The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (47 page)

The door still held then, but it could not hold much longer; and it came to my mind that even if I broke away from my present antagonist I would be driven head-on against others. There was really no escape from this predicament of mine but death.

And hard upon that hopeless thought came hope. One may sometimes die by proxy.

A moment later I got my assailant under me and discovered that we had squirmed about until the back of his head was directly above a large rock which was imbedded in the floor of the tunnel. It took a desperate rally of all my strength, for the fellow was very powerful; but I managed to press his knife-hand down upon his chest, and with my other hand at his throat where it had been from the beginning to prevent outcry—somehow to lift him and fling him back again, crushing down upon him with my whole weight.

He seemed to collapse. A swift examination showed that he was dead.

Instantly I was tearing at his loose coolie’s blouse. When I had him stripped I emptied my pockets of papers, wrapped them in the dead man’s clothing and flung the bundle farther back into the tunnel.

Then I yanked off my own outer clothing, suit, shirt, shoes and hat and dressed the dead man in them completely. Save for the shoes, which were too large, they fitted him not badly; for they were newly purchased, and I was worn lean from hardships in the West. I kept my gun, which the Ko Lao Hui would hardly miss from my outfit since so far I had had no chance to use it.

The thing was done, but none too soon. I had barely reached the bundle of clothing which I had tossed away from the body when the door which had held my enemies back swung open. I heard the bolt fastenings give way; and the angry Chinese, now settled into a purposeful silence, came through the door in a rush.

Some light must also have come through that door, but the curves in the tunnel cut it off; and when the Chinese reached the body and stumbled over it, with me crouching a little farther back in the tunnel, all of us were in utter darkness.

“IT IS indeed the pale foreigner, though one may only know it by his barbarian clothing. Face and head are blood-covered, but there is no need to examine them.

“Doubtless your honorable bullet killed him Li Huang. It was a shot full of zeal, but it would have been better had it not been fired, and the
kwei tzu
(foreign devil) had been saved for the torture.”

It was Ho Chung Fang’s voice, speaking over the body which he thought was mine, and which I had heard him kick violently immediately after examining it. Its tones denoted vicious anger, which was easily understood; but the cause for the fear that was in it was not so obvious.

Still, it might be divined. Koshinga was not an easy master, and certainly Ho Chung Fang had twice bungled in this matter of the crystal.

“It is true,” said some one else in the group that stood around him. “His death is an ill thing for us, though it must be that he was no stranger recently ocean-borne, but one of the two great enemies to our cause of whom we have been warned.

“How else could he have known the importance of the reading-crystal, so that he brought here instead a useless glass? Doubtless he has the reading-crystal hidden, but now we shall never find it, and Koshinga must be told.”

“Aye!” muttered several voices uneasily and yet with a certain urgency. “Koshinga must be told!”

“His anger will be the hotter the longer the telling is delayed,” one man continued.

“Moreover,” said another voice, “on the morrow he will demand it of us in any case, for then he takes all things into his hands—even the Throne of the Middle Kingdom, which will be the Central Throne of the world. So, Ho Chung Fang, you who had the responsibility of the crystal and the revealing of the exalted new books of the Shu King to the scholars, you from under whose eyes Wu Ting, the old scholar, stole the crystal, you should tell Koshinga now.”

These few sentences told me much. Concerning the
literati
and the first theft of the crystal, there was nothing that I hadn’t already surmised; but that Koshinga was somewhere present—here was news!

For if Koshinga had been easily come by, if he had been accustomed to mix personally in his own intrigues, he would not have lived as long as he had. Rather he, China’s evil genius, had hidden behind his yellow cloud of followers and directed them like a storm god from afar. Now he was present; and the reason for it was that tomorrow Peking was to witness the culmination of his long scheming for power.

Tomorrow! Tomorrow would also witness another thing, the great conference in the Government House of China’s officialdom, of Koshinga’s enemies.

And was not the tunnel, so far as I could judge its direction, being prolonged straight toward that Government House?

Truly Koshinga was finding his opportunity in the massing of his opponents; truly here was a plot worthy of his ambition and of his infernal artistry. That is, if I reasoned correctly.

