“Where did you get the explosive?”
“It was a mine I brought with me from Peking.”
“From Peking!” I stared at him, both curiosity and resentment freshly aroused. “Then you planned this. In Heaven’s name, why?”
“Well,” said Hazard, calmly, “I guess it’s about time to tell you that. Now, if we stay here quietly and drown, what happens?”
“Why,” I said, “we went over that. Li Fu Ching will send the coolies away, then—”
“Yes, but supposing we stay here quietly on the bottom of the cave and are not drowned?”
JUST then the front of the inrushing waters broke about our ankles. Up toward the mouth of the cave it was coming like a cataract, the dam breaking down more and more. The Chinese were abandoning it now and taking to their junks, which were jammed solidly into the bank.
“That’s your answer,” I replied, a little sullenly. “It’s either drown or surrender ourselves and Mu Ting to the Chinese, and I’m afraid I prefer drowning.”
“Do you think so?” asked Hazard. “Well, come this way.”
Suddenly he had swung around, taken Mu Ting’s elbow and my own in either hand and was leading us back into the cave. A few steps, and the innermost wall loomed darkly before us. We reached that nearly vertical wall, and Hazard put out his hand and touched, one after the other, three small objects the sight of which thrilled me to the marrow.
Not altogether pleasant, that thrill, that emotional reaction, as I passed from hopelessness to near certainty of continued life. My heart missed a beat; my skin grew suddenly moist, and I trembled with the suddenness of the transition. For there, affixed to the rock, was very nearly perfect assurance of safety both from the rising waters and our twist-brained enemies.
“These,” said Hazard, “I brought from Peking, too. I fastened them here last night, when I set the mine. Now do you understand my question?”
I did. I understood it well.
“My ——, Hazard!” I cried, in something like awe. “You brought them. But why three?”
“I told you,” he said, “that I hoped to pick you up.”
This was what he had done. He had brought with him from Peking and clamped on the irregular knobby face of the wall three breathing-tubes of hard rubber. Vertically these tubes extended about a foot higher than the water would reach when the cave was flooded. At the bottom were mouthpieces, which were curved horizontally away from the wall. These would have been a little too high for convenient use, only Hazard had built up the bottom of the cave with loose rocks.
“Very good,” approved Mu Ting, in a voice that, fear having departed, was quite emotionless.
“Hollow bamboo might have done as well,” said Hazard, “if I hadn’t foreseen the contingency and brought these. As it was, I planned to splice these with bamboo at the upper end, if they weren’t long enough without it. I had to carry them secretly inside my coat, and three and a half feet was the limit. But the mouthpieces of these are especially shaped, as you see. We’ll have no difficulty in excluding the water. Well,” there was laughter in his voice, “do you understand now?”
“Ah, Hazard, Hazard,” I cried, in a sort of ecstasy of admiration, “it’s always easy enough to understand after the event. But to foresee—”
Very faintly now the jeering laughter and chattering of the junkmen came to us. The rush and roar of the water was much louder. By now it had reached to our knees.
THE rest of our escape was commonplace. Within ten minutes we were completely submerged, and for half an hour we remained so, breathing through the hollow rubber tubes. It wasn’t particularly difficult or unpleasant. The only danger was that the two junks which came in searching for us—they were betrayed by the vibrations of the water—would find the projecting ends of the breathing-tubes. But the fact that these tubes lay against the wall reduced that danger to a minimum.
I suppose the searchers finally concluded that we’d weighted our clothes with rocks and drowned quietly, rather than risk falling into their hands alive.
Anyway, when we chanced coming out, we found the coast clear. That was pretty sure to be true, the Chinese being the industrious creature he is and not lightly neglecting business. A little back of the river bank we found a place where we could dry ourselves in the sun without much danger of discovery, and then began an uneventful journey overland. Three days took us to the Han-Ho, and four days longer to Tientsin, where we sold the nearly ruined pearls for a thousand taels.
This money we gave to Mu Ting and parted from her at the gate of a missionary school—but to come back to the pearls.
It was while we lay drying in the sun that the instant’s misgiving I’d already had concerning those pearls was justified. In the light of day they were no less dull and dead than they’d been in the gloom of the cave. Only the hearts of some of the larger ones remained “alive,” which accounts for the fact that we were able to sell them to a Chinese jeweler for “peeling.” As to their ruin, the explanation was easy.
“Nineteen years in water saturated with animal acids as was the water of that cave—no wonder!” said Hazard. “There may have been unwholesome exudations from the soil besides. A great many ideas about pearls are superstitions, but there’s no question about their peculiar delicacy and susceptibility. I foresaw this as a possibility.”
“You foresaw everything,” I said.
“Pshaw!” he put aside my admiration. “I did no more than you could have done, given time. You recognized the fact that the long-submerged image, found floating down the river, could only have come from a cavern of some sort. Given that fact, at which I arrived in Peking, the rest was easy.”
