The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (25 page)

Save that Hazard had pronounced it impossible, I was still in the dark as to what he wanted. I glanced inquiringly at Hazard.

“I think your coming was quite convenient after all,” said Hazard in his even, analytical voice. “You know my belief that there’s a way out of any predicament. It’s at least a rule to which there can be but one exception in any man’s life, and that makes it a sounder rule than most. Now in this case, the way Koshinga has in his mind for us to escape torture is blocked, but there must be another way.”

Knowing Hazard, I interpreted his speech as a carefully veiled hint to hold myself in readiness for—what? I didn’t know, couldn’t imagine, but it was with slightly revived hope and increased alertness that I turned to Koshinga.

“What is it you want?” I asked directly.

“I command,” he replied, “that you write on a piece of paper the names of the men that have employed you to work against me. Your companion will do the same; it is for that his hands have been left free. If these names are the same on both your papers, I will know they are the true ones, and by pressing harder on this button—” he indicated the button at his left hand—“I will give your companion the boon of the swift death of the falling weight—after him, you.”

“And if we tell you there are no such persons?”

“Your companion has already said so and I know he has lied. If you both continue to lie, you will die by the cutting knives which are driven by the same weight.”

“But it is the truth,” said Hazard.

It was the truth, but of course I knew he didn’t expect to make Koshinga believe it. To every one the world is a sort of mirror in which he sees nothing that isn’t in himself. It would have been useless to tell Koshinga that in fighting him we were actuated by anything but self-interest. Of course, in a way, it was self-interest—we felt a natural zest in the bigness and strangeness of the adventure—but it is a fact that our principal motive was a real friendship for the Chinese race and a firm conviction that Koshinga, self-styled patriot though he was, was his own country’s most dangerous enemy.

“You will speak differently in half an hour,” said Koshinga, glancing at that thing coming down upon Hazard’s shoulders.

“Perhaps,” said Hazard, “yet—”

HE GAVE me one sharp, spurring look that riveted my attention, then glanced past me at Ho Whan and back at Koshinga.

“Your servant, Ho Whan, planned things well,” he said; “too well, in fact. Maybe the trick he used to hold my friend and me in Sian-fu was a little too clever. Simpler methods usually work better, as you should know.”

“What do you mean?” asked Koshinga, his heavy, monotonous and indescribably soulless voice rising a little with its first touch of anger.

“Why, I’m coming back to the tablet that’s so valuable. You haven’t placed your hands on it yet. What if we had actually succeeded in the task Ho Whan set for us? What if we actually did succeed, and Ho Whan has lied to you?”

That was a most astonishing supposition for three of us. Koshinga’s face, that I would have given so much to see, was hidden behind his black mask, and Ho Whan was out of my sight entirely, but the muzzle of his revolver jerked nervously, and Koshinga’s whole huge body seemed to tense. As for me, a sort of tingling perplexity shot through every nerve. What could Hazard’s suggestion mean?

“Ho Whan has the tablet,” replied Koshinga harshly, “for he knows that no man lies to me and lives.”

“Nevertheless—” began Hazard confidently; then, master of his voice as he was always of his every faculty, he checked himself and changed to a tone of simple exposition.

“It’s plain to me,” he went on, “how valuable the tablet would be to you. There’s no race so swayed by symbols as the Chinese; consider their thousands of temples and countless images. And there’s no race so swayed by reverence for the past. Consider, then, a symbol that’s been handed down from the time of Shun and that bears with it Shun’s authority for rulership over four hundred million people—an authority, too, that’s been sanctioned by four thousand years of custom. What punishment would be too great for the man who held possession of that tablet for you—and who lost it through carelessness?”

During this speech the atmosphere of the little room had become very tense. Koshinga’s small, wide-set eyes were now glittering with rage as if actual lightnings were about to dart from them. I couldn’t understand Hazard’s motive. Why increase Koshinga’s anger and Ho Whan’s venom against us by a half-accusation that couldn’t be proved?

“He who rules will not consider what the
yangyen
says!” cried Ho Whan, a great fear in his voice. “Shen Yun has the tablet and will be here with it. It was my duty to bring this man; his to bring the tablet.”

