The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (50 page)

“A fair story,” I scoffed, “only it happens not to be the true one. Obviously. You seem to know the way we were led here, and I ask you this. How could you, being imprisoned here, communicate your will to the false seeker after merit, the freer of pigeons, so that he would drop the message at our feet?”

Again there came that derisive curl at the corners of Koshinga’s heavy lips.

“Fool, do you think Koshinga would enter a place like this without the means of communicating with his servants? Even a prison must have an air passage; there is one behind me, opening outside the city wall. The carrier pigeon which I loosed was not lost, but flew straight, bearing my orders to his owner, who is the master of many men, but my slave.”

If I had not, perhaps mistakenly, come to regard Koshinga as a being quite outside all human judgment, I should have admired him then. From the moment he had learned that his presence here in the tunnel and his plan to capture the government had been discovered, he had played the only part that could possibly have effected his escape, and had played it with consummate skill.

Here was the only place he could have hidden from the searchers; and even before entering this secret cell—realizing that he could break through neither door nor wall without noise, and that noise would attract his enemies—he had planned to trick us to his assistance and to our own destruction. The plan had failed in part because something that Hazard was to reveal in his next speech had put him on guard; Hazard and I were still alive, but misgivings assailed me that even yet I did not know the plan in its completeness.

“And still,” said Hazard, “you made a mistake, a very little, fatal mistake. You should have instructed your agent to carry the capsule in his hand while he was engaged in arousing our curiosity and tricking us up to him. Then when I picked it up it would have been warm, not cold; it would seem to have actually come from under the pigeon’s wing, instead of from the outer pocket of the merchant’s gown. But now—”

Hazard’s voice was not yet completely under his control, and I caught in it a faint shadow of my own doubt. The coup was too easy for the magnitude of the result involved, nor was Koshinga one to yield so easily to capture.

Mad with self-worship as he was, he was still the craftiest of antagonists; behind his insolent composure there lay some grim intention; and though I could not see how he could hope to escape, the conviction of his supreme confidence that he would do so smote me unnervingly.

“But now,” went on Hazard, “the game is over. You will follow us—”

Here Hazard took a short step backward, whereupon I, reading his intention, set myself to keep pace with him.

“Step by step,” Hazard’s voice had turned tense and deadly, “keeping your distance, keeping side by side, the three of you. We want you alive; but if any one of you makes a move that is not ordered it’s not he alone that will die now, but all three. And, you, Koshinga, will go first.”

That was Hazard’s reaction to the uneasiness which possessed him.

So we started to back away toward the entrance of the place, the others following us with a disquieting hint of willingness. Since Hazard had made me responsible for them, I turned my attention more closely to the two Chinese who flanked Koshinga right and left. Again I was struck by the soul-shriveling terror that distorted the faces of both of them—a terror that now seemed to me to surely spring from something more imminently dreadful than that imprisonment to which we were leading them.

And again my curiosity was flicked by something else which I seemed to see in their features—a fascinated look, a look of horror, a look also of some fixed and unshakable resolution—unshakable because it had been imposed upon them from without by a will which controlled and molded their own.

Now I know that look, coupled with Koshinga’s confidence, should have given me at least a hint as to what was ahead. But neither did Hazard get the hint, and Hazard in a normal condition missed nothing.

The truth is that just then neither of us was capable of perceiving anything more than the obvious. The pressure of Koshinga’s maleficent personality benumbed us both. About him there was an atmosphere of wizardry and horror that was infinitely disconcerting to the faculties.

It was by sheer force of will that Hazard and I were holding ourselves, in defiance of emotional stress, to the line of plain common sense. For instance I knew that Hazard’s purpose was to reach the door of this chamber and then to fire a shot out into the tunnel, summoning help. But until my heels contacted with one of them I had even forgotten the existence of those two great chests which had been placed so conveniently for our inspection when we had entered the place.

But when I touched them a vague premonition filled me, thrilled me unpleasantly, as if they contained evil potentialities which threw a shadow across my mind.

Hazard, still backing away with panther-like carefulness of tread, still holding his gun rigidly on Koshinga’s heart, passed through the narrow space which lay between those chests. I edged around their outer end, to the right.

Our captives still followed us with ready obedience. If there was any change at all in them it was that the corners of Koshinga’s gross mouth twisted still further upward with contempt.

NOW, by the distance which lay between us and the chests, Hazard and I had almost reached the door. As I remembered it the door was wide enough for two of us to pass through it abreast.

I reflected that our best plan would be to back completely into the tunnel before giving the alarm—then there would be no necessity of turning in order to fire a shot which would surely ring down the long dark passage to the sentries’ ears.

I started to suggest this plan to Hazard, but something checked me. It was an inexplainable feeling of futility that seemed to say to me:

“It is not the time. It is not the time for Koshinga’s end.”

But Koshinga and the two Chinese had in their turn come up to the chests. Koshinga, being the central figure, naturally passed between them, while the two Chinese came around the outer ends. And Hazard said to me—

“Now watch them carefully.”

Then he also had an idea—an idea of what? My own was incoherent, but somehow it revolved about these chests, so carefully placed.

Was it true that Koshinga’s purpose had been to leap upon us and in some way destroy us while we were bending in a position of helplessness over them? To me it did not seem his way of doing things.

I steadied my gun on Koshinga’s head. That way I could shift it and fire quickly at either of his companions, whom I watched most closely; but Koshinga was the one we must be sure of. And, still obediently keeping their alignment, still obediently following us, they came around in front of the chests.

That was it; they came
in front
of them; for immediately the two Chinese had passed the chests they closed in instantly until their elbows again touched Koshinga’s. That was perhaps a natural movement; or at any rate it would have seemed natural had it not been accomplished with such concerted precision and despatch.

