Truly, the gathering of the junkmen illustrated that principle, but I couldn’t believe it was our danger of which Hazard was thinking.
“It’ll be night by the time the dike is finished,” said I, with a look at the westering sun.
“Yes,” said Hazard.
We ate—crammed ourselves at Hazard’s suggestion—from a supply of hard-boiled eggs, corn bread and plantains Hazard had cached in the cabin. The laboring coolies didn’t stop to eat. They were in a hurry to get through with their work and with us.
It was about sunset when they patted smooth with their bare feet the top of the dike, which rose about a foot above the surface of the water. At that sign of completion, Hazard rose, went to the prow of the boat and from under the forward thwart drew a large roll of blankets. He brought them back ’midship and began to make another bundle of Mu Ting’s bedding, which was inside the cabin.
“Sometimes it pays to travel like an immigrant,” smiled Hazard. “The dike’s our home from now on.”
The crew of the junk, their work completed, were gathered in a knot on the nearly leveled bank. They were discussing something. When the knot broke and they started singly over the plank bridge to the junk—veritable mud-larks, almost entirely naked, like creatures of another world—I knew Hazard was right.
Dull animosity sat with a scowl upon each man’s face. They had determined to be done with us after the payment. As for us, of course, it wouldn’t have been safe to have spent the night on the junk with them.
“We might buy those planks,” I suggested to Hazard. “They’d keep us out of the mud.”
“We’ll try it.”
But the laodah, master of the junk, developed absolute incapacity to understand me when I made the offer. And, when Mu Ting herself addressed him, at my request, he refused in sudden hot anger and motioned us off the junk.
Standing on the dike, we watched our late servants paddle swiftly away to join the ever-lengthening line of our enemies. Then Hazard and I laid down our blankets, and, while the purple and gold died out of the haze that covered the land and in the west the sun sank with a last flare of crimson, we carried some rocks from where the dike joined the bank so we could at least sit dry through the night.
We spent the night there, Mu Ting, Hazard and I. Hazard and I arranged a sentry go, for it was possible we would be attacked before morning. It depended, we agreed, upon when Li Fu Ching arrived. Until then the junkmen evidently only had orders to watch us while we traveled, close in upon us when we stopped and prepare to destroy us at command. Naturally, Li Fu Ching himself must be present at the dénouement, else where would be his chance of attaching the pearls?
I think for Mu Ting the night passed most easily. Most of her race could sleep quite soundly standing on their heads in sugar barrels, which is a quality worth considering. But Hazard also demonstrated that he had learned the trick of sleeping under difficulties. I did quite well toward morning, but most of the night I spent watching the lights of the junks, like evilly vigilant eyes, extend to right and left, in peering into the black depths of the cave, where water no longer glimmered in the moonlight, and wondering what riddle the morning would read.
Hazard would have me think he had already read that riddle. I doubted it. I doubted his every pretension. Particularly I doubted his pretended knowledge of a way out of this predicament. I hoped that he and I, and brave little Mu Ting, too, would live to understand the mystery of the cave, but I felt that for the three of us this understanding would only be preliminary to exploring, before another sunset, the greater mystery of Death.
IV
BUT morning is a miracle, in the way it brings us strength. Perhaps the sun has seldom risen on a trio more depressingly situated, but, as the east paled and the light came, something like cheerfulness came over us.
At least we were still alive. The center of the line of junks was no nearer to us, although up-stream and down-stream it curved in until its ends impinged against the shore. And every minute we could see further into the mysterious depths of the cave.
We could see further into it, for the rays of the rising sun, increasing in strength, shone directly through the opening. From the front of the cave, at least, the water had entirely receded. As far as we could see, the nearly dry bottom sloped downward steeply, its own rock surface covered with other rocks of all sizes, some of them shattered into fragments, as if they’d been flung forcibly into that cave and dashed against its floor.
“Now,” said Hazard, who had viewed all this with a peculiar air of satisfaction, “let’s get busy. Mu Ting, are you ready?”
