The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (32 page)

“It is an evil thing,” grunted another. “Each clan to itself is the way of freedom. For what but strife were men given fists?”

“But this will be a greater strife, and he that is to be tested has promised the Lolos leadership. Also there is the prophecy.”

“Also,” chuckled a third, “there are the five arrows. Clearly it was intended that death should come—”

I heard no more of it, but I thought I could complete the sentence. Clearly it was intended that death should come to any man pretending to authority over the Lolos. Well, I hoped that the man was right, but he did not know Koshinga.

But what I had heard gave me a new and rather frightful thought. What fit leaders indeed those Lolos, who went to their fighting as Mussulmans to their prayers, would make for the yellow horde with which Koshinga hoped one day to swamp the world!

THE road twisted and turned, divided and divided again, with Shen Yun ever directing us from behind. Finally we came to a place from which we could see far to the north, across a green country corrugated with low ridges—the great sacred mountain of the Lolos, Chonolevo, the Mountain of the Dragon’s Head.

To the west, still farther away, there was a range of still more majestic mountains, their flanks precipitous and bare—the horizon wall of Tibet. When Shen Yun first assumed his doubtful leadership he had mentioned this place. We were very near our journey’s end.

Now we descended into a deep ravine, which seemed to narrow and come to an end ahead of us. Very near this apparent end of it, there were perhaps half a dozen mounted Lolos. When we were within two hundred yards of them, they started toward us on a gallop.

There was a businesslike directness about their movements that left no doubt as to their intentions. We’d come to the end of our easy traveling; at last we were to be challenged.

Hazard, as usual, was in the lead; but Shen Yun had come almost abreast of me. As the Lolos approached us, I shot him a sidewise glance.

The dreadful suspicion that inspired that glance was really only half-formed; but the next instant it was turned into certainty, and my immediate fear of the Lolo guard was relieved by confirmation of all my other fears. As the Lolos drew up in front of us, Shen Yun lifted his left hand and passed it with a circular movement around his heart—clearly a secret sign to them.

The Lolo horsemen wheeled and galloped back to the gateway they had been set to guard. And we went on. Of course there was nothing else to do. But I’m afraid that my observation was somewhat misted by terror for the next few minutes, for my first impressions of that rock-bound amphitheater that lay on the other side of that natural gateway, at the end of the ravine are still somewhat vague.

In fact, my great impression was that of a trap. The walls that surrounded that amphitheater, which was some hundreds of yards across, were bare and almost vertical, broken only around the base by the accumulated rubble of the ages. Only, at the farther end that wall sloped back steeply in a chaos of shattered rocks; but that possible avenue of escape was blocked by a great wooden platform, with its interior carpeted, curtained and canopied with some sort of black cloth. Before that mysteriously suggestive platform perhaps a hundred Lolos were seated in a semicircle—doubtless the leaders of their people. To their right, near the edge of the cup-like amphitheater, was a second smaller platform, like a great table. Just to the left of the entrance were massed the Chinese slaves that Shen Yun had prophesied—I estimated two for each Lolo—while directly across the amphitheater from them, regarding us with a suggestion of malevolence in their ugly faces, were the camels whose sinister loads had been our first lures to this place.

And near the camels lay the loads revealed—a dozen wooden packing-boxes, now unswathed of canvas and with their tops ripped off, so that potential death in the shape of many rifles and many bandoleers of ammunition peeped over their edges. Lying near these boxes, guarding them, were about twice their number of Chinese, the camel-drivers and others, each man unquestionably a Ko Lao Hui.

In the dead, anticipative silence that hung over the whole place, I saw these things, and saw, too, how the eyes of every one present were fixed tensely on the gloomy-looking platform at the farther end of the place. I dismounted with Hazard and followed his example in turning my pony over to Shen Yun. Still holding to his rôle of servant, he led the ponies over to where some hundreds of others were tethered. When he was out of ear-shot I turned savagely upon Hazard.

“Hazard,” I whispered, “we’re lost. Shen Yun—”

Did I fancy that he smiled, and that, as nearly as his sharp-featured, composed face ever revealed any of his thoughts, it now revealed an incredible satisfaction with the situation?

