The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (53 page)

“God knows what—” began Hazard.

And then he was checked by something that, breaking into the eerie silence, made the hair on the back of my neck to stir a little, and drew from Tsai Mu’i a low, poignant cry. Sharp and full of fear was that cry, but I would have sworn that it was not fear for herself—a strange sound to come from the lips of one who might be supposed to be deadened by suffering. But I paid her little attention in the sudden compelling mystery of what we had heard.

From somewhere ahead of us had come a man’s scream, chopped off instantly. A death-cry, I was sure. There was an echo flung back by the cliff, which the artificial light made visible, hanging like a threat over the rear of the house. Then that unnatural silence settled down again, oppressive, even appalling.

“Sha Feng?” I muttered in a whisper.

“If it was, he had need of help and he needs it no more. But let’s hope— Well, forward!”

He went on, taking Tsai Mu’i between us. If she was a friend, she deserved protection; if she was not, she needed watching. Once I took her by the elbow to assist her up some steps, and for the first time noticed how rounded and soft her arm was under the ragged sleeve. I thought she was trembling; but there was nothing significant about that. The chilly hand of King Fear had touched all three of us.

And still we went on. With Hazard and me, in our long matching of wits against Koshinga, courage was always bolstered up by the thought of the enormity of the evil we combated. But with the woman it was different. What was it that drove her forward in spite of her terror? What was it that had driven her earlier in the evening to brave Li Fu Ching’s assassins?

We passed through the third gate. Beyond this gate began the low, sprawling dwelling-rooms of the place, stone-walled, interspersed with garden spaces. Indeed, the whole place was really a garden, of which these rooms were a part.

We moved with the extreme of caution from room to room, finding much in the way of arrangement and furnishings which we might have admired under other circumstances. But now the furnishings impeded our search, and the artful arrangement confused us; so that we worked through them for perhaps half an hour and found nothing but signs of very recent occupancy.

And everywhere lights—lights, and the haunting shadow of tragedy betokened by that eerie cry.

So we searched fruitlessly until we had come nearly to the rear of the house. Finally we entered a bedroom opening off the one fairly continuous corridor. Against the farther wall of this room was a large teakwood bed, every inch of which was exquisitely carved. Upon a Chinese chair near this bed lay a complete outfit of mandarin garments—gown, undervest, loose silk trousers, underwear, silk-topped felt slippers, everything—all flung down there carelessly as if their owner had hastily disrobed.

“Hum!” muttered Hazard, fingering the fluffy pile. “Now how many days, hours or minutes have these lain here? It’s minutes;” he answered his own question. “For see, this fold hasn’t had time to settle normally, nor this one.”

True, the silks lay all too loosely to have been there long.

“Now, if we can find out who discarded these—” and I started to search the garments hurriedly. Presently I made a find, and another one; and Hazard and I studied them together.

An envelope full of railway and steamship tickets, and a letter. The tickets were properly viséd, and were issued in the name of Ho Pu Bon, owner of all this magnificence; they called for first-class transportation from Peking to Tientsin, Tientsin to Kobe, Kobe to San Francisco.

The letter was written in Chinese, which Hazard understood but indifferently. I whispered the substance of it to him. A certain Peking guild of carters acknowledged the receipt of an order from Ho Pu Bon, and assured him that ten freighting carts would arrive at the House of the Myriad Lights early on the morning which would in a few hours dawn.

We put the tickets and letter back where we had got them and tiptoed out of the room. I had got very little out of them, save that Ho Pu Bon had been in the house but a short while ago, and was probably here still, alive or dead; but Hazard’s eyes were gleaming like steel.

I had, of course, connected Ho Pu Bon with the cry we had heard, either as assailant or assailed; but I think Hazard’s mind had already leaped past that conclusion. I think he already surmised the one great motivating cause which lay behind all the curious circumstances of the night, to which must now be added Ho Pu Bon’s solitary stay in a house from which he had driven every one else. But even Hazard could not foresee our next find.

