The Adventure Megapack

by Wildside Press

  Shattuck would recognize that narrow gorge when he saw it—he would recognize it from what he was seeing now.

  * * * *

  Several times the Bogdo seemed to be on the point of speech again, and each time that he did so Shattuck caught some fleeting vision in which the movement and the figures were confused by a red mist. Each time when the red mist was shaping itself into something definite, the Bogdo made an erasing gesture in front of him with his slender hand and the unformed picture disappeared.

  Finally he murmured two words, which John Day translated:

  “Acquire merit!”

  The Bogdo reached out and touched his teacup as if he were about to drink. It was a ceremonial gesture meaning that the audience was ended.…

  The Soaring Meditation Lamasery of the Lesser Valley—as the place was known—was like a series of setback houses against a steep mountain slope. As Shattuck and his new prime minister came out on an upper terrace they both could tell by the stars that the night was already far gone.

  “It is time that I hit the road,” said Shattuck.

  “Pel—Captain—”

  “Make it Pel.”

  “I’m going with you.”

  “You’re not. I’m Captain Trouble. I’m even the Fighting Fool. I saw a blood-red mist when the Bogdo talked. You’re not a man of blood.”

  “The camp is debauched and drunk. You’ll have no one to help you.”

  “So much the better.”

  “You can’t go alone. These are gun-runners—all fighting men.”

  “His holiness, the Bogdo, saw me fighting them there alone. So did I. That’s why he mentioned that place where one man can turn them back. Is there a horse in the stables with a chestnut coat and a white mane?”

  “Torang! The abbot’s own! If he showed him to you in the vision he meant you to have him.”

  For an interval John Day closed his eyes. During that interval he had become Champela, the mystic desciple of Buddha again. He opened his eyes with a changed expression.

  “I have just received a message myself from the Bogdo,” he said.

  “What about?”

  “I’m not sure myself. Follow me.”

  They went down a dozen flights of steps as narrow and as steep, as ladders. Most of the time they were in almost complete darkness. Only here and there a butter-lamp burned.

  They came into a dusky temple room and there, without hesitation, Champela, again the mystic, went over to where a monumental statue of Buddha reared its height and breadth into the shadows from a breast-high platform. The front of this platform Champela raised like the lid of a coffer. Into this receptacle he stood gazing for a few seconds with a rapt attention.

  Then he drew out a long object swathed in fold after fold of silk.

  “What is it?” Shattuck whispered.

  The young lama also whispered, but his voice was thrilling.

  “Something else the Bogdo is sending you— the sword of Kubla Khan!”

  CHAPTER VIII

  When Chief Juma awoke to the fact that his adopted son, Dak (the nearest he’d ever got to Shattuck) had put the wind between them he was very disconsolate.

  Like many another hillman, nature had been generous to him in the matter of height. He was all of six feet seven in his well-worn chaplies, the sandals he stuck to in winter as in summer. And physically he was as tough as a bundle of rattan. But he was at an age when he was prone to go over and over the same story time and again.

  And now that “Dak” was gone, he was worse than ever in this respect. Formerly he’d had a number of favorite stories—how he’d killed this or that blood enemy, how he’d robbed whole caravans single-handed.

  But now he could think of only that one story.

  He’d come on this crazy young sahib (Shattuck) back in the hills being more or less neglected by some roaming Kazaks. After all, even Kazaks may treat a crazy man no worse than a dog. And he was about to pass up the incident when, by mere chance, he learned from a renegade Afghan the sort of battle the lad had put up against great odds while trying to raid a government gold mine.

  Thereupon, in the hope of merit in heaven and also, perhaps, a few honest rupees from the sahibs to whom this lad evidently belonged, he’d sought to turn “Dak” over to the English. But the cow-eaters wouldn’t have him at any price.

  He’d done something that had made him skip out of the country of the Oross, the English had said. Then he’d got into this battle in Kafiristan.

  After that, Juma wouldn’t have parted with the boy anyway—not at any price. He’d nurtured the lad like his own child; He’d spent a year’s income on prayers and medicines for him. As a result, the boy came out of his dream. And having come out of his dream he’d put the healing touch on Juma’s own eye-trouble.