That was very strange in men who were plainly so sick and broken with fear; and when I studied them again with sudden suspicion I saw on the faces of each a look of tortured determination that made the skin on my own back stir and creep a little.

“Hazard—” I began. “Hazard—”

There was something I wanted to say, but I did not know what it was; there was something of which Hazard needed to be informed, but I did not possess the knowledge.

“Steady, Partridge, stead—”

Something was about to happen—what? And the next instant the question was, what had happened? Even now I recall much that followed with blurred indistinctness, as one recalls the events of a chaotic nightmare.

There was an explosion—two simultaneous explosions—which in that narrow space produced a terrific effect and a deafening sound. Hazard and I were caught in the blast of expanding gases; we were fairly lifted from our feet and flung back against the rock wall, while at the same instant a burst of white vapor enveloped us and filled the room.

On the heels of the explosion came the report of our revolvers. Accompanying that double report sounded two frenzied screams—the “Ai-ya! Ai-ya!” of Chinese in mortal agony.

But it was at Koshinga that we had fired—or rather, by an instinctive reaction, at the place where Koshinga had been. Even as I pressed the trigger I knew that Koshinga would no longer be there, that his reaction to the explosion would be swifter than ours, for the simple reason that he must have expected it. He must have expected it, he must have planned it; he must indeed have leaped forward at the very instant of the explosion, for now his huge form, vaguely outlined in the white mist, was darting through the door.

And he was darting out alone. Behind him the shrieks of the two Chinamen were growing weaker, and the sounds of their death-struggles were lessening.

“But the door!” cried Hazard. “He’s closing it. After him—after him!”

We were leaping for him as Hazard cried out, but we leaped too late. Even considering the shock and surprize of the explosion, confusing us, Koshinga must have moved with almost incredible swiftness.

For even before we perceived him he had seized the outer edge of that door which not even its maker could open from within; and now he was drawing it after him; and as we clutched for it with straining fingers he slammed it shut in our faces.

After a while the air cleared; the vapor which had been produced by the explosion vanished. But long before then the two Chinamen were dead; and two lancet-like knives, driven deep into the leg of each just where those legs had pressed the locks of the fatal chests, showed the manner of their killing.

“But of course,” said Hazard, “those poisoned lancets were meant for us. The explosion, ejecting the lancets, was probably produced by an electrical connection established by a simultaneous pressure of both the locks—a device similar to that controlling the fastening of the door. If we had tried to open the chests Death could hardly have missed us.”

“And that was what Koshinga expected us to do. But in case we didn’t he had this other plan already arranged—a fiendish plan!” And I glanced with a shudder at the twisted bodies of the two men whom Koshinga had forced to die for him. “Well, it was worthy of him. How did you happen to suspect—”

“The chests were too convenient for inspection,” replied Hazard; “they were
too
convenient. And of course I was already suspicious. It was true, what I told Koshinga about the capsule being cold when I picked it up. I’d have mentioned it to you in that stall where we read the message, only I was sure there was an ear pressed against the other side of the wall.”

At that point we stopped talking and began pounding on the stone walls of our prison with pieces of the shattered chests, as we had been doing intermittently for the last fifteen minutes. Since we were not compelled to silence, as Koshinga had been, we had no fear of failing ultimately to attract attention and win release. But in the meantime— Well, Hazard had already forecast accurately what was actually happening.

“In the meantime, Koshinga gets away. Those two sleepy sentries, unsuspicious of any attack from within the tunnel, will be easily disposed of. And of course the giver-of-freedom-to-birds, who came so near to fooling us, has made arrangements for his further escape.”

“Well,” I said, “at least we’ve succeeded—”

“In saving our own necks,” Hazard completed my sentence for me rather glumly. “No, Partridge, we have to count this particular episode as a failure. We had Koshinga in our power and we should have kept him there, instead of which we find that we’ve actually been of service to him. But it is only an episode, we have that consolation; and when, Partridge—” now Hazard was brightening—“when in the world’s history has failure not preceded success?”

The Dragon Speaks

WISDOM and folly, truth and wickedness, have come from the lips of oracles since man first stared in amazement at the sunrise; nor is the time yet come when the cunning shall cease to lead the simple by signs and wonders.

Mighty also is the power of a symbol; and Koshinga—autocrat of the revolutionary Ko Lao Hui society and world-menace—was himself a symbol, as will appear later. A very clever symbol of that world dominion which he craved, and to which he had been dedicated by another will than his—a most masterful human will, long dead.

And it would have been odd if upon the path that had been laid out for him by that other will, there hadn’t appeared that greater symbol, the sprawling dragon. With all China fermenting with mingled expectancy and dread of Koshinga’s coming and the beginning of the great world contest, it would have been strange if that grotesque messenger of the gods hadn’t reared its rather horrible head above the horizon of the people’s imagination, even if that imagination hadn’t been stimulated by prophecy.

But there was a reason why Hazard and I believed that Koshinga would never use that particular device for enchanting Oriental wisdom into foolishness. We were wrong in that belief; and the beginning of it all was the wail of a beggar woman one Summer night in the streets of Peking.

“
Mao ch’ien, mao ch’ien!
A copper
tungtse,
that Kwanin may bless your fireside! A copper
tungtse,
rich
kwei tzu,
honorable foreign mandarin!
Mao ch’ien, mao ch’ien!
 ”

She continued to dog us intolerably close, even though she had already received alms from us. Again she caught at Hazard’s elbow with her broken-nailed, prehensile fingers, dirty beyond belief.

She was persistent beyond the custom of her kind, and there was danger in that persistence. There were reasons why Hazard and I, in those days, desired inconspicuousness above most things. But if we had ignored her or driven her away, we should hardly have been worthy of the task we had set for ourselves. One gathers where one may, and perhaps this beggar woman had something to give us.