WE STOLE down the corridor, with our revolvers in our hands, and with Tsai Mu’i following us mutely. Every step we took with trepidation. Now and then, at a silent signal from Hazard, we stopped sharply, hoping to surprize and discover any one who might be trying to cover his own movements by the sound of ours. But we heard nothing. Except for that seeming death-cry we heard nothing in all our passage through the house. And that was at least strange, for where was the assailant of whomever had been struck down?

Presently we came to what we judged to be the rearmost room of the house. It was much larger than those we had inspected before, softly matted, set about with teakwood benches, illuminated with many electric lights arranged around its wooden walls.

In the middle of the room was a great circular bathing-pool, perhaps forty feet across. Just to the right of the door by which we entered the room from a rather dark corridor were the steps and upper end of a diving-chute, which curved down until its lower end dipped into the pool.

“Ah!” grunted Hazard as he stepped inside the room. “Modernized, modernized. There aren’t ten such homes in— What’s that?”

I heard Tsai Mu’i whimper aloud; I heard that whimper change into a sob of relief. I followed Hazard’s look and saw a dark, huddled something lying on the matting very close to the water’s edge.

MY FIRST thought was that if it was a dead body, it could not be Sha Feng’s, for it was too great in girth.

We walked over to it quickly. The dead man lay on his face. When we turned him over, the contorted face of Ho Pu Bon stared up at us.

“Ah!” whispered Hazard. “It needed just this to—”

Upon his face was a queer mingling of exultation and depression. It was as if he saw a little ahead of us a triumph which would ultimately prove a disaster. And that look, which I did not at all understand, remained on his face through our examination of the body, with its bewildering results.

We had half-expected that underneath the flowered dressing-gown the body would be found nude, prepared for the bath which the man had evidently been about to take. But what we could not have expected and could not explain was that from head to heels there was no mark on Ho Pu Bon’s body to show the cause of his death.

“And yet,” said Hazard a moment later, “to judge from the cry we heard, death must have been practically instantaneous. There’s no poison that I ever heard of that would act so quickly. Besides, how could he have been poisoned? Certainly not subcutaneously, not by means of any weapon, for there’s no weapon but leaves a mark. And yet the blow must have been delivered here, on this spot. None but a perfectly well man goes for a midnight bath. And then—”

Hazard paused, for once utterly at sea.

“Well,” I put in, “it strikes me that this midnight bath is about as hard to explain as the killing. It’s not like a Chinaman.”

“And particularly,” said Hazard, “it’s not like a man of any race who had on his mind what Ho Pu Bon had on his.”

We were talking, of course, in the most cautious of tones, but Hazard’s voice was still queerly elated.

“I don’t get you,” I replied. “What do you mean?”

Hazard’s brows came together swiftly, as if he were concentrating on the effort to present a whole argument in a few sentences.

“I mean that the constant temptation to acquire almost inconceivable wealth will drive even a Chinaman mad. I mean that Koshinga’s hoard is here, in this house; that it was placed in Ho Pu Bon’s custody, and that Ho Pu Bon planned to make away with it.

“Evidence number one, our summons here by Sha Feng, whose one present object in life is to recover that money. Number two, Ho Pu Bon’s dismissal of his servants, for of course there might be spies among them. Number three, his return here alone. Number four, the tickets to America and the letter from the carters, showing that he planned to flee and to take something of great bulk with him. Number five, his death, sharp, swift and inexplicable, the sort of death that Koshinga deals. All these can’t be coincidences. Mad, indeed, he must have been, to think that Koshinga, who trusts no one, would trust him, would not put a double guard upon the treasure.”

“I believe you’re right, Hazard,” I admitted after a moment’s swift weighing of probabilities. “But how would he hope to get the money out of the country?”

“How do they get opium out of the country? There are ways of doing those things. But now—where is the money? How on earth was Ho Pu Bon killed? Why this impulse to a midnight plunge? And, most important of all, how long before whoever killed Ho Pu Bon will return with help and probably remove the jeopardized treasure? For of course, Ho Pu Bon’s faithlessness means that he may have told others about it.”

“Another question,” I added bewilderedly; “where is Sha Feng?”

“There’s an answer to all of them, probably one central fact that explains them all. But what?”