  * * * *

  Juma couldn’t understand it. They’d loved each other like father and son. Why had “Dak” put the wind between them?

  And so it went on and on, day after day. Until the mother of the girl Mahree came and told Juma the tale she’d learned from Mahree herself.

  “Now, by Allah and all the fiends of Gehenna,” said Juma, “had Dak but whispered it to me I’d given him the girl as readily as I would have given him anything else I won. Didn’t he restore my sight?”

  After that, he kept his band on the move. He was looking for “Dak.” Over high passes and into valleys he’d almost forgotten, into villages where there were unsettled blood-claims against him, into forbidden temples and lamaseries—there was no place where Juma wouldn’t go in the pursuit of that strange search of his.

  To make matters worse, Mahree was getting older. Also, she was gaining in beauty. He’d never gone in for purdah nonsense. He was able to take care of his women. But he’d have to wrap the girl up in a burgua at that, if he wanted to keep her for “Dak.” He was getting higher and higher offers for her all he time.

  Then, one day, Juma came on a fakir sitting naked on a glacier. And the devout neighbors assured Juma that the holy man had sat like that, unmoving since the last new moon. That meant the fakir had suffered killing frost for more than ten days. Yet he showed not the slightest ill affects from it. The man was holy.

  When Juma went to see him, the holy man came out of his period of meditation and said:

  “He whom you call your son is near death.”

  Juma said: “Sick?”

  “No! In bloody battle!”

  “Praise God, at least for that,” said Juma. “Where?”

  “I see—wait!—a lamasery in a little valley— a cleft between two hills—and there thy son is as one against a hundred——”

  The sadhu stopped as if he’d never spoken at all.

  “Where?” screamed Juma. “Or I’ll tear you——”

  The sadhu looked up at him unmoved. And Juma, for the first time in his life, began to quaver.

  “Where, O holy one? See, I am getting old!”

  The holy one looked at him with compassion. He made a forward movement with his hand to indicate a direction.

  “That way—until the sun goes down!”

  Juma turned and strode away as he stood. He didn’t have his gun. He hadn’t dared carry it into the presence of the holy one as he’d wanted to be sure of having his questions answered. But he had his knife. And the hills were rich in rocks of throwing and hammering size.

  He’d covered a mile before he discovered that he was followed. It was that curse of a female, the cause of it all, the girl Mahree.

  He tried to drive her back.

  But to his amazement and her own, she defied him.

  “Since when,” she shrilled, “is a woman forbidden to fight for her man?”

  CHAPTER IX

  With Torang between his knees and the sword of Kubla Khan held close to his breast Shadak Khan, Captain Trouble, the Fighting Fool, was off to fight he didn’t know exactly what.

  Long ago he had known someone called Pelham—Rutledge—Shattuck. The name kept time to Torang’s s
wift but easy lope. Pelham— Rutledge—Shattuck——

  But it wasn’t he—it wasn’t he—who’d sat on a mountain throne and looked into the eyes of his subjects. It wasn’t he who’d stood in the presence of a reincarnated Buddha and heard his fortune told. It wasn’t he who rode an abbot’s horse down a long dark valley with the sword of a great warlord against his breast.

  No, those were pages from the life of Shadak Khan—Captain Trouble—Fighting Fool—

  There came to the reincarnation who was himself the sharp pang of a realizing thought. The thought was this—that he might be riding to his death. He remembered the red mist—the half-seen astral pictures that the Bogdo had wiped away with his slender white hand, the old man’s final words:

  “Acquire merit!”

  How? If death was the way, he’d take his chance!

  He looked up just in time to see a meteor slide across the sky. It wouldn’t be so bad to go like that.

  He felt a sense of elation. It was as if the sword against his breast were coming to life— taking on a warmth of its own. It had no scabbard. The blade was a long strong scimitar, yet so exquisitely balanced to the hilt it could be handled like a wand.

  He flashed it about his head. It sang.

