The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (30 page)

I faced an opening which had been made in the
yamen
wall and which the inviolateness of the effigy which screened it had no doubt shielded from discovery. If my theory of Rambeau’s intention were correct, that opening must also extend through the village wall against which the
yamen
was built. But in front of me was nothing but blackness—and the sound of Rambeau struggling through the narrow passage.

I aimed my revolver into that blackness, but at that moment there was a crash of shattering and tumbling rock. Rambeau had flung himself against the thin, concealing shell he had cunningly left covering the outer end of the way which he had contrived to freedom. That shell fell outward and for one moment I saw his figure silhouetted darkly in the opening as he plunged out into the night.

I could still have shot him, but again I held my shot. This time it was not hope for a lack of necessity for that act, but certainty, for beyond him, faint in the darkness, wildly brandishing their weapons, were the flitting forms of many Lolos. And to them, mad with panic, seeing but dimly in the night, he could, of course, have been only an enemy rushing out to the attack.

Pity stirred faintly within me as I saw him throw up his hands, realizing his mistake. They flung themselves upon him. I think he cried out once as their spears ran him through.

A few minutes later, when all that remained of the Lolos was the sound of hoofbeats pounding away in the darkness, and when the fire of the always defensive Chinese was abating, I returned to the room of the ruined effigy. With the feeling upon me that there was one other thing in Ning-Po that needed to be done, I took Miss Martin’s arm.

“Now,” I said, “I will take you to your father. I have something to say to him.”

There are, as I have said, types of human nature as infinitely varied as the trees in our forests, but through all of them there runs one common strain. There is one string in every human heart that may always be played upon. Had Missionary Martin been thrice the zealot that he was and one-twentieth part as good, I think he would still have listened to me that night, and I think I should still have had the news to carry to Hazard of a coming change in the personnel of the mission station at Ning-Po.

The Test of the Five Arrows

IT WAS with a feeling approaching incredulity that I lay by Hazard’s side on top of the cliff overhanging the narrow pass known as the Lolos’ Gullet and watched the long line of camels wind away into the sunset. A feeling, indeed, which matched well the blurring uncertainty of the dusk that was slowly settling over the Great Cold Mountains.

Of course, that spirit of doubt was largely painted by an almost complete lack of knowledge of what was around us or before us. And yet I found other excuses for myself—a succession of things unprecedented even in our unprecedented quest.

The beginning had been strange enough, the tracing of the devious intelligence named Koshinga—master of the Chinese Ko Lao Hui and world-menace—to this land which is so little known that not even fables are written about it. The vague tale we’d shortly heard of Koshinga’s plan to bring under the Ka Lao Hui yoke the never before subjected Lolos, lords of all the mountains of Northwestern Yunnan, had heaped up the measure. And it had been rather too much when, having news of that camel caravan which fitted in so well with the story, I all at once found myself hurried by Hazard into following it.

The careful disguise and the swift packing, the secret departure from Yunnan-fu, the hurried trip to this mountain pass through which our maps told us the caravan must travel if it were really to enter China’s Forbidden Land, and our long wait here—through all this my impression of following the trail of the impossible had persisted.

By his voice, even matter-of-fact Hazard seemed to share this feeling. Remaining motionless, with his head projecting a little over the face of the black cliff, and watching the sponge-footed beasts of burden unwinkingly with his student’s eyes, he ventured in a half-whisper:

“We’re seeing something, Partridge, that’s never been seen before. ‘The land where the Chinese go not willingly’—that truthful description of Lololand seems to end today. How can one account for it, except as we have accounted for it?”

“Well,” I began, “it’s difficult—”

“And,” interrupted Hazard, “everything corroborates our theory. The drivers of the camels, I mean, and their loads. Or am I mistaken? Do you notice anything peculiar about them?”

I had noticed it; but I don’t know that I should have mentioned it, if it had been left to myself. There was something relentless about Hazard’s spirit of inquiry that, once aroused, would have led him on unshoed feet to the end of the world.

