The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (51 page)

Beggars and innkeepers are the eyes of the world, runs the saying; and the society of mendicants called the Ki Mao Fan are not the least wise of mankind.

Wherefore Hazard glanced over his shoulder, thrusting his hand into his pocket again, so that any one who watched might think him merely a prodigal almsgiver. I followed his example so that—since we passed at that moment under a street light—we got our first fair look at the woman’s face, and gave her a first fair look at us.

Black-bearded and scarlet turbaned were we, with hands and faces dyed coffee-color, and with our lean figures clothed in cheap khaki that smacked in cut of the Sikh police; but we held no great advantage over the woman in that exchange of scrutinies. Wisps of black hair too heavy for one of her class straggled over her face, and behind that hair were discolored plasters that made patchwork of her features. She stared up at us sharply and whined out thanks; but at the end of her beggar’s formula she threw in without pausing two startling compounded words that seemed to be half-assertion and half-inquiry.

“Hazlad-Patlidge! Hazlad-Patlidge!”

The yellow traffic was thick. The swarming passers-by jostled us, peering at us with slant eyes in which there was more hostility than there had been yesterday, as yesterday’s hostility had exceeded that of the day before. We could imagine some of them whispering to each other that grim motto of the Ko Lao Hui, “Destroy the foreigner, exalt the Chinese,” which was already becoming a byword even in modernized Peking. It was no place for our names to be spoken, and Hazard and I turned away with one movement.

Yet neither was it a time to ignore one who knew those names, which would probably have been our death-warrant if spoken aloud; and as Hazard turned he jerked his hand forward invitingly.

Leading off Hattamen Street to the east are many black and narrow alleys, muddy in the Summer months and usually empty, bordered by the unbroken rear walls of dwelling-houses. Presently we had entered one of those alleys. Ahead of us an empty rickshaw sloshed toward us through the mud. We went on until it had passed us, and then stopped with our backs against a mud-brick wall and waited for the beggar woman.

“What do you want?” I asked bruskly in Pekingese.

The beggar woman cackled sillily. Then in a barely audible whisper—

“Name of Sha Feng requires your help.”

Sha Feng! No name she could have mentioned could have startled us more. I asked her sharply what she knew of Sha Feng.

“That he needs your help. Will you give it?”

She silenced me with that question. I stared at the black splotch in the darkness which was now all that I could see of her, trying to judge what I should say.

Certainly we would help Sha Feng, but why should he send such a messenger? Of all Chinese I have ever met, I think Sha Feng was the one I most admired. A man without fear, a patriot who knew no stint of sacrifice, such he had proved himself as a leader of the Ke Ming Tang that had overthrown the Manchus, freed the Chinese and established the Republic.

And now he was engaged in the equally hazardous work of preserving that Republic; he was our colleague in the secret warfare against the disruptive and revolutionary Ko Lao Hui, and its insidious leader, Koshinga.

More than ordinarily clever in that work, by what we had learned, although he was middle-aged, languid in manner, indirect and circuitous in conversation. He was sprung from old China, but he was zealous for the new. Just now he was engaged in a bit of work so superlatively important that I tingled at the possibilities suggested by his message.

But was it his message? It had already been doubtful; and now came a memory of a certain arrangement that had been made between Sha Feng and us, that made it seem impossible.

“But the sign?” I asked. “Sha Feng would have sent a sign.”

The woman hesitated before answering, and her hand went to her throat.

“There was no sign. There was but this message for help.”

“How are we to help him?” asked Hazard.

“By following your miserable servant where she shall lead you.”

HER voice was growing timid, frightened and grievously distressed—emotions that are rare indeed in Chinese beggars, who have so little to lose in life and so little to gain. I doubted if she really belonged to the beggars’ clan; and if Sha Feng had sent us a message, he would certainly have also sent the simple signal upon which we had agreed and which would have ensured its authenticity. Plainly the woman was lying, and yet…

And yet she had knowledge that none outside the official class was supposed to have. Knowledge that, if but spoken aloud in the tea-houses, would certainly mean an end to Hazard and me, and probably to Sha Feng, too. That is, she knew our names and business.

