The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (27 page)

Nor was my hesitation caused by my first unfavorable impression of the man, though I’ve come to trust largely in first impressions. Anyway, all I saw of him was that he was rather short, heavily built, clad in a khaki hunting-costume, dark and sharp of feature and rather narrow between the eyes. Perhaps my instant dislike of him sprang mainly from the way he leaned toward the girl, who walked on the other side of him, seeming to talk to her insistently.

The thing that most impelled me to hold my tongue was the fact that just behind them, and evidently following them, judging by the fashion his eyes were fixed on the man, walked the Lolo who had preceded me into the town.

Coincidences sometimes explain such matters, but such are usually to be distrusted. The trio disappeared beyond the corner, and I was at that corner in a trice, looking after them.

Now I could at least see the girl’s figure, a sinuous and yet robust figure, clad—rather remarkably for Yunnan—in a gray walking-costume fashioned somewhat unskillfully after a foreign pattern. She held herself erect—very erect—and there was a hint of settled impatience in her stride and the backward fling of her head.

The tall Lolo, walking rapidly, was almost upon them. It seemed that his approach attracted the white man’s attention. Without stopping and without seeing me, the white man turned his head and looked squarely at the Lolo.

Was I mistaken in believing that there was both a warning and an imperative order in that look? The Lolo’s conduct seemed to corroborate that impression. At once he checked his pace and, sauntering idly to the next alley, turned up it and was gone.

I strolled on a little farther, then changed my mind about interviewing the tea-house proprietors. It might easily be the white population of Ning-Po that I’d find most interesting. My inquiries concerning the mission brought forth surprizingly reluctant and ill-natured replies, but I gathered at last that it was straight across the town and made my way toward it, now more grateful than ever that Hazard had abandoned this route to me.

I’d not yet pieced together the scattered patchwork of partial facts that I’d discovered: the queer story of supernatural government, the presence in the village of the sinister-looking white man, the visit of the Lolo, the evident connection between the two, the undefined but apparent intimacy that existed between the ill-favored white man and the rebellious appearing girl, and the tense and anxious atmosphere in which all these things and the village itself were enveloped. But where there were so many things out of the ordinary there must be a way of dovetailing them, and, again, chance couldn’t explain their coincidence. That was the conviction which I carried to my talk with Missionary Martin.

II

“IT HAS been very successful, very successful,” he told me with an undernote of uneasiness, after the formalities of meeting had reached the point when I inquired about his work. “Only of late,” he went on, “there has been a lapse—yes, sir, merely a lapse which will, of course, prove only temporary.”

“Of course,” I agreed.

“You’ll stay with us as long as you are in Ning-Po. My daughter and I— It’s very good to have a visitor. The last party passed through here some eight months ago, I think. Or was it nine? Anyway, I hope you’ll not be in a hurry to leave us.”

“Thank you,” I replied, purposely evading the question.

One rather unaccountable thing had already been explained to me—the presence of Missionary Martin’s daughter in Ning-Po. Martin was a man of medium stature, with a square, rather stubborn face, prim lips, precise speech and the overbright eyes of the zealot. His mind was evidently well characterized by the study in which we sat—a bare, severely furnished room adorned with only half a dozen wall hangings of yellow silk on which were scriptural texts embroidered in white. He was, indeed, just such a man as might be expected to forget the pulsing desires of youth and his own human responsibilities in overmuch zeal for the heathen.

To do him justice, he had already expressed in a cool way his regret that his income as a missionary wasn’t sufficient to support his daughter separately elsewhere. It had been rather hard for me then to repress the retort that it might be worth while for him to change the locality of his work.

At this point a servant fetched the inevitable tea and after sipping it I brought the conversation back to the subject that most interested me.

“You spoke,” I suggested, “of a temporary lapse in your work.”

“Ah, yes! It is unexplainable, absolutely unexplainable. It is a reversion, sir, on the part of the natives, to their false superstitions, or rather to one superstition that directly contradicts all my teaching, and in this case—I try not to believe in the power of the devil—it would seem that the devil is furnishing them with proofs.”

