for it, Hazard questioned her, but she would add nothing to what she had already told us.

“For the welfare of mankind”—so she justified her silence, and we didn’t press her.

Out of that and what she had said previously and Sadafuki’s few words in our first and only interview, Hazard has built a theory that, if true, would make this the most important exploit in our whole campaign against the Ko Lao Hui, not even excepting our final adventure against Koshinga himself. And of course he finds justification for his belief in the happenings of that last hour.

But I hold that Sadafuki’s power had within itself a flaw that in any case would soon have brought it toppling down. And it is certain that the vapor traveled no faster up the valley than the news of Sadafuki’s death. It was not fear that animated and enfrenzied the fleeing coolies, but the breaking of the chains of fear.

The Tablet of Shun

I SUPPOSE no one has known complete epicurean luxury until he has loitered through a Chinese dinner. I’m also quite sure that no Westerner, eager to be on a vital errand, has otherwise learned the full torture of enforced delay. If it was merely to tax my nerves that Ho Whan held me to his hospitality before taking me to Hazard, he succeeded admirably.

Now and then a ripple of uneasiness, of disappointed expectancy, seemed to break the surface of the mandarin’s Oriental phlegm, hinting to me that he had some other purpose. In any case I couldn’t escape without openly expressing my doubt that he was acting under instructions from Hazard, and to do that would probably destroy altogether my chance of getting to Hazard.

Since we had begun our search for Koshinga, head of the lawless and revolutionary Ko Lao Hui, Hazard and I had brothered each other in many perils and, I think, with some courage. From the moment of his broken appointment with me that afternoon at the Tea-House of the Many Winds, however, fear had held me by the throat. That fear had not been lessened a whit by the arrival, a few minutes later, of Ho Whan’s courier.

There were three reasons for this. We knew ourselves always in peril, marked for death by the Ko Lao Hui, and the break in Hazard’s plan was at least an indication that he had been overtaken. Furthermore, it was a definite rule of ours never to send word to each other through any one whom we hadn’t agreed was to be trusted.

Our first distrust of Ho Whan, acting governor of Shensi, had increased each of the four days we pursued the seemingly hopeless task he had insisted that we undertake—the recovery of a mysteriously important bronze tablet stolen from his
yamen.
So, from the moment I received it, I had been convinced that the purported message the courier bore, saying that Hazard needed me and that Ho Whan would take me to him, was but bait to lead me into a Ko Lao Hui trap.

The bait, however, I apparently swallowed without suspicion. If danger there was, Hazard—by the logic of his broken appointment—was probably already caught. If he still lived, he needed me, and I, at least, would have the advantage of walking into the trap open-eyed. I did what I believed Hazard would have done had our positions been reversed.

As a consequence, it was very small enjoyment I got out of the meal Ho Whan urged upon me under the pretext that the time fixed by Hazard for our meeting hadn’t yet arrived. I managed, I think, at least to match Ho Whan’s broken placidity and to go through the twenty-seven courses from seeds and nuts to bird’s-nest soup with an appearance of zest. I managed, too, to utilize the delay to analyze the situation still further. It was a process that gave me small comfort. I thought I saw how I could, before going any further, either confirm or dispel my belief in Ho Whan’s treachery.

When the last dish was gone and the last servant had left us, I put aside my eagerness to be on my way to Hazard and placidly lit the cigaret Ho Whan handed me. It seemed to me, though it was hard to read his worldly old face, that he regarded my changed attitude with some surprize and a little relief. The impression I had got during the meal, that he was expecting some one who didn’t come, still persisted.

He had no excuse to offer, however, and he made as if to get up.

“Now,” he said, “the
yang whan
will please come with me, as his honorable friend has desired.”

I pretended not to notice his movement.

“My friend has another desire,” I said, “of which I have thought while humbly eating food. It is a desire which I also share, for it is important that we soon leave your honorable city. As you know, we were about to depart when you asked our mean assistance concerning the tablet that has been stolen from your honorable safe.”

“I owe much to your condescension in remaining,” he bowed.

“Then you will aid us to complete our work and depart,” I suggested, “by explaining to us the importance of the tablet, that we may know where to look for the thief.”

It was a request we had made several times before but which he had always evaded. It was this evasion that had first made us suspect that he was playing a double game. Perhaps, Hazard had suggested, Ho Whan had his own reason for wanting to keep us in Sian-fu. It was true that our donkeys had been loaded to leave when Ho Whan’s runner had found us.

Ho Whan seemed to hesitate before answering.

“It is a secret of great age that you ask me. I have given you certain signs by which the tablet may be known. That is all I can tell you.”

I stretched myself with a pretense of weariness, blew several smoke rings and meditatively studied the sparsely bearded, flabby-cheeked face opposite me. It was inscrutable only as to his present thoughts, for life leaves its marks even on the features of a Chinese mandarin.

Ho Whan’s slant eyes were narrow and calculating; his thin lips were like a trap, and his high but receding forehead, arched nose and brutal jaw were the danger signs of a ruthless ambition—an ambition that hadn’t yet been fulfilled, for his present position was but a temporary one and would end with his chief’s return from Peking.

“Nevertheless, I must tell your Excellency this,” I said. “My companion and I have persuaded ourselves that it is necessary we have the information I ask. Without it, our mean wits are helpless and it is our intention humbly to withdraw from your business.”

Ho Whan’s face did not change, but his plump hands, resting lightly in the silken folds that half-concealed the lines of his rather gross body, stirred a little.

“It is a question that will receive my attention,” he replied smoothly. “Meanwhile, will you permit me obediently to lead you to your friend, as he has requested?”

“That will be unnecessary,” I asserted decisively, “unless you give me this information. Wheels turn and time passes. If we are to leave Sian-fu in the morning, there are certain things that must be done. My companion and I have agreed on this, and he will know where to find me.”

I awaited his answer in considerable suspense. It was the test I had conceived to discover his intentions—the corroboration of my suspicions. I could think of no reason he should now tell me a thing he had heretofore refused to tell, unless he were convinced that I would very shortly be past repeating it.