  To that faint note Torang let out a link or two of speed. In this light the gelding’s dark body was invisible. His white mane and tail glinted along like a pair of detached specters.

  It was this dash of white in the dark that had given the horse his name. Torang!—the first glint of daybreak; a high cloud shining white while the earth was dark.

  There was a cloud like that hanging over the easterly summits when Shattuck passed the camp where, last night, the two old governors would have given him aconite. He spat in their direction.

  It was a gesture as much for all their gorging, guzzling, lecherous herd of human swine as it was for them. And these were the men who’d barter for a revolution!

  Before you could revolute a land you had to revolute yourself!

  So said the heir to the blade of Kubla Khan.

  The thought was still with him when the valley suddenly twisted and went into a corridor like that of some overwhelming ruin. He was at the very lips of the wolf’s open jaws.

  He didn’t know how to pray but some instinct was telling him that the moment was solemn and that he ought to do something.

  He reined in Torang, with a swift hand. He raised the sword of the great khan Kubla straight up above his head. His head went down. For a moment he was thinking of the strange John Day.

  “I sure would be glad to be good enough,” he whispered, “to have him not as a prime minister— you’re crazy!—but merely as a friend.”

  A moment later he was stirred from his reverie by some faint spasm of nervous excitement that ran through Torang’s lithe frame. It was like a faint current of electricity, a silent telephone call. Torang had arched his neck. His slender ears were focusing on a distant sound.

  A moment later, Shattuck was hearing the sound himself—the faint, far-off clink and clank of camel bells.

  CHAPTER X

  The gorge of “The Wolf”—literally the throat—ran between towering cliffs for a twisted mile, and pretty bad going all the way. After the primordial earthquake had riven the mountains apart, a stream—or recurrent streams— had scoured out the bottom, leaving a debris of footless boulders, causing a cave-in here and a dike there and a pit like an elephant trap somewhere else.

  The caravan-master knew all this. He had been through the gorge time and again before. It used to be part of the regular opium route until the old Bogdo of the Soaring Meditation Lamasery put an end to it.

  The Bogdo was known to have great powers. Otherwise he would have “taken the aconite” a long time ago. There had often been talk among the caravan-master and his band that they could raid the lamasery and make their fortunes at it.

  The place was isolated. There wasn’t a drunken, brawling, dok-dokpa about the place— not a fighting man of any kind. And it was generally known that into the mountain back of every monastery the treasure caves were being dug deeper and deeper every year. That sort of thing had been going on for centuries. The treasure of even a rundown old lamasery like that of the Soaring Meditation would be enough to buy Japan.

  But they’d never tried to make a raid. They didn’t dare. The Bogdo had a reputation of being in league with certain ghosts.

  It was that matter of ghosts as much as the uncertain footing of the gorge that had caused the caravan-master—a pastmaster in timing, like all good smugglers—to bring his weary train to the outer mouth of the gorge just at the “peak-shining” hour.

  No more ghosts after peak-shining. And there would be light enough, although night got clogged in the narrow defile and stuck there like a fog until late morning.

  He didn’t dare halt now, even for a minute. Camels were peculiar creatures. You could keep them going and going—as he had this time—

  “Kwa-chi-cheng!”

  One forced march on top of another. But let up on them, after a race like that, and the beasts would flop down and die in their tracks. Besides, inside the valley there were good grazing and water. Outside, there was none.

  Still in the lead and only half awake the caravan-master pushed on into the gorge. He’d scarcely entered it before there was a clattering of hoofs and he saw a lone horseman in the shadows ahead.

  From the moment the caravan-master saw this man he felt the approach of trouble—a dark horse with a white mane and tail. Then, to a sharp increase of his trouble, he saw that the man in front of him was unquestionably white.

  The man came ambling toward him at a good swift track and didn’t stop or speak until the caravan-master’s own camel stopped.

  “I know you,” said the man on the horse. His Chinese was that of Pechili, with a good snap to it. “You’re Wong Tajen.” It was as if to say, “Wong the Big Man.”