“Shen Yun is a Ko Lao Hui.” He completed my sentence calmly. “I knew it. That was why I took him for a guide.”

I stared at him with a feeling of hopelessness that I should ever understand him.

“Of course,” he said, “it was obvious. The dagger was a lure; Shen Yun was a lure; and I wouldn’t be surprized if it was Koshinga who saw to it that we should get the news of the camel caravan. From the first he played to get us to this place.”

“And into his power,” I replied rather bitterly. “And you played into his hand.”

“But not,” said Hazard gravely, “without knowing the strength of his hand, and its weakness, too. Forgive me, Partridge, but there hasn’t been a time since my suspicions were corroborated—that is, since Shen Yun joined us—that I dared talk to you.

“But don’t you see we’ve really been in Koshinga’s power ever since we entered the Lolo country? He’d only to pass the word to the Lolos; white men masquerading as Lolos would get short shrift. It’s his other object that I’m playing on.”

“His other object?”

“Don’t you see it?”

Hazard was speaking very swiftly now.

“The song we heard; the double test to which the Lolos are going to hold Koshinga, and which, by the way, he’s going to pass. The first is plain, of course, the test of the five arrows—which, by the way, I think is going to confirm our doubt as to the insufficiency of the usual explanation of the Boxer leaders’ immunity to bullets. But as to the second test, the test of the invisible—”

HAZARD looked over his shoulder and broke off in the middle of his sentence.

“Shen Yun’s coming, there’s no time for anything but the next step; but if I’m right about that— And there’s something I want you to do.

“When Shen Yun goes to look for his brother among that bunch of slaves—which of course he’ll have to do to keep up his pretense—we’ll go with him. And I want you to walk between me and Shen Yun.

“Then I’ll slip away; I’ve something to say to the slaves. But you stick close to Shen Yun; and when he gets through with his make-believe search, I’ll join you. And then—”

“Yes; then,” I put in, “we’ll be finished. We can’t mix with the Lolos, and we can’t stay with the slaves. We’ve agreed our disguises won’t stand close inspection, and—”

“Then Shen Yun will help us out,” said Hazard.

“What!” I cried bewilderedly. “Shen Yun, who is Koshinga’s man!”

“Shen Yun, who is Koshinga’s man,” repeated Hazard, “will continue to take care of us. He’ll point out to us the necessity of concealment, and supply that concealment. Why? It should be easy enough to understand now—”

“Of course,” I said thoughtfully, “if Koshinga
has
another purpose for bringing us here than just killing us—”

“You have it. He’ll keep us alive till that purpose is accomplished. Moreover— But here’s Shen Yun. Now, Shen Yun—” Hazard turned to him—“we will make the search for your honorable brother.”

Since my own reasoning followed his that far without in the least discovering hope of escape, it neither surprized nor encouraged me that Hazard’s forecast as to Shen Yun’s next move worked out exactly. Shen Yun made his fruitless search for a non-existent brother—worried a little, I could see, at Hazard’s temporary escape from his surveillance—and then told us the rather obvious lie that during that search he had also inquired for and discovered a hiding-place for us.

It was a niche behind the broken fragments of rock that lined the left wall of the amphitheater, half-way between the entrance and the stage-like platform at the other end. There was a sort of crevice in the rubble just behind the ponies which, deepening as we went along until we were able to move almost upright, led us to that niche. Shen Yun, of course, went along with us.

So far as we could tell, our departure was unnoticed, which was hardly remarkable, considering the strained attention with which every one was regarding the platform upon which Koshinga was presumably to appear. That is, every one except the Chinese slaves.

From the moment of our passage through it, there had been a curious agitation in that group, and it had hummed and droned increasingly with subdued, guttural voices. I’d have given that phenomenon more thought had not my attention been distracted by another evidence of our own most certain doom.

I pretended not to notice that the niche in which we stood had evidently been fitted to receive us, that the bottom of it had recently been hollowed out, and that even the sparse shrubbery through which, ourselves unseen, we could view the entire amphitheater, had been no longer than a few hours before thrust into the ground. And, after all, it meant nothing—nothing more than I already knew—that the will of Shen Yun, who had brought us here, was Koshinga’s will, and that Koshinga’s will was our death.