“Should he not be here by now?” asked Hazard evenly. “Should he not, in fact, have come with you?”

The thrust seemed to have force, for I heard Ho Whan catch his breath. Evidently he was by no means sure of himself; in fact he was terrified, and when I remembered his nervousness in the
yamen,
his apparent expectancy of some one who hadn’t come, my heart leaped with a half-realization of the situation. What if he had lost the tablet? What if—

Koshinga, still glowering at Hazard, was speaking with a forced resumption of calmness.

“If the tablet is not forthcoming, Koshinga will know whom to hold responsible. Now I have this to say to you. There is the slow torture and the swift death. You will choose. It does not matter, for in the end you will do as I say. There is no man who can hold out against the slow torture.”

“I’ve said we have nothing to tell,” replied Hazard steadily. “We, like yourself, have no masters. You will gain nothing by all this but the knowledge of a faithless servant.”

He couldn’t, it seemed, stay away from that point.

“The foreign devil may have his own reason for prolonging the talk,” suggested Ho Whan in Shensian.

“Why should I?” asked Hazard sharply, shooting a glance at me. “Now, this tablet,” he went on; “you will never possess it.”

Why, I wondered, the peculiar inflection on the word “this”? Could it be— Ah, I had his message.

“Because,” continued Hazard slowly, thrusting both hands inside the bosom of his loose Chinese robe, “I have it here. And I have—”

His hands reappeared and in the right one he held the tablet that had been described to us—the tablet of Shun! And in his left.

“Devil!” Koshinga’s great voice snarled hoarsely.

From Ho Whan behind me came a terrible cry.

Hazard had swiftly lifted the pint bottle he held in his left hand to his mouth, pulled the cork with his teeth and, as he spat it out, concluded his sentence.

“Nitric acid, which will destroy it.”

As he started to pour the fuming, colorless liquid over the face of the tablet, Ho Whan, forgetting everything in his eagerness to save that tablet and so avert Koshinga’s anger, leaped for Hazard, as Hazard had hoped he would.

By the time he came in front of me, I had pulled my revolver out of my gown and, leveling it, I shot him dead.

IV

I TURNED my gun upon Koshinga. I started to pull the trigger but stopped.

It wasn’t because he waited the bullet in seeming passivity, watching me closely with his basilisk eyes. The natural instinct against shooting a man who is seemingly both helpless and unafraid would have held me only a moment, long enough to remember the magnitude of the evil I could end with one twitch of my finger.

The instant that realization came, I perceived something else, too, something that explained Koshinga’s composure. The moment Ho Whan had leaped for Hazard and died, Koshinga’s left hand had lifted sharply. His index finger now rested on the black button which projected from the wall—the button controlling the infernal machine which threatened Hazard’s life.

What was it Koshinga had said? “—by pressing on this button—the swift death by the falling weight.”

Hazard looked up from his work of obliterating with the whitely fuming acid the already time-worn and almost undecipherable inscriptions on the face of the tablet. He saw me hesitate, saw the reason for it, and he cried out—

“Shoot, Partridge, in Heaven’s name!”

“You can not shoot me,” said Koshinga calmly.

“Never mind me, Partridge!” cried Hazard in such excitement as I’d never seen him before. “Shoot and then finish this job for me—destroy this Tablet of Shun!”

“You can not shoot me,” Koshinga repeated in his icy voice. “You know that your shot will kill your friend, that with the last flicker of my will I would press this button and send the knives and the weight behind the knives down upon him. So, slave of your emotions and of a worn-out creed—”

“He’s not a man, but a devil incarnate! Hazard cried. “Shoot him while you’ve a chance. Do as you’d want me to do if we could change places. Haven’t both of us chanced our lives a dozen times—”

I don’t remember all Hazard said in his wild urging that I should do what I suppose I should have done. Cold-bloodedly and for the larger good, there’s no doubt I should have shot Koshinga and let Hazard die. There was no estimating Koshinga’s power for evil in the world—Koshinga with his fiendishly clever brain and his millions of followers. After all, if there were nothing but cold logic in the world, if all the warm and unreasoning passions of humanity were wiped out, how long would humanity itself endure?

