The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (57 page)

Again Hazard nodded, and I went on with a queer weak feeling of triumph.

“Then comes Li Fu Ching, and the spy that informed him of Ho Pu Bon’s plan to steal the money, and Koshinga. Naturally they’d flood the pool that Sha Feng had emptied, switch on the electricity that Ho Pu Bon had switched off; and Li Fu Ching and his man left for help to carry away the treasure. Koshinga hid somewhere. Then Ho Pu Bon came back—and died of the death that had been put back into the water.

“Then we enter. But by that time Sha Feng must have discovered some way of controlling the current from inside the vault—another switch. He must have heard us talking and been uncertain whether we were friends or enemies, for we talked so low he couldn’t hear our words. Being uncertain, he kept the electricity out of the water, but didn’t call to us. Then I left the room and you stayed and Li Fu Ching came back again.”

Hazard’s lips moved, and I thought that he asked—

“How do you know these things?”

“Because it’s the only way, the only way things could have happened. As you have told me,” I smiled, “ ‘there’s only one possible cause for an accurately determined effect.’ Well, Li Fu Ching came back, and you were driven into the water; and you were lucky enough to find the button which controlled the door with your foot. So you joined Sha Feng and together you— No, Sha Feng must have already arranged the trap which did for the Ko Lao Hui. He must have arranged a way of electrifying the water which had accumulated in the bottom of the vault. The cable must have been insulated, he could drag it from its fastening, and—and so he came out and you remained. That’s been explained. But how did he come out?

“I know,” I answered my own question hastily. “There’s only one way again. The way men escape from crippled submarines. That manhole was really an iron tube, with a partition in the middle and a removable cap on the end. I see the partition closed, the cap removed, the lower part of the tube drained of water, Sha Feng inside it.

“Now you replace the cap, open the partition and let in the water, and Sha Feng swims up into the pool. Reason for this arrangement, and for the arrangement whereby the water could be electrified from within the pool as well as from without? Koshinga’s fondness for secret hiding-places, inexplicable ways of escape and hidden weapons. Is all this right, Hazard?”

Hazard was now only a dark blur before my eyes, but I thought that he inclined his head.

“I wanted to know. My ruling passion,” I tried to smile, “curiosity. And now, now,” and I knew the swift rushing in my veins and the pounding in my ears and the sense of lightness that possessed me for the coming of delirium, “now we go to drag down the devil from the high places, and to fight the forces of hell upon earth.”

It was delirium, but it was not so far from the truth. Hazard tells me that after a minute I murmured again:

“There is a man with us who should be distrusted, although he is mad. And although he saved my life by shooting away the barb and the poison from my arm. A new way of cauterizing— But he should be distrusted because he is a ——”

And then I slept again, for days upon days, while the caravan slowly made its way westward across the Gobi. Sometimes I knew that I was walking in my sleep. Indeed, I learned afterward that after the first week of that journey my body seemed to have entirely thrown off the effect of the poison and that there were many things that I did automatically. It was only my mind that remained dormant. I am told that there are certain known poisons that may be combined to produce that effect if a quantity is injected into the blood that is just short of sufficient to produce death.

After a long time I got the impression that there was trouble. Of trouble about food, which some one would not sell us; camels, the owners of which refused longer to serve us; and donkeys, which could not be hired. We were in a village which was called Kan Chow; a starved, perishing ghost of a village, with mud-brick huts all tumble-down, and ruinous. The faces of the people were brown, gaunt and hopeless, but they sneered and gibed at us savagely.

“Clearly, the enemy’s been here before us,” said some one in a voice that sounded like Hazard’s.

And it seemed to me that we left that town on foot with a hundred savage voices shouting after us:

“He who was Lao-tse the mighty,

Who was Gautama, maker of gods—

He comes again, even Koshinga.

The priests will tell of it, the white paper will talk.

The warriors will gather under his banner.

Ten thousand dragons will come to assist him.

Sha! Shao!
(Kill! Burn!) Koshinga comes.”