As for me, I do not think I lack courage; but perhaps my lesser concentration on the end permits me to see more clearly the perils along the way. However, there was no avoiding the clear answer to Hazard’s question.

“Well, yes,” I replied. “For one thing, they’re not regular camel-drivers. They haven’t the regular camel-driver’s two-mile-an-hour pace. See, they’re forever gaining on the camels, and then dropping back again.

“Then they’re too alert and erect. Camel-driving is a hereditary occupation, and the driver’s a type—and these men aren’t that type.

“As for their loads, I’d say they were wooden boxes muffled in canvas. By their small size and the gait of the camels, their contents are very heavy.”

“Add all that,” said Hazard slowly, “to the fact that camels are seldom or never seen here, that these have undoubtedly come down from Shensi, where we know Koshinga is slowly gathering munitions of war, and that only a necessity for secrecy would have prevented their loads from being transferred to the ponies which are the natural means of locomotion here.

“Add the further fact that only the lack of firearms, which the Chinese have always prevented them from getting, have hindered the Lolos from conquering all this country; that therefore a gift of arms would be Koshinga’s natural bribe for their leaders; and, besides, that Koshinga would want them armed if they’re to become his servants.

“Consider these things, and aren’t those drivers Koshinga’s men as clearly as if they wore the Ko Lao Hui ceremonial robes?”

“I suppose so,” I replied without eagerness.

“And, as clearly as though the boxes were transparent, they contain rifles and ammunition. Almost certainly, the same kind of rifles we found in that; Ko Lao Hui rendezvous in Shensi. And yet I don’t see—”

HAZARD’S voice trailed off doubtfully, and very thoughtfully he followed the last of the grotesque and sluggishly moving beasts—almost as alien in that land as ourselves—as it rounded a curve in the ribbon-like trail below us and passed out of sight. Presently the sound of the tiny bells, which hung on the head-pieces of the animals, died away also, and, except for a pheasant that whirred away somewhere below us, and three black birds of the vulture type that circled slowly and stiffly above us in the darkening sky, Hazard and I seemed altogether alone in a very desolate world.

A world which, indeed, appeared quite unfitted for man’s habitation, ragged and scoriac, black peaks piled on black peaks, looking as if but recently upflung from an inferno. A forbidding and depressing world, which was, however, but the eastern curve of the natural ramparts within which the Lolos, those last barbarians to remain unconquered and unassimilated, have hidden themselves for many centuries.

Recalling the little that we’d heard of the land beyond those ramparts—a land, by all accounts, of warring clans, of fertile valleys and fortified villages and feudal castles, of lords and overlords and
nzemos
and Chinese serfs and slaves—I was glad of the uncharacteristic indecision of Hazard’s manner.

“You were saying—” I suggested.

“—that I don’t at all see our way in the matter. To go in any farther would seem—well, close to suicide. Then the camels will travel all night—it’s their time for traveling, on account of the flies.”

He roused himself, and, still thoughtfully, got to his feet, an action which I imitated. We made a strange picture for each other, in our long, brown felt cloaks and blue cotton vests and breeches, with rusty old curved sabers hanging from our leather baldrics, and with the turbans we’d bought along with the rest of this outfit in Yunnan-fu twisted to a peak on top of our heads to imitate the Lolo “horn.” Hazard’s face, tinged dark brown by the juices of some useful plant, broke into a serious smile as he regarded me.

“My word, Partridge, there’s as small a difference as the ethnologists say between the Lolo features and the Caucasian. If my masquerade is as good as yours, we should get by till we had to talk.”

“That’s likely to be a fatal limit.”

“Yes, that’s true. I can understand their lingo well enough, but as to twisting my tongue Lolo fashion—it’s hopeless. On the other hand, there’s Koshinga ahead.”

“If one could be sure of that,” I said reluctantly, for by now the pursuit of that illusive fantom had come to be an obsession with both of us, “there’s no chance too great to take.”