“Oh!” I said, feeling that at least two of my patchwork pieces were knit together.

“Perhaps I’ve heard something of it. Up-country they call this village the ‘ghost-ruled,’ and of course I know of the superstition—borrowed from the Lolos, I believe—that the spirits of dead men remain on earth for a period of—”

“Of three years exactly,” completed the missionary with a strained smile. “Yes, that’s it. They remain on earth and are permitted to interfere with earthly affairs; they have that length of time to atone for their ill-deeds in the flesh, so they may live happier in the hereafter. A heathenish doctrine, sir, and one that I’ve done my best to dispel.”

“And now,” I questioned, “it’s seemingly been proved?”

“Seemingly—I’m glad you say that,” replied the missionary half angrily. “For the effigy— You know, sir, it’s the Yunnanese profane custom to make effigies of their dead for the temporary home of their spirits. They destroy them at the end of the third year. Well, a month ago the magistrate of Ning-Po died. A good magistrate, too, beloved of his village, and I had thought him a convert. But, before he died, Chang Li Pang—that was his name—made his own effigy in the audience room of the village. And now the effigy talks, gives orders and controls the village. It is a Satanic performance, sir.”

“It talks!” I cried, incredulously.

“I’ve heard it,” Martin admitted. “And it isn’t ventriloquism; I’d know the sound of that. In a way,” he concluded moodily, “I blame Dr. Rambeau, but—”

“Dr. Rambeau!”

I suppose the start I gave at the suggestion contained in his last words passed well for the surprize I would naturally have felt had I not known that another white man than the missionary was in the village.

“Ah, that’s true. I hadn’t told you about him, but you’ll see him presently. He had the bad fortune—”

“Pardon me,” I excused the interruption. “You were saying that he is connected in some way with this trickery?”

“My dear sir,” protested Missionary Martin, “I’m sorry if I gave that impression. Dr. Rambeau’s connection was wholly inadvertent. He was Chang Li Pang’s physician and it was wholly in the ethics of his profession that he repeated the magistrate’s last whispered words to the effect that he would continue, though dead, to rule the village through the effigy. He has often since expressed his sorrow that he assisted in the deception.”

“I see,” I said with my eyes on the floor.

“Well, it’s all remarkable enough and unfortunate enough for you. What puzzles me is the motive for this chicanery. I understand that the magistrate of a town like this is practically omnipotent, but, after all, there are few sources of revenue, and—”

“Absolutely!” he interrupted. “I get your point. No, there’s been no attempt to profit by the situation. In fact everything goes on much as usual—Li Sing, who would naturally have succeeded Chang Li Pang, simply carrying out the latter’s will instead of his own. The reason for the thing is plain, nevertheless. I have enemies, as any man has who carries the gospel into a strange land. It is simply an attempt to discredit me.”

In that I took the liberty of disagreeing with him. If there had been Taoists in Ning-Po, if Martin had mentioned the arrival of a Taoist priest—mastery of jugglery and of all apparent supernaturalism as every such priest is—I might have accepted his judgment, but there are mental as well as other limitations to crime, and it would be strange if in the peasant village of Ning-Po there was a single man, save the one I already suspected, capable of perpetrating such a clever trick as this one seemed to be.

I thought, however, that I was beginning to understand the thing. In that I was doubtless assisted by the theory I’d formed days before when I first heard of the ghost-ruled village and connected it with the Lolo menace. It was really a very simple theory based on a very elementary observation of life. Nine times out of ten the creation or revival of a superstition that hasn’t a natural basis has, instead, its basis in somebody’s desire for easily gained loot, and there was but one possible form of loot in the agricultural village of Ning-Po, one thing possessing commercial value that might be stolen—the living bodies of the villagers.

So far I was fairly confident of my judgment, and certain other facts the missionary let fall before the return of his daughter and Dr. Rambeau helped to cement my conviction. Most significant was his careless statement that the only change in the administration of the village since the assumption of authority by the ghostly voice had been a change in gatekeepers and watchmen on the wall, bringing to my mind the curious look I’d received from one of them as I entered the village.