Then suddenly I came to my senses entirely and for keeps. It was the crash of revolver shots breaking into an absolute stillness that did the work. There were four of us lost in an immeasurable world of sand. To the right this sand was level as a floor to the horizon; but to the left it ran up in ascending even-surfaced ridges to a blackness of mountain-tops in the distance. And it was from over the top of one of those ridges which we had been about to climb that the shots came.

I went to my face in the sand. Hazard and Sha Feng did likewise. The Unknown, the man with the burning eyes, cried out as he fell; and then there was a thud, as if his head had struck upon a projecting rock. I reached for my revolver and found it and with a great rush of joy because I was myself again, jerked it down upon the seemingly empty sand-dune.

“There’s one thing to do,” I said, and the quietness of my own voice surprized me. “Advance by rushes; that’s the ticket. Clearly we can’t stay here.”

“Partridge!” Hazard cried incredulously. And then, “Thank God, thank God!”

VIII

AHEAD of us there was a slight rustling. It might have been the wind stirring a bush, had there been a bush on all that lifeless landscape. A Chinaman’s face poked cautiously over the top of the ridge. I fired and the face disappeared, but I knew from a spurt of sand that I had missed. Four yellow hands clutching revolvers appeared suddenly. Four more shots were fired, and one of the bullets dusted my face with sand.

My sudden return to reason had startled Sha Feng and Hazard into momentary forgetfulness of their danger. But now they turned their faces ahead again. I saw that Sha Feng’s hand seemed well accustomed to the feel of his revolver, and instantly I began to squirm ahead. Whoever were our enemies, I felt that I could trust my companions to keep them down.

A revolver cracked behind me. I didn’t look up, but my ears told me that one of our attackers had tried for a shot, had been himself struck, had struggled to his feet and fallen to the sand again, where he lay quiet. Now I stopped my advance, leveled my own gun at the ridge and waited for Hazard or Sha Feng to go past me.

It was Hazard who came, crawling swiftly. Then Sha Feng passed both of us and took up a position at the bottom of the ridge. A moment later the three of us, creeping abreast, had reached the crest of it. A dead Chinaman sprawled grotesquely on top of the crest.

A glittering lizard peered at us inquiringly from a rounded heap of sand, unafraid, its very instinct for danger destroyed, so long had it been since any other form of life had invaded this desolation. There was nothing else; the unique and profound desert stillness, through which I now vaguely remember traveling for a long time, had settled down again. And yet Death must lurk very near. We kept down.

“What is this? Where— Who are they?” I whispered.

“Hush. Ko Lao Hui, sent out to stop us.”

Hazard had twisted half-way around, and was looking back toward the place where we had left our fallen companion, he whom I, even in my own madness, had declared to be mad.

“By ——!” Hazard cried sharply, and fired.

Now of course, although this whole flurry of action had for me no easily assignable immediate cause, I had up to this point accepted it readily enough, and without wonder. I did not know where we were nor where we were going; but Hazard and I had for a year lived under sentence of death by Koshinga, and always and everywhere we were in danger of attack by his followers. But the next instant I was witnessing unmistakable proof that this was no ordinary attack, and if recklessness of life be courage, I was also witnessing as fine an example of that quality as I had ever seen.

THE three Chinese who were left alive had gone over the crest of the ridge a little way above us, and were running on bare and nearly noiseless feet toward the still motionless body of the man we had left behind us. They had chanced their lives on our not looking back that way—a slender chance enough. One man fell, shot fatally through the chest, but the other two kept on regardless. Plainly their continued existence had no value beside the motive that urged them.

I pulled the trigger, and Hazard’s and Sha Feng’s revolvers made a simultaneous report. We shot to kill; we had to, for they were very near our companion. Two were down and done for. The third and last man flung himself at full length beside the motionless white man and thrust a swift hand inside the white man’s soiled jacket. For a moment the popping of our guns was like the sound of a rapid-firer, and then the Chinaman collapsed.

“Now if they had only known—” muttered Hazard grimly and then checked himself with a doubtful look at my face.

“What did they want?” I asked. “What is the meaning of all this?” Questions came in a rush to my lips, but Hazard was already hurrying down the rounded side of the sand ridge and Sha Feng and I followed him. Was I mistaken in thinking that Hazard, before he turned away, had shot a warning look at Sha Feng, accompanied by an almost imperceptible shake of the head?