“This time there’s little doubt of it,” replied Hazard. “It would take Koshinga with all his powers to consolidate the Lolo clans and satisfy the demands they make of a leader. And their allegiance would be worth— Listen!” he broke off.

There was coming from the pass below a sound of slow hoofbeats, and of men singing unrhythmically to the accompaniment of a badly played flute. Hazard and I went back to the edge of the cliff and again peered over it.

A dozen Lolos, mounted on wiry, surefooted little ponies, were following in the wake of the camel caravan. It was such a group as we’d seen several times before, muscular, well set up, taller on the average than white men, with European features, and yet with something of the Indian about them. Indeed, I remember thinking, give them a war-bonnet each or a plume of feathers and what magnificent redskins they would make!

As there was nothing new in the sight of them, so there was nothing new in the song they were half-chanting, half-speaking, jerking it out in a variety of rude cadences. It might really be called the national song of the Lolos, for all have known it for centuries, and have never known any other. There was much in it of Lolo character and history—and something else, too, that had made me think of the chantey the moment I’d heard of Koshinga’s ambition to dominate them:

“Free rides the Lolo,

Owing no master, bowing not the head;

Free rides the Lolo,

Bending the backs of those that oppose him—

They shall his slaves be.

“In the high mountains,

Each man his kingdom, each man a warrior,

Testing with arrows,

Five arrows of death, those that would rule him—

No man shall rule him.

“But in a thousand years,

Then there may come one greater than man is,

One who withstands death,

Searching out, smelling out, enemies hidden—

Seeing the unseen.

“Then shall the Lolos

Come from the mountains, follow this Great One,

Down where the world lies,

Down where the fat and the wealth of the world lies—

Soft for the white steel.”

AS THE song died away in the distance, Hazard and I looked at each other, and I saw my own thought reflected in his eyes. There’d been an unusual note in the powerful voices of the Lolos, a note of tense and challenging excitement. If they were indeed on their way to the trial of a dangerous pretender to authority who offered them a great adventure at the great price of their liberty—well, they might be expected to sing in just such a way.

“Um!” muttered Hazard. “ ‘Five arrows of death.’ And ‘seeing the unseen.’ What do you know about that rigmarole, Partridge?”

“Well, it can hardly be called a rigmarole. It has meaning enough—that is, if one believes the Chinese story that about a dozen aspirants to authority over the Lolos have come to their deaths trying to pass the tests it mentions.

“Just what those tests are nobody seems to know, except that so far they’ve proved impossible. But with Koshinga it may be different.”

“Yes,” agreed Hazard, “with Koshinga it may be different. Well, let’s go down to our ponies.”

I acquiesced; and we started down the roundabout trail up which we had climbed to our point of observation. Near the bottom of it we came upon our ponies tethered where we had hidden them; and we led them down into the pass. During this procedure Hazard surprized me with a seemingly irrelevant remark:

“Speaking of tests, have you ever felt that there’s something inadequate in the ordinary explanation of the Boxer invulnerability to firearms? I mean the exhibitions their leaders used to give, and will probably give again.

“There were some darn intelligent men fooled by the trick, or Chinese history lies. Seems to me the stunt of extracting the bullets before the shot, or never putting them in, would have been easily detected. Then there would have been the fatal flaw that a suspicious spectator could merely have insisted on the substitution of his own gun—and away would have gone both the superstition and the teacher of it, together.”

I replied truly that I’d sometimes had that thought. In fact it was a matter that I intended fully to investigate if I lived through the struggle with the Ko Lao Hui. But just then we came to the bottom of the pass, and face to face with decision.

We were not so far into the Lolo country but that we could turn back and spend at least the latter part of the night in a Chinese inn. On the other hand, if we were to go forward we must camp the night where we were, for our disguises would not serve us in the dark, and we would surely be challenged. So we debated the matter, the lure of Koshinga and of the unknown matching discretion and common sense, until presently I saw Hazard start and gaze fixedly at the ground just in front of me.