The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (26 page)

“Certainly,” replied Hazard. “Shen Yun also told me the story of the tablet, and I intended to destroy it as soon as you’d seen it. The acid method struck me as the simplest, and I managed to get some at the Mission School where they use it in teaching the process of making aniline dyes. Under the circumstances, it was only natural I’d keep both tablet and bottle hidden inside my gown. It’s not so remarkable, considering the unintelligent membership of the Ko Lao Hui and their one rule of implicit obedience, that those who drugged me and carried me to Koshinga discovered neither. Koshinga had given them no orders to search me, and they didn’t.”

“Well,” I reflected, “though we’re in flight, we’re hardly losers. If Koshinga escaped us, so did we escape him and he lost in Ho Whan a valuable agent. Then there’s the tablet—”

“The tablet of Shun,” said Hazard meditatively. “In whatever hands it happened to fall it was an anchor cast too far into the past. That’s why I was going to destroy it—it isn’t good for men to be governed by their ancestors. Yes, it’s well for New China that the tablet of Shun is gone.”

Ghost-Ruled

THERE still remain a few journeys to be made on this round earth where the traveler seems to pass not only through space but through time as well. All the way southwest from Shensi to the southern edge of that twisted and tormented mountain country where the Lolos rule and the Yang-tse has its mysterious beginning, Hazard and I had the impression of returning to the Middle Ages. It’s true that we kept at a safe distance from the Lolo country itself, and also true that just then there was supposed to be peace between that hard-bitten race and the more pacific Chinese. But the fear of the Lolos was in the air; the talk of the Yunnan villages was all of their slaving forays, and every now and then we encountered bands of their free-riding warriors.

It was queer, in this twentieth century, to find a people whose whole disposition was reflected in these warrior bands—a people who, despising agriculture and all occupation save that of arms, lived wholly by the sweat of a captive population.
Nzemos,
nobles, serfs and slaves—such, we learned, were the four rigid castes of Lolo society, solving handily the Lolo economic problem. The latter two classes were, of course, made up of captured Chinese. All slaves became serfs after three generations of good behavior, but, in spite of that politic arrangement, it seemed that this captive population suicided rapidly and was unreasonably disinclined to reproduce its kind, showing that preference for death over slavery which has been one of the mainsprings of human action since the beginning of time.

Hence, of course, the dreaded slaving forays; hence the fact that the Lolos were willing to pay much good gold, which they dug up somewhere in their forbidden mountains, for the delivery of Chinese children. But the modern Chinese, from selling their offspring, had passed to defending them and themselves savagely, and Hazard and I half-circled Lololand without discovering even an indication of planned aggression.

That is, except for the story of the miraculous government of the village of Ning-Po, further south, and that I at first connected with the Lolo menace only from a habit I have of spinning a hypothesis around every unexplained circumstance. There is, as Hazard would say, only one possible cause of every accurately determined effect, and I had the additional theory that balked force naturally turns to trickery to accomplish its ends. The tale itself, which was that a dead mandarin continued supernaturally to rule his village, was such strong bait to my curiosity that I perforce spent much time mulling the matter over.

Consequently, when I discovered that Ning-Po lay below the point at which Hazard and I had planned to separate for a while, I worried a little over the possibility of losing the chance for investigation. Ordinarily we flipped coins when it came to taking different routes, and I was grateful enough when Hazard, knowing my desire, voluntarily resigned Ning-Po to me.

“But,” I protested feebly, “the other route, by way of Sz-Chuen, is two days longer.”

“All the better,” he smiled, “for that’ll give you time to look into this thing, if it’s worth while—which, as I’ve said, I doubt very much. You know the superstition itself is one of the oldest in Yunnan. According to belief, every dead man’s spirit is permitted to meddle with earthly things for three years for good or ill. And when you get there you’ll find the mysterious voice only the projection of some one’s imagination.”