What was this? Was there something that they had, in that swift exchange of glances, agreed not to tell me?

“Who is he?” I tried another question. “The white man, I mean?”

“His honorable name is Blalock,” replied Sha Feng. “He leads us to where the devil that is called Koshinga prepares to—”

“Lend a hand here, Partridge,” interrupted Hazard, who was by now bending over the man whom Sha Feng called Blalock. “It’s only a slight wound in the shoulder—see. His unconsciousness is caused by this blow on his head. He’ll soon be out of it. If you’ll get his coat off and peel back his sleeve—”

Hazard had doffed his knapsack, and was getting out a roll of bandage. He carried a small water-bag, too, and Sha Feng and Blalock were similarly equipped. It was the first time I had noticed it. I busied myself as he directed, resisting the impulse to take advantage of my opportunity of discovering what it was that Blalock carried that the Chinamen had so desperately attempted to secure. It was inside his shirt, for I could feel it there; it rustled like parchment, and then:

“Believe me, old man,” said Hazard gently, “it will be better if you don’t— And now,” he went on quickly, “let’s see to this wound.”

We dressed it, a simple enough task, and while we dressed it I questioned Hazard.

“I don’t remember a thing—hardly,” I said. “How long have I been out?”

“It’s been nearly two months, Partridge, since we found Koshinga’s loot. We left Peking that same morning, only waiting to notify the Government House of our find and to see to Tsai Mu’i’s safety.”

“Two months. And all that time—traveling?”

Hazard nodded.

“Where are we?”

“Pretty well over the edge. This is the Western Gobi, Central Kansu. These mountains to the south are the Nan Shan. We left the last town yesterday, Kan Chow. This used to be a trade route, the principal trade route into Turkestan and East Asia and Europe, but now you see the desert has conquered. Even Kan Chow is going.”

“Ah!” I said rather vacantly. “I remember that town.”

“You see,” Hazard went on quickly, as if to divert my mind from these disclosures, “the desert keeps creeping down. This afternoon, when the wind comes up, you’ll have a chance to observe the process. There used to be cities to the north; they’re buried; and where we’ve been walking were foot-hills; they’re buried, too. And—” he paused and regarded me steadily—“you’ve heard of the Sacred Pass?”

“Heard of it!” Instantly I was all eagerness. “Why, Hazard, you know—”

“We
hope,
” he said, “that we’re on our way to it.”

“Then Koshinga is going to—”

“Wait a minute.”

Having finished with Blalock, Hazard was about to examine the motionless Chinamen. But Sha Feng had already done that, and he announced the result impassively—

“All dead.”

Whereupon Hazard turned to me again.

“I was right about Koshinga’s next move, or at least he,” and Hazard indicated the still unconscious Blalock, “assures me that I was. And perhaps you remember Koshinga’s words when he found he was about to lose his war-fund. Koshinga’s about to make his biggest play, and his most dangerous, to himself and to the Republic and to the world. He’s about to produce the proof of the claim of his followers that he’s the rightful head of the Buddhist and the Taoist hierarchies, as well as of the Ko Lao Hui. If he succeeds, the revolution is an achieved fact, already successful, whatever becomes of Koshinga. If he fails—but if he’s left to himself, he won’t fail. And Blalock here has a plan—”

“Blalock!” I looked distrustfully at his haggard, unconscious face, full of sagging lines of weakness. “Why Blalock’s plan?”

“Why, he’s our guide here, the only man who knows the way. But you’d better let him tell you when—”

“He should know the way,” I cried sharply, pausing in my act of passing the end of the bandage under Blalock’s armpit.

“Why?” There was a hurried, anxious note in Hazard’s voice that convinced me that he knew what I had found even before I pointed it out to him—pointed out that tiny, indelible brand, composed of three Chinese characters intertwined, with which we had long known that each member of Koshinga’s Inner Circle of Lesser Rulers was marked. A means of easy identification in case of broken faith, I suppose, and here it was, under Blalock’s arm.