The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (34 page)

It was murderous work indeed, work that I didn’t like; but there was no help for it. I consoled myself with the thought that Hazard and I were fighting for more than our own lives—for the destruction of Koshinga’s power in Lololand.

And with that thought came the thought of Koshinga himself, and a guilty sinking of my heart that I’d forgotten him for even a moment. The incipient rush of the Lolos was already broken; the hasty shower of arrows they’d loosed had dwindled away; panic terror of our magic arms had seized them; and already they were breaking for the ravine that was the one exit from the place.

As I jammed home my fourth cartridge-clip I looked for Koshinga, certain that he would have disappeared. And, instead, I saw him.

His position on the platform had shifted a little; he had moved over toward our end of it. His great, yellow-clad figure appeared even a little more shadowy and unsubstantial-looking against its somber background.

But if his terrible face had changed by even the bending of a line or a shading of expression, I couldn’t perceive it. That immutability of features, as he looked down upon the destruction of his plans and all that turbulence, suggested again, most strongly, the omnipotence he had claimed and the invulnerability he had seemingly demonstrated.

The winds of the East waft many strange things into the consciousness of men who venture among them; but never have I struggled with a more weakening sense of futility in the face of the impossible than at the moment that I leveled my rifle and aimed at Koshinga. But when I saw him over my sights, that feeling was swept away somewhat by the confidence a man feels who has learned to trust his weapon. This, I reminded myself, was no arrow that might be turned aside, no matchlock cheated of its bullet—it was a rifle that would shoot where it was held. When I knew my aim was perfect, I pulled the trigger.

The crack of my rifle was echoed by Hazard’s. Out of the corner of an eye I saw by the position of his piece that he had followed my example, had fired at the same mark.

Now, in shooting I yield to few men, but I yield to Hazard; and it was with a surge of certain and somewhat savage exultation that I looked for Koshinga’s downfall.

When I saw him still standing there, evidently untouched, insolent in his immunity from death, and in a way magnificent in his imperturbability, I had a moment of absolute stupefaction. But the next moment came anger at being so easily balked; and that anger, backed by a certain driving curiosity and by the obsession of pursuit that had so long possessed me, brought me half to my feet with a reckless resolve in my mind.

“I’m going to go,” I cried to Hazard. “I’m going to get him. I’m going to find out if he’s flesh and blood or—”

“Don’t. The Lolos would cut you off. Wait until—”

Hazard gripped me and pulled me down again.

“But you could hold the Lolos. You might hold them. And he’s there, within reach—”

“The Lolos need more urging,” said Hazard, and renewed his fire. “He’s where?” he inquired alter the second shot. “Where he appeared to be from the other side of this show-place of his, or where he appears to be from here?”

“Why,” I said bewilderedly, but yielding to Hazard’s will, “he’s where we see him.”

“But we don’t see him,” said Hazard. “Those bullets followed the line of our eyesight.”

“Then what,” I cried, checking my fire again, for the demoralized Lolos had broken in a mass for the exit, “what is it we do see? And what did we hear? Is he master of our senses, this—”

“I watched him as we ran across the theater,” said Hazard, straining his voice to be heard above the triumphant yelling of the Chinese. “He moved, but he didn’t walk. He floated sidewise across that black platform like an image in a— Ah, he’s gone!”

It was true. As he had appeared, so he had disappeared, wraith-like; there’d been no time for any ordinary departure. I stared in amazement, and yet with a faint suggestion of the truth, springing from Hazard’s words, slowly enlightening my understanding.

“Did you ever read,” Hazard assisted me, “of ‘Doctor Pepper’s ghost,’ that so bewildered Europe in the middle of the last century until it was proved to be nothing but an arrangement of—”

“—of mirrors!” I exploded violently, half-angry and half-ashamed at having been so easily deluded.

“Of transparent plate glass,” corrected Hazard, “placed at an angle for reflection. But this, no doubt, is a mirror—a mirror of polished steel. Leaning forward, well back from the front of the platform and extending clear across it, with Koshinga facing it from in front and below—”

“Of course, the floor of the platform is broken—probably nothing but a black-lined opening deep enough to conceal Koshinga, extending clear from the mirror to the edge of the platform. That’s the way I see it.”