The Chinese girl, who had been placidly rearranging the end of her long, black braid, rose smiling the eternal smile of the East.
“Whatever the honorable Megwa scholar wishes,” she murmured in her musical voice.
“It’s best to hurry,” I agreed. “Li Fu Ching can’t be long coming, if he’s not already here.”
Hazard nodded agreement and began helping Mu Ting down the steep, muddy side of the dike. We all moved with some difficulty, being still chilled and stiff, from the night’s exposure. But my own physical hardships, at least, were easily enough disregarded. Also, once I’d turned away from them, I found it not hard to force to the background of my mind thought of the vulture-like junks outside.
Ahead of us was treasure, perhaps, but certainly knowledge. Perhaps we’d find there all that we hoped, justification of our reasoning, fulfillment of our dream—but more probably, I now thought, we’d learn that we had conceived a wild chimera and that our carefully worked out plan but led into a blind alley of destruction.
If I’d permitted myself to think of it, I should have known that, once we had disappeared into the cave, the junkmen would unquestionably close in upon the mouth of it and take our place upon the dike.
This they’d do in literal obedience to their orders not to lose touch with us. My imagination balked at conceiving how we would escape then. It was because of that I forbore thinking of them. I’d elected to follow Hazard, and I would follow him, but there are limits to every one’s courage, and I’d come to sparing mine.
We got in some fashion or other to the bottom of the dike and began clambering over the rocks, down the inclined bottom of the cave. Hazard and I kept pretty much side by side in front, while Mu Ting followed us closely. The almost level rays of the sun penetrated a long way ahead of us, but as yet we could see no end to the cave. Presently Hazard stopped and stirred something with his foot.
“Look here!” There was a slight note of satisfaction in his voice.
It was a human skull, square-jawed, level of eye-socket, arched of forehead, unmistakably the skull of a white man.
“What of it?” I asked.
He looked at me sideways, with a half-smile.
“You’ve forgotten,” he accused me quizzically. “What did I prophesy? But come on.”
I FOLLOWED him, and presently we came across that which forced to my mind Hazard’s apparently impossible forecast uttered the day before. Bones, guns and shattered rocks he’d said we would find. We were now thirty feet from the entrance to the cave, and the place was like a charnel-house. And among the bleached skeletons of white men and Asiatics, mingled confusedly as if they’d been overtaken by some unimaginable catastrophe, were ruined European rifles of an ancient pattern—Mannlichers, they were—and muzzle-loading Chinese jingals and matchlocks.
“How did you know it?” I cried in sheer bewilderment.
“Loot and death!” said Hazard meditatively. “Loot and death! See—” he picked up a metal button and a cap ornament—“they were Austrian soldiers.”
“But what happened?” I cried.
“Can’t you imagine it?”
I think I could have imagined it then. Confronted by that visible result, I think I could have recreated the cause: indeed, my groping mind had seized the first thread of the truth when Mu Ting, who had viewed the ghastly debris with Asiatic unconcern, recalled us to the more imp
ortant object of our search.
“The pearls?” she inquired insistently. “The pearls?”
“Right enough,” said Hazard and began searching quite coolly among the gruesome relics, turning over the rocks, throwing aside the white bones, scraping out of the way the silt deposited by the river. I followed his example, but my attention was irresistibly attracted by sounds of movement and of low guttural voices behind me. I looked back, in spite of myself, knowing what I would see.
On the top of the dike, clearly framed in the opening of the cave, was the sign of our doom. It was a solid bank of sun-tanned faces, muscular trunks and yellow limbs, clothed imperfectly—for the morning was still cool—in ragged garments of China-blue.
“The junkmen have landed on the dike,” I said in a whisper.
“Obviously they would do that,” replied Hazard with irritating unconcern. “Ah, I’ve found them.”
Instantly Mu Ting and I were at his side. His right hand was filled with globules of varying shape. At his feet, in a cup-like depression in the rock floor, where they’d lain so many years, were many others—hundreds of them. I clutched a handful. In the semi-darkness their coloring was like any other pebbles, but by their weight and size and rounded, smooth surfaces we knew them. They were pearls, pearls, the treasure for which we had hoped.