But to balk that plot! An idea came to me, swiftly growing out of the substance of what I had overheard. By Ho Chung Fang’s fault had the crystal been lost; and these men had taken upon themselves the guilt of secrecy as long as they dared.

It was clear that they would force him to confess—and probable that he would go to Koshinga alone. If he did, here was still a chance—a chance!

Perhaps Ho Chung Fang realized that it was inevitable, for after a moments’ silence he grunted:

“It is well. It will be done.”

“May the wrath of Koshinga touch you but lightly,” said some one as, leaving the dead body where it lay, they parted from Ho Chung Fang and turned back the way they had come.

There was a slight depression in the wall of the tunnel near where I was standing, and I shrank back in it, with the bundle of clothing pressed between my knees. It was so dark that I knew when Ho Chung Fang passed me only by the sound of his footsteps. That, and the unpleasant sound of his breathing, which was heavy and significant of fear.

Well, that fear was probably justified. Koshinga’s rules were absolute; his penalties for failure were not light. But Ho Chung Fang might not live to reach Koshinga.

After he had gone a little way I followed him, with the rocky tunnel-bottom cutting my bare feet. Upon me was a great regret that I should not be able to follow him to his journey’s end, into the presence of Koshinga, that gray specter of doom to all that was good in New China. But the odds were too great for chancing; Koshinga knew well how to guard himself; and I must escape, if I could, with my half-triumph, my knowledge of Koshinga’s plans.

I had left the clothing of the dead Chinaman behind me, hoping to return later and to recover my papers. I needed clothing, but not his.

Particularly I needed, and I must secure, the clothing of Ho Chung Fang, who was going to the judgment of Koshinga.

I followed him, putting my naked feet down like a cat’s. Presently I moved a little faster, closing in upon him. This fight must also be at hand-grips, a silent fight.

How far I was from Koshinga’s audience-chamber I did not know, nor how close to other enemies. Certainly my gun was doing me little good this day.

When I came close enough to Ho Chung Fang I leaped.

Fifteen minutes later, to the ears of the inwardly trembling Chinese waiting for Ho Chung Fang’s return to the anteroom, there came the sound of shuffling feet and a low whimpering approaching from within the tunnel. They had of course no doubt as to the meaning of those sounds nor as to the identity of the man who made them. Koshinga’s punishments were varied, and usually mysterious in method and terrible in result.

Hands fumbled uncertainly at the other side of the half-opened door. They pulled it weakly open. I came through it. What the Chinese saw was this:

A figure with shoulders collapsed, head down, muscles twitching as if in agony, huddled in a mandarin robe—Ho Chung Fang’s robe—which was disordered and dirty. The right forearm of this pitiful figure was pressed over its eyes so that the loose sleeve, hanging down, shielded its face. And the explanation of this might be gathered from my moaning:

“The hand of Koshinga has touched me. Death enters through my eyes. The hand of Koshinga— Let no man touch me. I am accursed?”

That exit of mine was a little melodramatic, but it was effective. The Chinese shrank back from me—so much I could see through some slits I had cut in the sleeve of the robe.

Curiosity doubtless burned within them—that callous Eastern curiosity that ever peeps in at the heart of suffering—yet was their fear stronger. Fear lest they should even appear to desire to succor one whom Koshinga had smitten.

And so, guarded by that fear, I passed between the two receding rows of them to the outer door of the room. Fumbling for the latch, I opened that door and passed out.

Life was ahead of me—life, and the doing of what I conceived to be a greater good than is ever the chance of most men. But there is nothing so dangerous as the appearance of fear, and I did not hurry up those stairs.

The dim candlelight flickered from below; and the latch of the door to freedom, which from this side hid no secrets from the eye, was plain to my view.

I opened it and passed out slowly, still moaning; nor was I to outward appearance other than a Chinaman miserably afflicted, until I was safe in a curtained Peking cart and on my way to my chief in the Government House. I had something to tell him which would cause a stir within the walls of that house.

TWO days later I again visited this man, who because of the fact that he still holds office had best remain unnamed and undescribed.