  Wong was beginning to simmer.

  “This is no place to halt my caravan,” he said.

  He guessed the fellow might be a Russian. He’d heard about big fights between opposing clans of the Oross beyond the Gobi.

  “I’m halting it, Big Man.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Don’t talk to me from a camel. Dismount!”

  Big Man’s ears were picking up tell-tale sounds from back of him as squad after squad of camels came to a halt.

  “Dismount and send your camel ahead or all the camels will be lying down on you. You know that, Fathead.”

  Wong did know it. He’d been handling camels for the better part of thirty years. But not for twenty years had anyone dared call him ta-tou, “fathead,” except a fresh tax-collector whom later he’d slowly killed.

  With a curse and grunt he rolled himself from the riding camel he was on. The beast was already smelling grass and water and lurched ahead. The camel that followed also lurched. As it did so, something amazing happened. It shed its load—one heavy box to either side.

  A sword had flashed across the pack rope—a mere swish, and the rope had parted.

  Even while Wong was rolling from his camel he’d found the grip of the revolver he carried in the breast of his sheepskin coat. He got that far when he stopped to think. This man might have an army back of him. Already two camels were past—his favorite of all the camels he’d ever slept on, leading the way.

  The thought meant hesitation; the hesitation lost him his chance and two other camels. Two other loads had crashed down.

  “Hands up and face the rock, you!”—this fellow spoke like no Russian.

  There was a needle of steel against Wong’s neck.

  Wong’s nerves were tuned to small things. In that needlepoint against his neck he could detect not the slightest quaver—no skipping, no torture.

  His hands were up. His face was to the rock.

  There were shocks of falling boxes, the grunt and scramble and heave of camels becoming frenzied by a prospect of camel heaven after a long, h
ard drag through camel hell.

  And the fellow kept talking all the time— slanging the camel pullers and laughing at them; he was driving them back along the gorge as fast as he slit the lashings of the heavy freight. “Hey, you, Big Man! Why don’t you ask me who I am?”

  “Who?”—and Wong dared to turn.

  “Hands still up, or I’ll slit your throat as you did the widow’s in the Traveling Sands!”

  That was the most secret murder that Wong had ever done. His eyes were beginning to pop. The man leaned down from his horse— Torang wasn’t very tall—and found with his left hand the pistol in Wong’s breast. Wong felt a faint breath of courage when the white devil searched no further—else he’d found a second pistol lower down.

  “Who are you, duke?” Wong asked placatingly.

  “Not ‘duke,’ kahn!” He stopped to sever the ropes on two more camels and Wong had snatched his second pistol higher. “Shadak Kahn!—all same Captain Trouble. You savvy, Captain Trouble?”

  Shadak Khan turned to yell at a camel puller who was trying to stop a camel by the nose-rope. The camel-puller was either stupid or deaf. He raised apologetic frightened eyes to the horse-riding duke and pulled harder than ever.

  At that instant there was a crashing report—it sounded like a hand-grenade, there in the rocky confines of the gorge.

  Shattuck felt a blaze of heat at his side as if his coat had caught on fire. But before he’d take note of this—more swiftly than Wong the Big Man could fire his Number Two gun a second time—Shattuck lunged. Like a thing alive and self-directed the sword of Kubla Khan slit the Big Man’s throat.

  CHAPTER XI

  Tibetans are early risers. Their climate has made them so. Late night and morning hold about the only golden hours they ever know. Along about midday the horrible wind comes up—the buran, the hideous dry gale that blows stronger and stronger under a blanched and cloudless sky.

  As often as not the people of Tibet will be up and about well before daylight even after a night of debauch.

  It was so this morning in the little valley, in the camp of the two old governors, Tsarong and his brother. Then the black-faced fighting lamas where thirsty and on the prowl for fresh adventure so early—or so late—that there had practically, been no night for them at all. And the dokpas were the first to note that queer invasion of camels from the Throat of the Wolf. They were a superstitious lot, those dokpas—none more so, since to each of them had come, some time or other, manifestations of powers they could not understand.