It was also interesting that, since his own first and last visit to the speaking effigy, a blanket prohibition had been issued against all white men and that even the Chinese had been forbidden to approach within ten feet of it. And of course I noted carefully in my mind the location of the
yamen
—just to the west of the one village gate. It seemed that the rear wall of the audience-room in which the effigy stood abutted closely upon the village wall itself.

My own plan, to force the dénouement of the affair in time to keep my appointment with Hazard, was already beginning to shape itself, when there came the sound of leather-shod feet and English-speaking voices outside in the compound, and presently I was being introduced to the couple of whom I’d already caught a rather illuminating glimpse.

NOW MY life has, in a way, been a series of glimpses. Whatever else it has done, I believe that vice of curiosity of which Hazard was accustomed to complain has given me some accuracy at snap judgments. So it was that, even while I was bowing to them, I was reading into the quick, significant glance that had passed between the missionary’s daughter and Dr. Rambeau the moment they became aware of my unexpected presence, something that enormously complicated what I had come to believe a rather simple problem.

It was a look of astonishment, but it was more than that—discomfiture, certainly, and perhaps fear, was in the eyes of both. I’d expected Rambeau, guiltily dreading any possible interference in his scheme, to betray himself in some such way. But was not the girl’s similar expression really a surprized confession of partnership in his plan?

And yet her appearance fought against that thought. It is true that my previous impression of a nature simmering with discontent with her surroundings was accentuated by a closer view of her, and also true that her face expressed anything rather than a meekly submissive spirit. The strength for rebellion was in it, in her well-formed chin, her arched nose, her mobile, eloquent lips, her jet-black eyes, over-steady and with always the beginning of a look of scorn in them. She was strong, that was it, she was too strong for this thing of which I suspected her.

Rambeau, on the other hand, with his heavy-lidded, narrow eyes, his thick nostrils, his brutal jaw, had strength, too, but it was not the strength that would save him from utter vileness.

For a while we chatted inconsequentially. I gave the newcomers the same fanciful explanation of myself that I’d already given the girl’s father—that I was a member of an exploring-party working in the other valley, a party which I would presently rejoin. At this the missionary flashed a regretful look at Dr. Rambeau.

“It seems as if it were a chance for you to leave us, doctor, but I hope you’ll not avail yourself of it.”

“I should take the first opportunity, sir,” replied Rambeau doubtfully, while a glitter came and passed in his quickly averted eyes.

I glanced quickly at the girl and surprized a look of evident uneasiness on her spirited face.

Rambeau’s tone had invited objection and, of course, he got it. During the colloquy that ensued, I got what purported to be the explanation of Rambeau’s presence in the village. Two months before, he had entered the Lolo country with the second exploring-party that had ever attempted that inhospitable land, had become separated from his party while trying to discover a stray mule loaded with photographic supplies and after wandering for a long time had found hospitality in Ning-Po. It was a story that I might believe or disbelieve as I chose. It was such a story as a man would naturally tell if, for any misconduct, he had been compelled to abandon his party in haste or stealth, as my prejudice still convinced me Rambeau abandoned his.

Since his arrival in Ning-Po, it seemed Dr. Rambeau had really made himself useful in ameliorating the ailments of the village. It was on that humanitarian ground that the missionary urged him to stay, and at last, as was inevitable, Rambeau yielded.

“There’s the present unrest in the village to think of, too. I wouldn’t want to leave you while that lasts,” he said with a glance toward the girl.

Now the glance was one of hypocritical intent, as his words had been, for the missionary’s benefit. But truth is a thing that is hard to hide and I saw something in his look that he hadn’t intended. For an instant, as his eyes rested on Miss Martin, a smoldering fire leaped to the surface of them and then disappeared. It was only an instant, a glimpse, like the first warning light in a volcano’s depths, but it was enough to convince me that in any crime he had in mind the girl had her place. More, I thought it might well be that the crime was merely a short-cut to the girl.