“Even to providing breathing-tubes by which we could sham drowning?” I cried incredulously. I was still marveling at that supreme example of foresight.
“Even that,” he smiled. “I think I can state my reasoning in five sentences. The looters would only have entered the cave for refuge, and they would only have abandoned their loot because of fatality.
“That fatality must be complete and must include also the members of the pursuing party, else they would have carried away the pearls. There never was a mere battle in which all combatants were killed; therefore we must look to some more deadly natural catastrophe. In a cavern opening off a river there are two possibilities—a cave-in of earth or an inundation.
In the former case the image and pearls would have been buried along with the rest; so that leaves the one possibility of an inundation, which leads irresistibly to the theory of a natural dike, a gun-fight inside the cave, an explosion which destroys the dike, with the consequent deluge.”
It seemed a clear and concise statement of a somewhat remarkable process of imaginative reasoning.
“From that theory,” went on Hazard, “to providing for our own escape in case we were besieged in the cave after we’d drained it out—which I had every reason to believe would happen—was a mere matter of common sense.”
“Perhaps, if you put a certain prefix before that word ‘common.’ But with escape so nearly certain, and a rich find so probable, I don’t understand why you invited me into the affair.”
“Well,” said Hazard, “as I said before, I’ve heard of you. One gets to hear things in this country, even secret things. There’s a certain investigation you’re making which—well, which this devil-faced little god—” he touched the bulge of his coat beneath which the image lay—“seemed to suggest. And so—well, I wanted to meet you, anyway.”
I caught the tentatively suggested offer which lay behind his words.
“It’s a big thing,” I warned. “A dangerous thing.”
“I thought you might let me help you,” said Hazard modestly.
The Eight Vultures of Kwang-Ho
TUI FEI, or earth evil—so the same majority of Chinese named the Ko Lao Hui, and in truth the whose vast, evil-doing society was like a fungus growth, a morbid excrescence, from the much disturbed soil of China politic.
&nb
sp; In another sense, Hazard’s simile of the giant octopus asprawl over the empire is a better one. Every province was gripped by its wide-flung tentacles. If a community rebelled, refused to pay tribute; if a magistrate was sane and courageous enough to distinguish between the true spirit of patriotism and the base perversion of it traded upon by the Ko Lao Hui—but this is a story of such a case.
It was really a tyranny of the base, this latter-day Ko Lao Hui. Beginning “when the Ming ended and the Ching began,” that is, when the Manchus overran China, its first object was lofty enough, the delivery of the Chinese from their conquerors. That object was achieved in 1911. Directly afterward, I believe, the society was formally dissolved, but the order of dissolution was obeyed only by the nobler elements in it.
Anyway, when Hazard and I—who am John Partridge, searcher after the unusual—joined forces to combat its workings, it was larger in membership than ever before, its propaganda had shifted to revolution and warfare against the whole foreign world and it was ruled by a hidden intelligence as sinister and subtle as has ever misled a people.
It was, of course, to locate that secret intelligence—who falsely misnamed himself Koshinga, descendant of the founder by a strange road—that Hazard and I directed our first efforts. The earliest home of the Ko Lao Hui had been in Szuchuen, whence across Hanchungfu and the Ts’ing Ling Mountains it spread into Shensi, Kansu and over the rest of China.
Other information being absolutely unprocurable, we decided that the source was likeliest to be the center; and it was on our way to that ancient cradle of the tong that we encountered one of the weirdest forms of its devilry flaying the prostrate town of Kwang-Ho.
We heard inklings of the punishment in Sian-Fu, where we were furtively listening in the tea-shops, masking as usual our knowledge of the dialect behind a hired interpreter. It was enough to start us south at once.
From Sian-Fu to Kwang-Ho is a five-days journey, mostly through the Ts’ing Ling Range—hot, blisteringly hot in the Summer months. We made it in eight days, thanks to our muleteers, who managed to lose the way and were persuaded to find it again only at the pistol point.
We took it as an intimation that our mission in China was suspected, though of course we couldn’t be sure. We’d kept always on our guard anyway, taking no chances. After Kwang-Ho there was no further doubt; the gage of battle was fairly thrown.
Kwang-Ho we found a little village of grayish-brown walls and soil and houses, wedged in the center of a triangular valley that cut up into the foot-hills from the south. We trudged into it from the east behind our two mules and muleteers, along a narrow trail that had been cut around the southern edge of Tung-Whan.
This peak was shaped something like a great cone; its sides were almost impenetrable with long, brown, dry grass, and trees and shrubbery living and dead. Perhaps it was our tired eyes and the superheated air, but the peak gave us both an impression of sullenness that scorching afternoon and the way it quivered from base to summit seemed to betoken some secret anger.