“Your servant’s duty to New China, who owes you her life,” he said, “commands that I prostrate myself before you. The raid which your honorable information made possible was a nearly complete success. Two hundred were taken in the underground workings, and confession was had from many of them.

“The plan was as your exalted intelligence divined—to enter the Government House secretly from below, to make prisoners of the officials when they were gathered for the great conference and to take possession of the machinery of the government in the name of the revolution. Doubtless the riotous devils would have then risen in all parts of the empire and the revolt—”

“But,” I interrupted him, “the principal thing, the important thing, Koshinga himself—”

“Also,” pursued my chief imperturbably, politely evading the question whose disappointing answer I felt I already knew, “there were discovered the plates which purported to contain the missing sections of the Shu King, vulgarly called the Chinese Classics. And among other falsities these sections, when interpreted by the crystal which you sent me—”

“They extolled Koshinga and the Ko Lao Hui, of course,” I put in. “Prophesied their coming to power, and even justified this particular means to power—the wholesale capture and execution of the officials of the Republic. Which would have won for the Ko Lao Hui the enormous strength of the scholar class.”

“Exactly. And that explains the influx of the
literati
—pilgrims on the way to poisoned knowledge. Many would have been deceived, beyond doubt.”

“Many,” I corrected him, “have been deceived, for it is only by assuming that a secret exhibition of the plates was already in progress that one can explain the escape of the old scholar, Wu Ting, with the interpretive crystal.

“One wonders how he discovered the falsity of the plates, and also what plausible tale Koshinga had arranged concerning the separate histories of the plates and the crystal during the last two thousand years. But you have not told me—although I think I know the answer—Koshinga himself; was he taken?”

“Why should you ask?” and my Chinese chief stirred uneasily in his chair. “Koshinga is a devil, even though it be proved that in flesh he is as other men. He had gone into the air; there was no sign of him.”

The Escape

“ONE wonders sometimes,” said Hazard, with his rather small, bright eyes, sharp and quick as the eyes of a wild thing, straying over the confusion of Peking street life ahead of us. “Here’s the kindest race in the world and yet the most callous; the noisiest and yet the most silent; the most beautifully ugly barbaric civilization that ever contradicted itself. For instance—”

His voice, which had been pitched in so cautious a key that it barely reached my ears, trailed off into silence—yet there had been a tentative question in it. Moreover Hazard was scarcely the man to waste words in abstractions at such a time as this. I searched the narrow, cobbled thoroughfare, jumbled with traffic, trying to discover what particular item of its alien life had caused his remark. And, doing so, I read the truth of his words in a score of little things.

I marked for the thousandth time, for instance, how indefinable was the expression in the black, almond eyes that stared at us from all sides. Richly clothed mandarins and coolies with ragged backs and bare, brown limbs, traders and tinkers and peddlers and starveling beggars with hands thrust out—they were all alike in that.

The very children, shrinking from us a little with a mixture of fear and wonder, had a third quality in their look that has never been analyzed. And what of the chantey which a line of beggars ahead of us were singing as they staggered under goaded shoulder-poles—plaintively and yet not plaintively, rhythmically and yet not rhythmically, regularly irregular in import, and meaning and pattern of tone, the very spirit of the East, past all Western understanding?

But none of this was what Hazard meant.

“What particular thing?” I asked.

“That bird-stall on the left side of the street,” said Hazard, looking carefully in quite another direction.

And after a few seconds’ search, looking over the heads of the pedestrians, between human-borne palanquins, nimbly drawn rickshaws and hooded Peking carts, I glimpsed a proceeding that was at once very easy and very hard to explain.

In front of a stall filled with all manner of feathered creatures stood a tall, middle-aged Chinaman of the merchant type, dressed in a long, brown gabardine and blue-buttoned cap. Even at a distance the profile of his pock-marked face was harsh and repellent and cut deep with many evil lines. It was a face that might help explain why official China gave up so reluctantly its power of inflicting death by the slicing process; and yet this man, whose character I should have estimated in one word as “cruel,” was engaged in one of the most beautiful offices of Buddhistic compassion.