The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (54 page)

We matched coins for position. Hazard won the watch in the room of the bathing-pool. I waited until he had taken his position just inside the one door of the room and then retired to the bedchamber, darkening the corridor as I went by unscrewing the globes. Midway between us, as I have said, was Tsai Mu’i.

I drew a chair quietly to the door of the bedroom and sat down in it. Certainly I was never more alive in my life, nerves strung up, senses alert. I did not know what to expect, but I was sure that whatever the house held of drama was not ended. However, if I had strained my imagination to conceive an extravagant next scene, I should hardly have conceived one as strange as that which I was presently witnessing.

PERHAPS half an hour had passed, and nothing had happened. Then the absolute, eerie silence was broken by a subdued stir which might have been merely the lifting of a light wind through the trees, but which might also have been many other things. Under the circumstances it was infinitely suggestive, threatening. I leaned forward, listening intently; and then the sound passed.

But I was not sure that the cause of it had passed, and I got silently to my feet.

I was standing there with my revolver in hand, when I heard the sound of a voice.

It was a voice which I had heard once before, far down on the Pei-Ho; a voice which, heard anywhere, would have filled me with a mixture of hatred and fear; a voice which ran the gamut queerly from the guttural to the falsetto, blending all notes into an odd but forceful monotone.

It was the voice of the one man who, if the Ko Lao Hui war-fund were actually hidden in this house, would be most likely to come here—the voice of Li Fu Ching, Koshinga’s cleverest agent, and head of the Peking branch of the Ko Lao Hui.

In the strange troop of events that had recently crowded my life, I think I had proven myself not easily unnerved; but of a sudden I found myself quivering. For if I were not mistaken that voice came from the room over which Hazard had mounted guard, and there was triumph in it.

I could not understand the words. I stole into the corridor, where Tsai Mu’i was standing motionless, seemingly tranced with fear. Beyond her I could see nothing but the open door, but now fragments of Li Fu Ching’s sentences came to me.

“At last—in my way many times, and it would rejoice me to—a bullet. But there is reason for silence. The false Ho Pu Bon’s death—yours also. You will walk—forward—still forward.”

He was promising Hazard the death that Ho Pu Bon had died. But what was that death? And how had the ever watchful Hazard been taken off his guard? I crept past Tsai Mu’i, warning her to continue silence with a look.

Hazard had not answered Li Fu Ching. Now I had gone to the floor, and was wriggling forward on my stomach serpent-like, hugging the wall. When I had got nearly to the door, I twisted over until my head was in the middle of the corridor. I saw Hazard first, and then Li Fu Ching.

Hazard had waded into the swimming-pool. He was knee-deep in that pool and was still moving stiffly and reluctantly forward. His hands were empty; the one revolver that he carried was lying near the edge of the pool, where he had been forced to drop it. Li Fu Ching was standing near the wall of the room, to my left, and his gun was trained on Hazard’s head.

Li Fu Ching and perhaps twenty others—Ko Lao Hui all, by the brutish faces of them. Behind them was an opening in the wall, where an invisible panel had slid back. It was through this opening, of course, that Li Fu Ching had got his gun upon Hazard.

Three other of his men also menaced Hazard with their revolvers, and of the remainder there was not one who did not have a gun somewhere in evidence, while deadly curved knives were thrust in the trousers’ belt of each, showing under their loose, unbuttoned blouses. They had come prepared to kill, and certainly Hazard seemed as helpless as any man ever was.

And yet, if I could read his face at all, things were not going altogether to Li Fu Ching’s expectation or liking. It seemed to me that puzzled wrinkles had come about his narrow, reptilian eyes.

“The false Ho Pu Bon’s death—yours also,” he had said; but Ho Pu Bon had died on the brink of the pool, while Hazard was nearing the center of it. And suddenly Li Fu Ching called out sharply:

“You will go no farther! You will stop!”

Hazard did what I should have expected him to do, considering the evidence in Li Fu Ching’s voice that something had gone wrong with the latter’s plans, and considering that Li Fu Ching would hardly shoot unless he was forced to, for fear of the sound arousing the curiosity of some belated passer-by. Hazard kept on advancing into the pool as if he did not understand Li Fu Ching’s command. And then….