“And the arrows, fired at an angle to that mirror, merely glanced off,” I cried with a picture of the whole thing in my mind. “That accounts for the cracking sound we heard. And, of course, as soon as they passed across the reflection of Koshinga and came against that black background, they would disappear. While our bullets—

“But the Lolos are gone—” I sprang to my feet—“and Koshinga’s still there somewhere. We can get him now. Or at least—”

“We can try,” said Hazard. “But Koshinga may not be alone, and he always plans for an open door behind him. In this case there’s the avenue of heaped-up rocks back of the platform—and I, for one, don’t feel like following him there. No; I’m afraid we’ve had our chance at him.”

OUR investigations but verified Hazard’s conclusions. Of Koshinga we discovered no trace; and we found the arrangement of the platform very much as Hazard had foreseen, with the added detail that very close scrutiny showed the great mirror, of the most beautifully polished steel I ever saw, to be made up of many sections very skillfully jointed together, so it could be easily set up anywhere.

Which whole arrangement, by the way, we still believe explains the seeming miracles of the old-time Boxer leaders. Our bullets had perforated the mirror, but the Chinese
jingals
of 1900 were very low-powered, and would probably have affected it no more than the arrows.

Since the Boxer society was really but an offshoot of the Ko Lao Hui, this belief also helps to explain Koshinga’s possession of the paraphernalia. But that explanation isn’t really necessary. Koshinga had man-power enough at that stage of history to create whatever his wily mind might conceive and to convey it where he would, even into Lololand, once he had made his truce. And to his immediate subordinates secrecy was a condition of life.

The disposal of the altogether too useful mirror puzzled us until we remembered that we had another problem in the disposition of the surplus arms and ammunition. Then we got our grateful Chinese to load the extra rifles, chambers and magazines, and to pile them, together with the remaining boxes of cartridges, in the hollow of the platform just in front of the mirror. Shortly after we left it, the platform was seen to be on fire, and the ensuing-explosions left the mirror a dulled and twisted sheet of steel. It was all well; Yunnan was safer with those rifles out of the hands of the freed Chinese, and perhaps the Chinese themselves were safer.

Then we left in haste, for there was no telling how long the terror of the Lolos would hold. But once under way we were a formidable-looking cavalcade enough, and the road cleared ahead of us to the lowlands.

We were half-way there, Hazard and I leading, the Chinese trotting behind us on their requisitioned ponies, holding their rifles awkwardly and with slippered feet dangling well above the low-hanging Lolo stirrups, when I said to Hazard:

“I understand pretty nearly everything. Of course Shen Yun’s story, if he lived up to it, insured that we would at least be able to communicate with the Chinese slaves. And those slaves constituted the weakness in Koshinga’s position that you referred to in the beginning. But how did you know they would be able to help us?”

“I didn’t know it,” said Hazard. “But it was a big thing we were up against, this particular play of Koshinga’s—one worth a long chance.”

“I can see,” I said, “quite apart from their usefulness as leaders, that with the Lolos safely Ko Lao Hui and armed as Koshinga meant to arm them, there would have been no blocking the Ko Lao Hui program in Western China. The rest of the country would have been forced into the brotherhood as a matter of self-preservation. Then the Lolos could have been taken farther east, with much the same effect.”

“It was a big thing,” repeated Hazard, “but at least that project of Koshinga’s is ended; he’ll never make way in Lololand again.”

“But that face—” I lowered my voice “—that centuries-old, prophesied face. Was it—”

“Another mask,” replied Hazard, “or reality? Well, we’ll see.”

Ming Gold

MASKED knowledge may sometimes be useful; and Hazard and I, still seeking out the devious workings of the revolutionary Ko Lao Hui, evilest of Chinese
tongs,
had listening to do in the market-places of Yunnan-fu, whither we were bound from Lololand over the wilderness of mountains that is central Yunnan. So it was that to our youthful guide, Wang, who was of a family of ten generations of guides, our “Chinese hearing had not yet come,” and his talk with us was mainly limited to the four most useful English words he knew—

“Masters, do not go.”