We had little time to debate the matter. At the moment we were standing at the head of a great ridge, on either side of which the two valleys which we were separately to explore sloped downward under the pale, turquoise heavens from the heart of the mountains, their bottoms veiled by the damp mists of the morning. We had dismounted; but behind us our four
mafus,
aware by reason of the shifted baggage that we were to separate, watched us incuriously from the backs of their wiry Kansu ponies. It was the thought of the country back of them, black hills wholly unconquered and almost wholly unexplored, the stamping-grounds of the Lolos, from which might come anything, that made me reply hopefully to Hazard—

“Somehow I’ve a feeling that for once you’re wrong.”

At that Hazard chuckled a little, good-naturedly tolerant of what he was pleased to call my one weakness—my utter inability to resist the call of the unusual. Hazard’s mind, on the other hand, was one that naturally clung close to every single problem until it was solved. Just now, of course, he was occupied wholly with the destruction of the Ko Lao Hui, that sinister, tyrannical union, millions strong, that threatened New China with ruin. I don’t think his zeal was any greater than mine, but for me there were always bypaths opening.

“Well,” he admitted, “this particular section of the world is very much like an old curiosity shop. Take the short way, through Ning-Po, and I hope you’ll not be disappointed.”

“At least,” I replied, remembering something else we’d heard of that town, “I’ll see another white man and a white woman. Where won’t the missionaries go—male and female? Hazard, it’s darn selfish in me, but—”

“Oh, the devil, Partridge; go ahead! Remember what I owe you from Sian-Fu. And, as for the rest of our plans—”

Very briefly we went over them again. There were a few mandarins in each valley who must be interviewed concerning Ko Lao Hui activities; certain other things that must be done; and at the end of the fifth day we were to meet at the village of Ki-Liang, where, by our maps, these two valleys joined each other again. To save time we often adopted this method of going by diverse routes to some meeting-place, thereby, no doubt, increasing our danger a trifle. But even one of only moderate courage becomes at last accustomed to danger. It’s really the fascination of such an existence, reflecting only one’s own will and preserved from day to day only by one’s own strength and cunning, that makes the explorer, and we had the additional incitement of feeling constantly at grips with the malevolent society of the Ko Lao Hui.

Everything understood, Hazard called up his two
mafus,
gripped my hand in parting, mounted his pony and led off down the trail that followed a shelving slope into the eastern valley. I watched him out of sight behind a bend and then, feeling a little more the strangeness of this land, made ready to go my own way.

I’D JUST reined up my pony from browsing the short grass when a swift pounding of hoofs came to me from behind. Looking back, I saw something that caused me to order my men a little off the trail and to take up a position in front of them, my carbine unslung and resting in the hollow of my arm. It’s always well to match the Lolo respect for the white man’s arms with an equal respect for their shorter range weapons and to keep them well away.

They came down from the mountains in a swift gallop, about thirty of them, their small, agile ponies, sure-footed as goats, making nothing of the rough trail. With the points of their long lances, spears and tridents glittering in the brilliant morning light, sabers rattling, bows and quivers swinging on leather baldrics, red saddle-trappings dotted with little bone plates flapping up and down and long brown and blue cloaks floating out behind them, they reminded me curiously of an old painting I’d seen somewhere of a robber baron and his knights swooping down to despoil a peasants’ countryside.

When they were almost up to me, their leader turned off along a narrow trail that led away to the west. The rest reined in their ponies and followed in single file. That is, all but a single horseman who swung out from the rest, flung his free hand up in a parting gesture and came on into the valley.

As he passed, he turned his face full toward me and gave me a long, assured look, startled, inquisitive, thoughtful. It was such a look as he might have given had he seen in me a possible unexpected factor in some plan he had in mind. As for me, I returned his scrutiny with interest. Savage slavers as they were, there was something fascinating about a people who, though surrounded by Chinese as by a sea, have managed to preserve complete racial separateness through a thousand years.

This man was over six feet tall, well formed, muscular, with nothing of the Mongolian about him. His skin was brown, not yellow; his large, fiery eyes were neither oblique nor flattened; his nose was aquiline and but for his color he would have passed for a Caucasian. A perfect horseman, he dashed by swiftly, and my two
mafus
drew closer together and muttered to each other uneasily.