IV

THOUGH the night was warm, I found myself shivering a little. What assurance had we that the next instant we would not also fall victims to whatever ghastly tool of death Koshinga had used against Ho Pu Bon? I glanced around the room swiftly, almost furtively, at the innocent-looking teakwood furniture, at the unbroken surface of the swimming-pool with its dark, light-absorbing bottom which rendered the water almost opaque, at the diving-chute which dipped down into that water, and curved upward and backward to the doorway. My eyes fell on Tsai Mu’i, who was standing in a strained attitude just inside the room. I dropped the dressing-gown over Ho Pu Bon’s body and beckoned her forward.

We questioned her anew, but got nothing more out of her. Sha Feng had sent for us; Sha Feng was here. Beyond that, she who had talked with us so fluently in the alley still took refuge in reiterating her inability to understand us. She was afraid, very much afraid—but now I noticed that she stood erect, forgetting her pretense of decrepitude.

Well, she was another mystery. I finished the disappointing whispered cross-examination myself, and then turned to see what Hazard was doing.

He was kneeling by the side of the pool. With his pocket-knife he was scraping the outer circumference of the basin which contained it. This circumference was flush with the floor, and was about two inches above the level of the water. He straightened up and whispered to me—

“Porcelain, enameled black!”

There was a queer eagerness on his face which I did not understand, nor did I understand his next action. He looked swiftly around the room until he discovered a stand on the polished top of which stood a bowl of goldfish. Quickly he strode across to the stand, lifted the bowl, carried it back to where I stood, and emptied it slowly, so that the fish slipped one by one off the matting, down the smooth porcelain surface and into the water. With the slightest exclamation of disappointment he restored the bowl to the stand, while the released fish scurried away into the dark depths of the pool.

“Not that,” he murmured, coming back. “Well—”

“What did you expect?”

“No matter, since it didn’t happen. Now what’s to be done? I’m still afraid this thing’s premature. I still think it would be better for Koshinga to be left in possession of his loot until that day is past which half Asia has been taught to look forward to—the dangerous half. But Sha Feng don’t think so, nor the Government, and with the loot actually within our reach we’ve no right to let a chance to recover it slip. So, what’s to be done?”

We discussed the matter for a minute or two in very guarded tones. One thing seemed clear; that we couldn’t afford to leave the house. By the time either or both of us could return to the city, arouse the Government police to action and come back in force, it would be past daylight, and anything might happen.

Anything affecting the disposition of the treasure must take place before morning, for it could not be removed from the house by day. Consequently, if we could only keep the situation unaltered through the night we would have all the time we wanted afterward to investigate these mysteries and to search for the treasure.

And besides there was Sha Feng to think of. Queerly, Tsai Mu’i’s fervently asserted conviction that he was still alive and still in the house woke echoes in both our minds. By his history, that erstwhile artful intriguer against the Manchus was hard to kill. And if he was actually responsible for our summons here, which we were now both inclined to believe, he would be expecting us to stay, and would be including us in any scheme he had in mind.

That was easily settled. The real problem, as we both realized, was at once to keep watch in this house until morning, and to keep alive. The real wonder was that we were still alive, intruders here where Koshinga kept his wealth. Tsai Mu’i, too—she would be in equal danger. But when, realizing this, we tried to get her to leave, we found her immovable.

It is seldom possible completely to understand a Chinese man, but in comparison with a Chinese woman he is transparent. Tsai Mu’i kept repeating that Sha Feng was here and that she would wait until he showed himself; and of the simple fact that lay behind her whole attitude and actions we could not get an inkling.

But when we had arranged our own dispositions for the watch we intended to keep, we persuaded her to withdraw to the corridor, where she would be between the two of us. This was our plan: One of us was to post himself in the room wherein Ho Pu Bon had died, while the other retired to the bedroom down the corridor in which we had found Ho Pu Bon’s discarded clothing.

Thus both of us could hardly be dispatched at once; and if one was killed, the other might be able to spy upon his assassins, to discover the location of the money which we were both convinced was hidden here, and perhaps, if it was removed, to trail it to its new hiding-place. It is usually unwise to scatter one’s strength, but still I believe that under the circumstances it was the most promising plan that we could have devised.