III

KOSHINGA, that monstrous egotism, that specter-like devil-man—doubtless damned and doomed in the end, as utterly evil things are ever doomed—but for the present a triumphant Colossus whose shadow lay as a blight the length and breadth of China. Koshinga, spawned as it were in an evil prophecy, bred in the gloom of the past, who’d burst upon the somewhat chaotic present a full-formed leader of all that was vicious and backward-looking in struggling New China, master of the criminal
tu fei,
master of the Ko Lao Hui, preacher of racial hatred and world conquest, deluder of the ignorant, oppressor of the poor, robber of the rich.

And, topping all that, Koshinga the illusive, working his will by brute force and tricks and charlatanry always behind a yellow cloud of his followers, so that Hazard and I in eight months’ search had attained his presence but once, and that at his own volition.

Such was the man for whom we waited, and such the man who hoped for his own ends to attain dominion over the Lolos. Now I could see that semicircle of them, that represented all the authority of their scattered clans, more plainly—warriors and savages all, Herculean of form, wild of features.

All of them were intent, but I thought it a reluctant intentness; most of the faces I could see wore scowls, and a certain faint hope came to me as I thought of their hard-bitten rage if Koshinga failed to endure whatever ordeal they had set for him. That hope passed quickly as I recalled certain other things Koshinga had done, in the doing of which he had seemed to rise above the limitations of mere flesh; but another hope followed it—one which made it seem possible that the next few minutes, which seemed so likely to be the last and the most illuminating of Hazard’s life and my own, might also be the most useful.

I turned to Hazard and saw that Shen Yun had for some reason drawn a little away from us, down the way we had come. And I whispered:

“Perhaps it’s well after all, Hazard—well that we came here. For if Koshinga comes out on that platform— It’s long pistol-range, but—”

It seemed to me that the slightest of smiles again curved Hazard’s compressed lips.

“Well?”

“We should be able to bring him down, between us. We’d have a chance, anyway.”

“It is long range.”

Hazard squinted over the distance.

“It would be only a chance. Now, if Koshinga didn’t know we were here—or if you didn’t know that he knew it—what would you advise then?”

“Why, in that case,” I said, “I’d advise waiting and trying to get closer. For of course if we fire and miss it’s all off. But—”

“Yes,” said Hazard; “that’s what we’d do if we knew no more than Koshinga thinks we know. And in that case we’d never get any closer, which twin facts are one reason Koshinga allows us to get so close.

“But there’s another, too. Consider what you know of him, and tell me if you think Koshinga would take even the fraction of a chance of our firing at him at this range, if he were—well, hittable.”

“Why, what do you mean?”

It was a queer feeling that came over me then, for I knew what he meant.

“Remember, the Boxer
tong
and the Ko Lao Hui are really the same. And if arrows won’t—
Ah!
 ”

Hazard’s exclamation was but the echo of a subdued and almost frightened gasp that broke upon the death-like silence of the place like the stirring of a wind. It started from the Lolos immediately in front of the platform and spread back in a swift rush of sound through the Ko Lao Hui munition-guard, and even through the queerly excited and tense Chinese slaves.

As for me, I heard that sound, but I don’t know whether I joined in it or not. Probably I did; for even while I was talking to Hazard I’d kept one eye on the dark-curtained platform, and so I saw a thing that was almost as impossible as Hazard’s impossible suggestion.

For Koshinga had suddenly appeared upon that stage he had prepared for himself. He had appeared, I say; one instant the stage was empty, the next instant he was standing upon it—an apparition full formed out of the clear air before our very eyes.

An enormous figure clad in a yellow robe that was like a flame against the solid blackness of the platform—a figure that fairly radiated light, and yet one which was, for some curious reason, unconvincing and wraith-like. But it was Koshinga unmistakably—and this time no black mask covered his face.

“My God!” I whispered to Hazard. “It’s—it’s true. It’s the same—”

By the slight tremor of his voice, even Hazard’s equanimity seemed to be disturbed by that apparition.