What followed seemed to me to belong to the realms of nightmare, of delirium, rather than to sane reality.

Hazard had neared the center of the pool; he was now shoulder-deep in the water. Suddenly he sank. Or rather he was sucked down, as if, which was actually what had happened, the bottom of the pool had given way both from under his feet and from under the water in which he was nearly submerged. The water itself dropped, bearing him with it. Instantly it closed in from the sides, over Hazard’s head. Hazard had disappeared before Li Fu Ching could fire; and from the Chinaman came an enraged ejaculation.

“May a million devils torture him! May the forty-seventh hell be his abiding-place!”

The curses of Li Fu Ching’s men answered his own, but they were somewhat subdued by amazement. Then, almost as suddenly as it had begun, the downpouring of the water ceased, the lowered surface became quiet, and the partially emptied pool began to fill again from an inlet in the side.

V

AT THAT moment my mind was like a confused kaleidoscope, in which emotions and ideas pursued each other without sequence or relevance, impossible to halt and impossible to grasp.

But as soon as I got a grip on myself, I realized that what I had just seen, extraordinary as it was in itself, really fitted in well with all that had gone before. Especially it fitted in with the conclusion to which Hazard and I had come concerning the presence in this house of the vast loot of Koshinga.

The treasure was here; and certainly it would have been most surprizing had our uncanny opponent chosen commonplace means to guard it. The treasure lay hidden under the guarding pool into which Hazard had vanished, and by the side of which Ho Pu Bon, who had thought to make away with it, had died. Perhaps, I thought, Sha Feng’s disappearance might also be laid to the account of the mysterious pool. But Li Fu Ching, choking down his rage, was talking again.

“It matters but little. He has escaped for the moment, but for that escape he shall perhaps die more painfully. Yet it is strange that the death in the water has passed, and it is still more strange that the door of escape opened under him.”

“You forget that your servants are ignorant of these matters,” muttered a tall rascal standing near him. “This is only plain to me; that the ocean-borne one is a devil who should be given the death of the slicing process.”

“Because you abased yourself to become a house-coolie of the traitor Ho Pu Bon, and so discovered his purpose,” replied Li Fu Ching, “you shall have the killing of him, if he be taken alive. And since that which these waters have guarded is to be removed, your minds will be enlightened concerning all that is now hidden from you, for it is well that you should know the power of Koshinga’s weapons.

“But now I leave you. There is a way of emptying the pool of water other than that of stoppering the inlet pipe, which Ho Pu Bon intended—a way that I hid from him, else he would not have died this death. It was even foolish of me, under Koshinga, to trust him with the secret of the death that lay in the water. He who betrays Koshinga dies; but if it had not been for your good work Ho Pu Bon might have lived annoyingly long.”

“Then the thing that my master did,” questioned the other, “when his low-born servant led him here after telling him of the strange and suspicion-inspiring acts of Ho Pu Bon, was to put the death back into the water again, which the base Ho Pu Bon had contrived to take out of it? So that Ho Pu Bon, thinking that all remained as he had left it, came back to the house, and was stricken even as he set foot into the water?”

“You have intelligently stated the matter. Now you will wait here until I return.”

And Li Fu Ching, forgetting not to bow gracefully to his companions, backed through the opening in the wall and was gone. Whereupon they who remained began to talk to each other in tones so low that I could make nothing of it, save that an occasional cackling, cruel-sounding laugh convinced me that they were discussing the trick their master had played upon Ho Pu Bon, and the way he had walked unsuspectingly to his death.

Well, so much was plain to me. Now I understood the reason for Ho Pu Bon’s death, if not entirely the manner of it; now I understood the dread significance that had really lain in the saying Hazard had quoted to me, “The treasure of Koshinga will be found only under the waters of death.” But it was for only an instant that I puzzled fruitlessly to discover the nature of that death. That was not so immediately pertinent as another and a very terrible problem that confronted me.

The number of men Li Fu Ching had brought with him made it evident that Hazard’s surmise concerning the intention of the Ko Lao Hui immediately to remove the treasure to another hiding-place was correct. Here was my problem: Should I lie quiet, and then attempt to trail the bearers of that treasure? Or should I instead bend my energies to rescuing Hazard, who without help was plainly doomed?

