The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (24 page)

VERY soon we had passed from the business section into the quieter but very narrow and crooked residence streets bordered by one-story, mud-walled houses placed close together. Finally we came to that gate in the north wall just to the east of the junction with it of the wall which divides the old-time Manchu and Mohammedan cities. Here a tinkling caravan of camels, sponge-footed and sprawling of gait, helped congest the traffic. By dint of much jostling and shouting, our coolies gained on the mass of outgoing vehicles, and at last we were through the gate and in the northern suburb.

There was a short stretch through a district of upper-class residences with large courtyards and green trees above which rose the curled roofs of yellow-tiled temples, pagodas and a distant tower or so. I knew we hadn’t much farther to go, for just ahead of us was the Ching River dotted by the curious brown sails of junks and larger
kwadses
flapping like tattered window-blinds.

It was before a high-arched gate in a wall paralleling that river that Ho Whan’s rickshaw finally stopped.

Ho Whan was already on the ground when my coolie drew up, and as I climbed out of my rickshaw he gave me his hand.

“It is here your exalted friend awaits your honorable coming,” he said.

His courtesy was perfect—so perfect that I shivered a little. However, I tried to match it, and presently we had passed a kowtowing gatekeeper and went into a well-kept outer compound with a floor of pounded clay about which were set many vases of well-kept shrubs and flowers. Another gate led us into a second compound; then we passed through several dwelling-rooms in the rear, the walls of which were hung with scrolls containing drawings of landscapes and the mottoes of ancient sages. Everywhere were rather stupid-looking servants whose abject deference to him convinced me that Ho Whan was a frequent visitor here.

I could have done well without some of Ho Whan’s courtesy. Particularly I could have dispensed with his insistence that I, being his guest, should precede him through the long corridor behind the dwelling-rooms. I couldn’t afford, however, to betray my distrust of him by disputing the rules of ceremony—not yet, at least. With a slight chill at my heart and with my right hand instinctively hitching toward the revolver that still lay hidden in the bosom of my gown, I went ahead.

We came out upon a compound at the rear of the residence—an ornamental garden, the farther wall of which abutted upon the river embankment. It was a place of well trimmed grass, filled with flower beds, fantastic arbors and vines trained over covered passages. At the rear of this garden, close to the wall, was a small red temple with wonderfully scrolled cornices and roof. The whole effect was beautiful and I forced an admiring exclamation.

Ho Whan bowed acknowledgment, but I saw that his face had gone grim and that he was keeping his right hand in a pocket of his gown. He seemed to grip something which was concealed by the folds of the silk. We walked side by side to the door of the temple, but here he again paused and waited for me to go ahead of him.

It was here I should have done what I had planned to do—dispose of him as silently as possible and continue alone. I felt sure I was now very near whatever awaited me, but I hesitated until we were inside the temple and out of observation—which is to say I waited too long.

Ho Whan outguessed me. As I entered the door, coming face to face with a meditative Buddha on a low wooden pedestal, I felt what could only be the muzzle of a pistol pressed against my spine.

“Behind Sakayamuni (Buddha of the Past) you will find steps leading downward,” said Ho Whan in a purring voice from which all pretense of friendship had suddenly departed.

It was unlucky that he should have divined the exact moment at which I meant to act, but now I had no choice other than to obey him. Pretending not to feel the pressure on my back, I rounded the clay image sacred to the precious past and, with some foreboding as to the still more precious future, found the steps he had indicated. Ordinarily there was a trap door over them but this was now flung back. I started down the steps which extended backward under the Buddha.

Ho Whan kept close behind me. I counted the steps as we descended; there were fifteen of them. I realized that we must be almost as many feet under the river surface. At the bottom, in the pitch dark, I stood puzzled, but Ho Whan reached past me and opened a door.

“I have said I would lead you to your friend,” he reminded me with a touch of derision, “also that your friend needed you.”

As the door swung open, I called through it into the well lighted room:

“Hazard! Oh, Hazard!”

Hazard’s voice, calm and quite unanxious, came from the room like an echo:

“Partridge! Is it you?”