Hazard was my friend. I edged toward him, keeping my gun upon Koshinga. With my left hand I reached into a side pocket of my gown for my pocket-knife. It surprized me that Koshinga offered no objection to my movements.

“Poor fool!” he scoffed. “It is your sentimentality that dooms you to mediocrity—you and your class, while I—”

There was a sort of prescient triumph in his voice now, as if he foresaw not only escape, but the kingdoms of the world at his feet. Fascinated, I stopped and watched him narrowly. He had raised his right hand and it was now on the knob of the wooden door in the wall.

Very slowly, with all the dignity of confident deliberation, he drew the door open, shifted his hold to the inner knob and, still keeping his finger on the fatal button, began to back through the opening.

Beyond that door I could see the black beginnings of an earth-walled passage—a passage that led riverward. Wondering a little, I remembered the fifteen steps by which we had come down to this place, remembered that we were far below the surface of the river. How was it Koshinga meant to escape?

“While I—” his voice rang out in a tone of utter conviction—“I will rule the world.”

His finger had left the button but was still too close to it for me to chance a shot. His body was already half-shielded behind the door.

Hazard still frantically urged me to fire, and by my own desire to end that embodiment of all evil, I understood his eagerness, surpassing even his instinct to live. I felt however that Koshinga would still find that button even in a last convulsion. Therefore I could not shoot. And then—he was gone.

He had slipped behind the door like a shadow. As the door jammed shut, my bullet sent splinters flying from it.

Flinging Hazard my knife, I sprang for the door, but midway I heard a bar jammed into place on the other side of it. I caught the knob and pulled back on it with all my weight, but the door budged no more than would the wall itself have budged.

Wildly I looked around for a piece of iron, a heavy rock—anything with which to break it down, but I saw only that Hazard was swiftly cutting himself loose. Then I turned to the door again for I heard a sound that bewildered me.

Beyond that door had suddenly begun a mighty rushing of water, a great gurgling and bubbling as of air caught and escaping. A rushing, gurgling and bubbling that died away almost as soon as it had begun—died away and ended with the surging impact of water against the inner side of the door.

It began at the bottom of the door and rose swiftly to the top. Clearly the passageway beyond was filled with water. Clearly Koshinga was drowned. I cried out something to that effect.

“Drowned, you say?” came Hazard’s calm voice close behind me. “Drowned, you think?”

“Well, what then?” I demanded, turning upon him sharply.

“This enemy of ours will be hard to handle,” said Hazard gravely. “I think he must always plan to hold his finger on the button of power and ever keep a safe escape behind him. We must remember that when we encounter him again.”

“But—” I began uncertainly.

“Don’t you understand? The surest of escapes. A short passageway with a watertight door at the other end, which, when he opened it, let the river in and let Koshinga out. By now he has come to the surface where, no doubt, a junk is waiting for him. He thought he had us but he took no chances when he brought us here.”

“Then we can do nothing,” I said despondently.

“Nothing but get away, which shouldn’t be difficult. But with Ho Whan dead at our hands and Koshinga well able through his agents to raise the authorities against us, Sian-fu will hardly be healthy for us for some time.”

WE MOUNTED the steps, climbed the wall of the ornamental garden to the street and, within an hour, were leaving Sian-fu behind us. So hurried was our departure that it was not until we were trudging behind our donkeys along a narrow road worn deep by the traffic of ages, between fields fertile as in the days of Confucius, that I remembered there was one thing in our adventure that remained unexplained.

“But the tablet?” I cried suddenly. “It was really your possession of the tablet that saved us. How in the name of wonders did you happen to have it?”

“Very simple,” replied Hazard. “When I left you this morning I went to see Shen Yun, the fast one. As you remember, we suspected Ho Whan and him of playing much the same game that they did play. I had discovered that Shen Yun was about to be seized for debt, so I offered him a thousand
taels
for information concerning the tablet. It turned out that he had it and he gave it to me. He intended to fly to the coast, and I hope for his health’s sake he’s well on the way.”

“And I think that also explains,” I said slowly, “how you came to have that very convenient bottle of acid.”