Fair loot, if ever loot was fair—honorable spoil for the first finder! They’d been gathered through foul methods by a corrupt court that had fallen long ago; they’d been stolen from a long dead empress who had no manner of right to them; they’d been lost, buried and forgotten for nearly twenty years. They were ours, the ransom of a kingdom!
Now wealth is something I’ve never pretended to despise; nor have I claimed to be superior to that lust for it which has through all the ages stirred men’s blood and driven them to deeds incredible. I admit that for a moment I forgot the double bank of coolies at the entrance of the cave, forgot the walls of rock that prisoned us around, forgot the dead bones at our feet—mute and terrible prophecies of our own fate—and thrilled only to the thought of our priceless find.
“Fill your pockets,” half-whispered Hazard.
“They’ll see us.” But I stooped quickly to obey.
“We can’t help it. They can’t see us plainly, anyway. They’ll not understand what we’re doing. Hurry.”
We picked them up as fast as we could, Mu Ting helping, putting the pearls away in her jacket somewhere. It was then that I got the first intimation that something was wrong. The light was very poor, but—I remembered some other pearls I had seen, the shimmering whiteness of them, the ghostly tints of pink and amber glowing up from their hearts. Surely these were not….
“Ah! Listen!”
My half-formulated thought was interrupted, was swept from my mind by what I heard coincident with Hazard’s exclamation. There had been a disturbance among the coolies on the dike, as if some one had pushed through them roughly. Now a loud and imperative voice began haranguing them. At the first sound of that harsh voice Mu Ting shivered and whimpered aloud:
“It is my master. Now we die.”
“The circle’s completed,” said Hazard coolly. “It’s Li Fu Ching.”
Of course, the wonder was that he hadn’t come before. The word that he’d sent up and down the river to locate us and hold us had traveled fast enough. Perhaps the return message notifying him of the corner in which we’d obligingly placed ourselves had been delayed, or perhaps—but that’s conjecture.
Chinese are proverbially dilatory, anyway. As it was, he had no reason to believe we’d already found the pearls. Swiftly I tried to decide what would be in his mind. It would be this: he would get us killed; he would send the coolies on their way; then at his leisure he would return and pick up the pearls. That would be the purpose of his harangue, the words of which came jumbled to our ears.
“The devil!” muttered Hazard. “Shall I shoot him? No; it’s hardly worth the chance. They might rush us.”
BUT, if I knew my Chinaman, nothing but shooting Li Fu Ching or silencing him in some way would prevent them from rushing us. Invariably the sluggish nerves of the Chinese coolie class require strong stimulus to rouse them to action; sometimes a mob stimulates itself by loud chanting and yells and jabbering, but always it will give itself up to the impassioned spellbinder.
And Li Fu Ching was eloquent, as most Chinese are under stress, melting gutturals, labials, sibilants and aspirants into an endless monotone more compelling than the fieriest accented speech. I caught a few words of his deadly urging. He was appealing to the spirit of the guilds: we had trespassed upon their property, the river; we would rob them of things that were theirs.
Now Hazard did an irritating thing. In apparent indifference to the death that fronted us, he tried to reason out how Li Fu Ching had known that the pearls were here.
“I’ve never been able to solve that,” he said. “Or rather I’ve found so many solutions. One is that he was a Boxer chief; that he saw the looters making way with the pearls and the image; that he detailed a trusty subordinate and the men whose bones lie here in pursuit, and that none returned. But that’s far-fetched. There are other simpler explanations. For instance—”
I tried to keep my temper, but I lost it then.
“For —— sake—” I began and then stopped in discouragement at the utter futility of appeal.
True, he had claimed to have almost a chance-proof plan of saving us. But already the coolies were crying to each other excitedly; those in front were crouching as wild animals do before the spring, with strength showing in every line of them. They had knives in their hands, a few pistols; we’d be overwhelmed in the mass of them. It would be no use to beg, no use to resist.