I stepped forward into the chamber, which was a small one, and upon the rock walls of which many candles were bracketed. My eyes flashed in the direction from which Hazard’s voice had come, and for a moment I saw nothing but him.

He was bound by stout cords around his trunk and hips to the back of an armless, Chinese chair which stood against the wall to my right. He sat erect and in an easy pose, his slender, well kept hands resting lightly near his knees, his close-cropped, student’s head flung back, and an expression of little more than thoughtful interest on his youthful, smooth-shaven and unsophisticated-looking face.

Over his head was something that puzzled me—something like a rectangular envelope of sheet iron from the lower end of which two sharp-edged things like headsmen’s axes projected downward at about the width of a man’s shoulders apart. I’d just seen this when a slow, heavy voice interrupted me in English:

“You are welcome.”

I turned in a flash, and as my eyes met two others that gleamed across the room at me through slits in a black mask, a sudden shock tingled through my body from head to foot. I knew it was Koshinga, and yet there was nothing of him visible but those coldly malicious eyes. Otherwise, he was merely a huge figure draped in black, a color which blended into the dark wall against which he stood, making his stature seem that of a giant.

Sometimes high excitement makes for detailed clarity of observation. Instantly I saw that just to Koshinga’s right there was a wooden frame set in the wall, and in that frame a door, and that just to his left a small black button projected from the stone.

He bowed and spoke again. There was something terrifying in the slow, mocking movement and the powerful, passionless voice.

“I had been telling your friend that you would come,” he said.

III

“FOOLS,” said Koshinga, “to attempt to balk me. Mere helpless flies that might have sported in the sunlight if you had not conceived the idea of blocking the wheels of destiny. But even flies may become troublesome. You yourselves forced me to turn my attention to you.”

“Thank you!” I said with an attempt at irony.

Near-god though he might be to millions his calm assumption of infinite superiority was decidedly irritating. There was no denying, however, that he had us down and done for; it wasn’t a moment for anger but for quick counsel and action, if action were possible, and I tore my half-fascinated eyes away from Koshinga and turned to Hazard.

Hazard’s calmness really meant nothing; I couldn’t imagine him otherwise, whatever our plight. I knew, nevertheless, that my jeopardized life counted for at least as much with him as his own, so it was hopeful that he’d showed no regret at sight of me. It seemed to me, as our eyes met, that he flung me a reassuring look.

“I’m sorry, Partridge,” he said, but without emotion. “Don’t trouble explaining; I know how you came here. I figured you’d come. As for me, I was drugged in our own house with my own food—”

“—prepared by your own hands,” completed Koshinga.

I imagined him smiling sardonically behind his mask.

“But,” he went on, “you did not notice that each of your eggs was pin-pricked. If you had not known something I want to know, I would have so impregnated your body with poison that it would have killed the scavenger worm.”

“That’s very probable,” agreed Hazard easily. “Well, Partridge, as I was saying, I guessed they would trap you. If I had known where to find you when I discovered Ho Whan’s connection with the Ko Lao Hui, we might have missed all this.”

I felt the muzzle of Ho Whan’s revolver suddenly jammed harder against my back. It was my first intimation that the double-dealing mandarin understood English, but it was an intimation of something else, too. Evidently the knowledge that his duplicity toward us had been discovered even before Hazard had been drugged and bound both startled and alarmed Ho Whan.

I wondered what object Hazard had in bringing this fact out. There were few things he did without reason, this imperturbable friend of mine. But just then I happened to glance again toward the curious contrivance that projected downward from the ceiling above Hazard’s head, and everything else was driven out of my mind by a really horrible discovery.

The two sharp-edged, ax-like things that jutted out from the sheet-iron sleeve had moved perceptibly downward. Indeed, they were moving now, creeping very slowly but smoothly and steadily out of their sheath. The lower cutting edges were about three feet above Hazard’s shoulders which I figured they would reach in about half an hour. Plainly the thing was an instrument of torture and death as devilish as even the Asiatic—who isn’t so much cruel as dull-nerved, and hence incapable of understanding acute suffering—has ever invented.