“He goes to Ning-Po,” said one. “
Ma ta-men yi peitzu.
May his generation be accursed forever.”

That village of the dead man’s rule, in which I was already so interested, was indeed the first town down the valley. Starting on, I wondered a little, not at the fact of the Lolo’s visit, but at its purpose. It’s an interesting sidelight on Chinese character that they allow this ancient enemy of theirs—into whose country it is death for any unauthorized Chinese to enter—free access to their villages, requiring them only to leave their arms at the gate.

Usually the Lolos enter only to barter their slave-produced goods, hides, honey and the eggs of the wax-insect, but this man had carried no such load.

So, busying my mind with that additional trifle, I followed down the trail at an easy pace, while the great Snow Mountains of Shama to the east and the white-capped ridges of Tibet far to the west sank slowly behind the black walls of the valley that was as yet little more than a ravine. But after a while the valley widened abruptly and I came out upon one of those garden places which have existed much as they are now from the beginning of China. The mist from the paddy-fields having by now been dispelled by the increasing blaze of the sun, I could see, perhaps twelve
li
ahead, the gray, rectangular wall of Ning-Po, within which it was probable the vanished Lolo had already passed.

Presently I was traveling along a narrow lane, bordered on each side by a multitude of tiny farms through which thread-like ditches ran everywhere in a silvery network, distributing the water from the hills. Here and there, scattered over these vegetable patches, were little red shrines raised high on brick-and-wood staging for protection from the floods. Everything was quite as usual except for one really remarkable fact. For once, something had interfered with the ant-like industry of the Chinese peasant; there were no workers in these outer fields.

This puzzled me until a little later I came upon them nearer the protective wall of the village—sun-browned laborers naked from the waist up but crowned with stiff-brimmed, conical hats; plowmen with their lazy water-buffaloes; women with babes on their backs. Then the explanation of the neglect of the more isolated fields was made clearer by the fact that near each group of these workers gleamed the shining points of a cluster of spears thrust upright into the ground, against which cluster sometimes leaned a rusty match-lock or Chinese
jingal.

Ning-Po evidently lived in fear, a condition not so very surprizing in a village near the Lolo country. More puzzling, however, in that primitive but ordinarily hospitable land, seldom neglectful of the chance for
cumshaw
which the white traveler brings, was the utter silence, seeming to veil some hidden antagonism, with which the workers nearest the road greeted my passage. Even the venders of hot tea and millet soup who had come out from the village to tempt these workers with their shrill, staccato cries let that feeling override their desire for gain and passed me by.

With a growing feeling of uneasiness—for these are bad signs where a missionary is stationed—I came at last to that which I later discovered was the one opening in the village wall. Beside it a rather villainous-featured gatekeeper squatted on his haunches, his back against the heavy wooden gate. He let me pass without a word, but was I mistaken in believing that, allowing for the difference in race, the look he gave me was much the same as the look with which the Lolo had favored me two hours before?

Now I, with my
mafus
close behind me, was in a narrow, winding street which seemed part of a labyrinth—a street bordered by tiny little houses of all sorts, mud, plank, bamboo and matting. Dismounting, I sent the
mafus
and ponies ahead to the village inn, to which a toothless old man sitting in a doorway had surlily directed us. Hospitality has its bonds as well as its advantages. My first curiosity concerning the ghostly tale I’d heard of Ning-Po had been increased by what I’d seen and I had determined to try the loosening power of silver on the tongue of a tea-house proprietor before visiting the missionary. Had I done so, things would probably have worked out much as they did, but chance hurried my understanding.

I WAS meditating upon the evident unfriendliness of a group of children playing
morra
on a street corner, when a white man and woman crossed the street about a hundred yards ahead of me. I started to call to them, with the thought that they were the missionary and daughter whom Hazard and I had heard were in Ning-Po, and then I checked myself. That was not entirely because a second look told me conclusively that the man was not the missionary nor the girl’s father.