Concerning the rescue, with the odds twenty to one against me, and with Hazard caught in a trap of which I knew nothing, I could see little hope of success. On the other hand I could easily hope to follow the Chinese, who were as yet unsuspicious of my presence. Also, I may as well state, I did not yet share Hazard’s conviction that the recovery of the stolen loot was apt to prove a misfortune in disguise. And yet I hesitated; and it was probably as well for my future opinion of my own sense of values that my decision was postponed.

Logically, of course, there could be no hesitation. Logically one man’s life should hang pitifully small in the balance against any phase of Koshinga’s world-threatening plot. But that one man happened to be my friend. Friendship is not a logical thing, nor are its attributes. I wished fervently that I had only to weigh my own life against Hazard’s.

I had not long to worry over the matter; and, curiously, the only thing that came out of my wrestling with myself was a sudden partial divination of Tsai Mu’i’s part in this affair. Sha Feng, she had said, had summoned us. Sha Feng, she had asserted stoutly, and against the evidence of our search, was still here. Did Sha Feng’s imperiled existence in this house of death affect her in the same manner that Hazard’s peril affected me? Was that why she had risked her life to lead us here, why she continued to risk her life by staying? Of a sudden her wretched beggar’s mask slipped off, and….

But what was that?

I had seen a slight agitation of the surface of the water in the middle of the pool—an almost imperceptible agitation. But it was moving slowly toward me. It was moving, indeed, straight toward the end of the diving-chute which dipped into the water, and it was such a disturbance as might be made by a man swimming very cautiously, close to the bottom. The Chinese, still chattering among themselves, had not noticed it.

My tightened muscles relaxed. A warm glow crept over me. My relief was unspeakable, for surely this was Hazard.

So desire forces conviction contrary to the facts, for it was not Hazard.

A minute later the tell-tale wrinkling of the water reached the end of the diving-chute. For just an instant the face of the swimmer was lifted above the edge of that chute, into which he had forced himself noiselessly. It was the yellow, placid, middle-aged face of Sha Feng.

I held my breath while he stole that glance, but the Chinese did not see him. He marked their position and also mine; and then ducked down again. The unsuspecting Chinese continued muttering together, intent on whatever they were discussing. And slowly, very slowly, as I pictured it, Sha Feng began working upward along the bottom of the chute, edging inch by inch, pressing with elbows and knees wide-spread against the low, curving sides. Slowly, of necessity very slowly, though he worked so carefully that I could not hear the slightest sound of his movements.

But I knew he was coming. Presently his immobile face, the color of fine old parchment, appeared above the upper end of the chute, which was just inside the door. His wide-lidded, bright eyes looked at me inquiringly. And indeed this was a precarious moment; he had only to descend the steps, when one stride would take him into the corridor, but during that descent he would be in full view of the Chinese. However, Li Fu Ching would soon be returning; then there would be a diversion. I made a sign to Sha Feng to wait.

Questions pressed themselves upon me. That Sha Feng and Hazard had met and talked I knew, for how otherwise would Sha Feng have known exactly where to look for the Ko Lao Hui? But how had Sha Feng escaped, why had Hazard remained behind, and why had Sha Feng remained imprisoned in that vault under the water until Hazard, by the sheerest chance, had been projected into it?

And, most important of all, how could Sha Feng’s release be turned to account in rescuing Hazard and in winning the money away from the Ko Lao Hui? I grew befuddled in puzzling over these unanswerable questions.

“The water flows no longer into the pool, which will soon empty itself; for I have opened a second and greater drain in the bottom. Then shall come to you knowledge of the craft of Koshinga in guarding what is his and to the foreign devil knowledge of the fate of those who oppose him.”

It was the voice of Li Fu Ching, come back from his errand. As I had expected, no sooner did the Ko Lao Hui receive this information, than they drifted in a body over to the edge of the pool, to watch the receding water. They stopped near Ho Pu Bon’s dead body, their backs toward us; and I motioned swiftly to Sha Feng. He descended the ladder nimbly and absolutely without a sound, and stepped into the corridor.