I really hadn’t the excuse of the unexpected, for some sort of torture was quite in the cards as I’d read them, but there was something so relentless in the slow downward creeping of those brutal tools that I suppose I changed color. Anyway, Hazard recalled my attention by laughing lightly.

“Eastern ways, Eastern manners!” he explained. “It’s not a cheerful thing to sit under, I’ll admit. Koshinga assures me those knives can be adjusted, much as a butcher’s bacon-slicer.

“I go first and then you. That is, unless we’ll tell Koshinga something he wants to know—something concerning which there’s nothing to tell. A pleasant prospect, but Koshinga has mercifully been taking my mind off it,” he went on fluently, “by telling me the story of the infernal tablet that got us, in a way, into this mess. Have you heard it yet?”

It wasn’t like Hazard to thus deftly take the conversation under his control. Usually he let me do most of the talking. I wondered at what he could be driving, or was I wrong in supposing he had any plan at all? The thought came to me that he might be merely trying to distract his mind from the inevitable, but I rejected that suspicion instantly. Quick-witted and indomitable, Hazard would never despair, nor would I, while he lived.

“I got the story from Ho Whan before coming here,” I replied.

“I suppose there’s a chance that the two versions are the same,” Hazard sneered, as if he disbelieved it.

I thought they very probably were, and the next instant Koshinga expressed my reason for so thinking.

“Of what use,” he inquired coldly, “is it to lie to those who are about to die? The tablet is the tablet of Shun, maker and namer of kings, and it will be worth to me a million soldiers. Has my servant brought it with him?” he asked Ho Whan in Shensian.

Ho Whan stirred behind me, the muzzle of his gun shifting uncomfortably in the folds of my gown, and it seemed to me there was a slight faltering in his voice as he replied:

“Your humble slave thought it wisest to leave the honorable tablet in the hands of Shen Yun, who, as you know, is one of us and who will soon be here. I myself must deal with this
tu fei
(earth evil)—” he prodded me sharply—“who might have been dangerous.”

“It is well,” replied Koshinga. “You have proved yourself one who obeys intelligently and worthy of greater tasks than the capture of two
yangyen
(goatmen). I asked only that you detain them in Sian-fu till I arrived; you yourself devised the means. You shall be rewarded.”

“He who rules is kind to his servant,” replied Ho Whan.

I reflected that Ho Whan had indeed behaved rather cleverly. Not only had he held us for Koshinga but, by employing us to search for the tablet, he had pretty well destroyed the possibility that he would later be suspected as the thief. Hazard and I had by now some little reputation in western China among the official class, and it would hardly be supposed that a guilty man would hire us to detect his own guilt. On the other hand, our movements had accustomedly been so erratic that one more mysterious disappearance would hardly be noticed, which is to say that Ho Whan stood in no danger of being accused of our death.

IT WAS very difficult even to imagine a way of escape from this death—so difficult that I gave it up and set my wits to contriving escape from the fiendish instrument of torture, which really was but a mechanical variation of
singhchi
(lingering death), the means long used by the Manchus for extracting information and misinformation from prisoners.

For myself, this was simple. I had the means of self-destruction inside my gown. Rather, I had the means of forcing Ho Whan to shoot me, which I knew he would do instantly if I moved for my gun. That, in a way, would be a cowardly desertion; I would leave Hazard to suffer alone. On the other hand, if there was a diversion of some sort, if I could get free from the deadly contact of Ho Whan’s revolver for but an instant— I racked my brain in vain to conceive a way.

While I was thus desperately breaking my hopes against the wall of impossibility, Koshinga amused himself by jeering venomously at me for allowing myself to be trapped as I had been. It seemed he had felt sure I’d suspect Hazard’s peril and had deliberately played upon what he called the “weak sentimentality of friendship.” I suppose it was only natural that he should hate all sentiments other than that of self-seeking in the same proportion that he had renounced them.

“Yet,” he went on, “I have it in my mind to give you both a merciful death. Yes, I will promise it if you will do as I have commanded.”