Those words had grown parrot-like to our ears, and, even though the hills through which he’d piloted us were known to be infested with robbers preying on the rich traffic from Sz-Chuen to the coast, we’d come to believe Wang’s bump of prudence overdeveloped. When he repeated them at sight of that queer gathering on the bank of the Yalung River, we laid it to a habit of caution and perhaps to a desire for “squeeze.” That last because of the tall, gently swaying mast that thrust itself above the rocks which almost barred our view of the broad, ocher-colored stream ahead of us.

Indeed, I’m still inclined to think that the mast, suggesting the possibility of a quick passage of the river without the necessity for profitable bargaining with passing boatmen, was the real cause for Wang’s warning.

But in any case it was too late to retreat. We were seen the moment we rounded the curve of the dry creek-bottom we’d been following, and from the cluster of twenty-odd yellow men clad in the usual disarray of provincial soldiers—loose blue blouses, ragged bamboo helmets and gaping lower garments through which the wind whistled—a rotund, sparsely bearded man in a dark-colored mandarin robe instantly started to meet us. A very dignified looking man who, as he approached us, clasped his hands together, waggled them up and down and smiled gravely in salutation.

“An official party,” murmured Hazard. “And a lucky meeting—perhaps!” he added quickly.

“For us?” I questioned, for I, too, had caught certain signs of recent disaster in the group back of the mandarin—a group which seemed to be watching us intently. “Well, not if one holds to the theory that luck’s contagious. I suppose, since we’re liable to meet this gentleman again, we’d better ’fess up our knowledge of his lingo.”

The mandarin was too close for Hazard to reply, but it’s not good to deceive Chinese officials and so I took my companion’s agreement for granted. So, the next moment, with Wang glumly watching the revelation of our linguistic abilities, we were bowing, shaking our own hands and displaying all the knowledge we had of the nineteen ceremonies of introduction.

But my solicitude in this respect did not prevent me from continuing to use my eyes and, as I used them, my wonder increased. Chinese of the official class are, for the most part, accustomed to consult their own ease before anything else, and the mere fact of finding one of this class in this wilderness was in itself puzzling.

More puzzling, however, was the fact that across the left cheek of his plump, well-cared-for face—almost the color of old ivory—there was a wound which had apparently just stopped bleeding, a shallow furrow very like the track of a bullet. In one side of his gown there was a great rent and from three fingers of his beautifully kept hands, the long, polished nails, always the pride of his class, were broken off to the quick.

In other words the appearance of Ko Tien Chung, for so he’d introduced himself, corresponded well with the appearance of his men, who were variously armed with rusty old rifles, pistols and sabers, and not less than seven of whom had dirty bandages wound about some part of their bodies.

But by the mandarin’s manner he might have been receiving us in his own audience-chamber, save that now and then a sort of shadowy fear seemed to peep out from behind the curtains of his eyes. He searched the classics for complimentary terms with which to address us, and we replied in kind. His phrases were perfect, only there was a swifter pushing forward into confidences than is usual in one of his class, which habitually proceeds with indirection and hints at facts instead of openly stating them.

“Heaven is propitious,” he was presently saying, “and surely the gods have directed your feet. Your honorable names mean much to your servant. Are you not the
yang whan
(foreign mandarins) who are the terror of evil-doers? Are you not even they who will yet prevail against the false but mighty Koshinga, he who is obeyed by the Ko Lao Hui?”

Stripped of their flattery, his words did identify us in a sense. This recognition wasn’t altogether pleasing. Hazard and I were becoming altogether too well known in China for the success of our work. It was becoming as hard for us to hide our movements as it would have been for the Yellow River ahead of us. I wondered if this overfriendly mandarin had learned somehow that we were coming this way and had for some purpose waited here for us.

“Our insignificant efforts,” replied Hazard, “have been bent upon ridding China of that
tu fei
(earth evil) that is called the Ko Lao Hui. It is good that your exalted mind should recall us.”

“One’s mind grows sharp under the shadow of the suicide rope,” said Ko Tien Chung; “but in the northern capital your names are as twin suns visible to the lowest understanding.”