“Before they take me, I must die,” said Mu Ting.
What an ancient and universal plea that is! Yes, it was the cry of a Chinese woman. Once have the wells of Shensi, and once of Peking, been choked with the dead bodies of women who have thrown themselves there to escape the rabble—and that within two decades.
I turned upon Hazard furiously.
“You boasted—” I began again.
He didn’t seem to hear me.
“Well, it’s about time,” he murmured thoughtfully and as calmly as if he held all the future in his own hands.
And he stooped and seemed to be doing something with a light, stout cord that lay near his feet.
I stared at him; I hadn’t perceived that cord before, but I saw now that it stretched outward toward the mouth of the cave, and I realized that he had dropped it behind him, a connecting link to the dike, as we had entered.
There is nothing as terrifying as the inexplicable and, under certain circumstances, nothing as reassuring. When understanding is lacking, anything is possible. And, if I hadn’t at bottom been possessed of some little instinctive confidence in Hazard, I’d hardly have yielded my fate to him so readily. Anyway, at that action of his my spirits swung away from hopelessness.
“What are you—”
But I was interrupted amazingly, and a moment later changed my question—
“What have you done?”
For he had pulled the cord sharply, and that instant there had boomed through the cave the sound of a muffled explosion.
“Merely completed the obvious,” replied Hazard calmly.
The madman had blown up the dike. Or rather he had blown up one end of it. Away from that end the Chinese leaped, some into the water, some toward the center of the dike, forcing their comrades back in a solid mass. This was all to the accompaniment of shrill cries of astonishment and terror, which drowned out Li Fu Ching’s voice. An instant later the water burst through the dike, with a rushing, gurgling sound, and reached toward us like a lapping tongue.
“You’ve drowned us,” I accused Hazard.
“Certainly,” and there was exasperating amusement in his voice. “You might have surmised what I intended to do. Didn’t I say Li Fu Ching would find it hard to collect from us if we were drowne
d?”
“Faugh! You’ve played into his hands. You’ve simplified things for him. Now the junkmen will never know there were pearls here. Li Fu Ching will send them away, then come back secretly himself with some of his own Peking ruffians. He’ll drain the cave at his leisure and take the pearls from our dead bodies.”
“That’s the way I figured it, too,” and Hazard chuckled maddeningly.
“Well, you—” I began. Then I realized the folly of expostulation. After all, we couldn’t have escaped anyway. “When did you plant that—mine?” I asked.
“Last night, while you slept. But compose yourself; we’re not dead yet. While we’re waiting for whatever’s to come, let’s try reading a riddle. The riddle of this cave, I mean—of the bones and the pearls and the image and how they all came here. Can you make it out now?”
As I remember it, it was rather a relief to find an excuse for turning away from the face of death. And there was to be an interim. The Chinese were laughing now—low, sly, cruel-sounding laughter. They realized the deadly joke we’d played upon ourselves and knew we’d be killed without further act of theirs. So, with my mind working rather jerkily, I considered the problem Hazard suggested, which all of a sudden I discovered to be no problem at all, in the light of our own predicament.
“Why, it’s simple now,” I cried. “The event is merely repeating itself. The cave was dry-bottomed in those days, as it is now; all we’ve done is to reconstruct a natural dam. They were all drowned as we’re to be drowned.”
“Just how do you figure it?” queried Hazard curiously.
“I suppose,” I said slowly, “that the Austrian looters fled into this cave, closely pursued by the Boxers. It was customary for the Chinese to carry large quantities of powder for their muzzle-loading rifles. A fight, a chance shot exploding a keg or more of this powder, which would naturally remain on the junk close in upon the dike—yes, that’s what happened. It must have been a great explosion, destroying the dike completely. See how these rocks are shattered to pieces.”
“I think that’s the only possible explanation,” corroborated Hazard. “Every one that wasn’t killed by the rocks was drowned. The water must have come in a solid wall, not slowly, as it’s coming now. I figured on only starting it.”
The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge Page 9