“ ‘Sheep choose their guide lightly, and go easily over the precipice;’ ” Hazard quoted a saying of the woman’s race. But immediately he revealed that he shared my own perplexity by asking—

“Where would you take us?”

“My masters know the House of the Myriad Lights. It is there that Sha Feng waits you, having need of you. Now that I have told you, you may go alone; but if your exalted wills permit, I would go with you.”

“It is true that we know the place,” muttered Hazard.

“Listen!” I put in, both favorably impressed and still further puzzled by her desire to accompany us. “There is a good reason why it seems to us that your tongue is scattering falsehoods. But if you will give us cause to believe you, perhaps we will go with you.”

Again the woman hesitated, seeming to weigh her arguments.

“If I come not from Sha Feng, how is it that I know that which no one is supposed to know, save the honorable foreign mandarins themselves, and Sha Feng, and one other? How is it that I know that the business of Sha Feng in the House of the Myriad Lights is to win back to the Republic that treasure which Koshinga has taken from the people by force, and which is the greatest single treasure in all the world?”

Hazard seldom shows astonishment; but I wasn’t surprized to feel him start at that. That was truly Sha Feng’s present business; and it was also true that everything about the quest for Koshinga’s stolen loot had been kept the closest of official secrets. How, indeed, had the woman learned it unless Sha Feng had told her? But on the other hand I couldn’t imagine Sha Feng telling her, or any one else outside officialdom.

I could far more easily imagine that some of the Ko Lao Hui, perhaps Koshinga himself, had discovered our identities, surmised the relations between Sha Feng and ourselves, suspected Sha Feng’s present business, and sent this woman to us with a false message to get us into their power. It was a thing that I now may boast of, that there were no other two men in the world whom Koshinga desired so greatly to get into his hands. And it was very probable that Koshinga was still in Peking.

“And yet,” questioned Hazard with open disbelief, “Sha Feng didn’t trust you with the one sign that would have put your words beyond doubt?”

The woman was silent for a still longer interval, probably realizing that she had lost rather than gained ground with us. And then, in the slightest of whispers:

“The honorable mandarins will be told my name, which is Tsai Mu’i. And if they will listen, I will also tell them—”

The truth? A certain change in her tone made me think so, while at the same time it strengthened my belief that heretofore she hadn’t told it. But at that moment she was interrupted in a manner that would have very much startled and bewildered Hazard and me a year ago, but which was now very nearly self-explanatory. We had learned during that time that there were few criminals outside the ranks of the Ko Lao Hui, and few crimes committed that were not directed by Koshinga, who sat in the center of his vast web of villainy, directing everything.

There came from somewhere in the dark huddle of houses beyond the alley the sharp twang of a bow and the thin whistle of an arrow; and almost instantly that arrow shivered to bits against the mud wall behind us. And if the point of that arrow was not steeped in venom, if it had not been directed by one of Koshinga’s many facile assassins, then I missed my first guess widely.

If it had been sent against Hazard or me, it wouldn’t of course have been a matter for wonder, though we had believed, until our recognition by the woman, that Sha Feng was the only one in Peking who knew of our disguise. And the fact that it passed within an inch of the woman’s shoulder, and a safe foot from Hazard’s head, might have meant nothing but poor aim; nor was it at all strange that she should cry out in terror at such a narrow escape. But it was more than strange that her terror should express itself in these words:

“Ah! Li Fu Ching! Li Fu Ching has traced me—”

She choked back the rest of tier cry, which was clearly unpremeditated. And Li Fu Ching was head of the Peking branch of the Ko Lao Hui! If the hidden archer was Li Fu Ching’s agent, he was also Koshinga’s; if the woman was Li Fu Ching’s enemy to the extent of attempted assassination, then it was very likely that she was our friend even if she had lied to us in part.

The next instant the three of us were scurrying toward Hattamen. Our flight must have put us instantly out of range of the archer, by placing some one of the mud hovels between him and us, for no more arrows came. Here was more evidence that the would-be assassin had intended but a single shot, and hence had in mind but a single victim—the woman. Although I still discredited altogether her claim to be Sha Feng’s messenger, by the time we reached the broader, crowded street I was of the opinion that we might do well to trust her at least a little way.

It was then, when we tried to lose ourselves in the crowd that surrounded the booth of a story-teller, that I caught a glimpse of a certain white man’s face that had become in the last few days disagreeably familiar to me. A pair of overbright, staring eyes gleamed above the throng of shorter people—eyes that were set in features of rather unique cast, forehead too high for its width, nose strong and sweeping, chin too weak. A face natively passionate, intelligent, unbalanced of will, over which a veil of horror had recently dropped, almost extinguishing the light of reason.

That was my impression of this man, who was very cheaply clothed in a white linen suit of native manufacture, and who I had come to suspect was following Hazard and me. Now there was something in his look that made me suspect it no longer; I knew. I knew he had been waiting for us to come out of that alley.

One glimpse, that was all I had of him, like my dozen previous glimpses of him whose life course had for a long time been slowly drawing closer to ours, with which it was to blend that night to an end that no one could have foreseen. There was an unoccupied Peking cart creeping past the skirt of the crowd. Hazard hailed it, and we climbed in, taking with us the woman who had called herself Tsai Mu’i.

Perhaps it was the sight of us, who were foreigners if not by appearance white, that made some one in the crowd start to hum with an air of furtive but defiant animosity:

“From the dim darkness

Comes now a mighty one,

Giver of power to the children of Han;

Foretold his greatness,

Son of the master’s son,

Blood of all races, and ruler of men.”

“Aye!” muttered a long-haired Po-Bon priest in a gloomy gown, passing close to the singer. “But first must speak the messenger of the great Old Ones, who is the dragon with the talking tongue.”

II

THREE ride with difficulty in even the largest of Peking carts, but it may be done, and the hooded vehicle makes for concealment. And Hazard and I had decided in a few whispered words as we passed through the crowd that our first business was to get away from this spot as inconspicuously as possible, and our next to investigate the truth of Tsai Mu’i’s story.

“To the North Gate,” Hazard murmured in the driver’s ear. Beyond that gate lay the House of the Myriad Lights mentioned by the woman, which house had even before that night prodded our curiosity rather sharply.

This was its history, so far as ascertained by us, whose business it was to ascertain everything that was unusual. The house had been built about six months before by a certain Ho Pu Bon, who had so far as any one could tell us dropped into Peking from the sky. His credentials were his money, of which he seemed to have an unlimited supply. Hazard and I had seen him several times. He was a fat, pompous, upper-class ruffian with an oily face, who looked as if he might have retired from the governorship of some province after a lifetime of dishonest gains.

His house was one of a small colony recently built by wealthy Chinese in the low foot-hills well outside the north wall of Belong. It lay, however, a little farther to the north than the rest of them; and was otherwise distinguished by being equipped with a complete electric lighting system, drawing its current from the city’s new power-plant. Hundreds of electric globes formed a sheen of light that hung over the place at night like an aureole; and it was of course this that gave the house its name.

A striking name enough; but not as striking as would have been given the house anywhere else than in Peking, where, of all Chinese cities, East and West most distinctly meet. For evidence of which fact Hazard and I had only to part the curtains of our stuffy, bumping box-on-wheels and look out upon the traffic of which it was a part.

The bulk of that traffic was as it had been for a thousand years—palanquins and shoulder-borne chairs, coolies singing under incredible loads, gabardined merchants with hands inside ample sleeves, shaven-pated monks, itinerant tinkers and peddlers, with whistles of differing notes. Here was an open-fronted tea-house wherein men stripped to the waist ate and drank unimaginable things, while barbers shaved their faces and scraped their eyelids. And here was a joss-house with an open space in front in which conjurers and story-tellers entertained silent, staring crowds of yellow folk. Round about stood crumbling statues of twisted lions with mouths like frogs; and by the looks of them, the crowds and the conjurers might have stood there since the building of those statues.