One might easily have imagined the frowning mountain as guardian of the village it had overlooked so long, but the first appearance of the village suggested no reason for its rage. Kwang-Ho stood out from the other towns we’d recently seen like a settlement of Chinese bourgeoise.
All around it, up and down the valley, were rectangular, rock-fenced fields of astonishing greenness, considering that the river curved into the valley a mile below the town and so would ordinarily have been considered useless for irrigation.
Equally remarkable for Central China were the absence of beggars at the gate of the centuries-old wall that surrounded the town and the fact that no inhospitable odors insulted our nostrils as we passed through that gate. The houses averaged at least a room larger than usual and the streets were wider and strangely clean.
“No wonder the Ko Lao Hui hates this town,” said Hazard.
But our comment upon these phenomena was cut short. A boy playing just inside the gate was off in a whirl of dust, crying out: “Yang kwei tzu, yang kwei tzu!” (Ocean ghost children.) And hard upon the apparent cause of the Ko Lao Hui’s anger came signs of its result.
The doorways of the street we were entering became filled with many curiously depressed faces—yellowish-brown faces with black, slant, staring eyes and rather primitive, immobile features. We saw, too, that nearly half those doorways were hung with white and blue lanterns and edged with white cloth, symbols of mourning. At the same time we became aware that a certain weird sound we’d been hearing for some minutes was really the wailing of women.
“Ai ya, ai ya,” it came strong to our ears in a dozen voices, the eloquent mourning cry of the East.
At that Hazard’s deceptively professorial face, inexperienced-looking and quiet, became a shade whiter beneath the tan.
“The work’s begun,” he said, in his mildly thoughtful voice, “whatever it is.”
“Most characteristic work, by appearances.”
“Well,” suggested Hazard, “let’s get on to the inn.”
“With all my heart,” I agreed, for of course we were both dog-tired, footsore and sticky with sweat under our loose native jackets and trousers of China blue.
I PASSED the word to our leading muleteer. Instantly he turned mafu, abandoning his animal to his companion and running ahead of us, loudly inquiring the way. Some small perquisites would be his as a reward for bringing, or rather preceding, our patronage. Also it was best for our comfort’s sake that the innkeeper be notified of our coming.
We followed, by dint of many questions, through a maze of streets well calculated to confuse strangers and evil spirits. We weren’t surprized that these streets cleared before and filled in behind us, and that everywhere, around the irregular street corners, around the corners of houses, from behind half-open doors and through slits in the paper windows, were curiously peering eyes.
White men in Shensi are rare enough, particularly white men traveling alone, without a guard of soldiery. Our apparent courage was, however, only prudence—the Ko Lao Hui being too strong among the common soldiery for us to provide our enemies with a handle to our destruction by hiring them for an escort.
Really, the curiosity of the people was much less noisy and eager than in most villages. A sort of apathetic, helpless terror seemed to hang over Kwang-Ho. Especially was this noticeable among the children, who were an unusually well-nourished and ruddy-cheeked lot and would ordinarily have been boldly and inquisitively friendly. Instead, the few little faces we saw were sobered and chilled as if by some hardly understood terror.
Hazard and I made no comment on this, it being largely what we’d expected. The intellect that had marked Kwang-Ho for its anger was no ordinary one and would strike in no ordinary fashion. But presently—
“Listen!” I said sharply to Hazard.
From a point a little ahead of us and to the right, probably in the market-place, came the sound of masculine chanting. It was a recital, a sort of story-song, weirdly and mournfully sung, far different from the usual cheerfully accented recital of the village distributors of news and fiction:
“The vultures came—
Black was the sky with them—
Laden with death for the children of Kwang-Ho.
The vultures came—
Heavy their sable wings.
Loud was the mourning in Kwang-Ho the Good.”
This was repeated many times, with variations in the words but with no additional meaning. It puzzled me. I knew vultures were widely symbolic of death in Shensi; but in this chantey the connection, though vaguely enough expressed, seemed emphasized beyond the bounds of symbolism. Of course, things altogether unrelated in fact are often related in imagination.
“But the Ko Lao Hui?” inquired Hazard, after I’d translated the song to him as best I could. “Isn’t there any mention of them?”
“Not a word.”
His question reminded me of the peculiar fact that though from time to time, as we’d pas
sed along the narrow street, I’d caught snatches of talk from within the stricken houses, there had never been a mention of the guilty society. Hate there’d been in plenty, but hate expending itself as it were in vacuum—
“As if,” I suggested to Hazard, “Kwang-Ho doesn’t know yet the cause of its troubles.”
“I noticed that,” said Hazard.
Though he hadn’t quite my knowledge of the Shensi dialect, he could follow an ordinary conversation well enough.
“Well,” he continued after a thoughtful pause, “we’d best get to the yamen as soon as possible. If what we heard in Sian-Fu is true, the magistrate will know, anyway. And he should be willing to talk. Look, another house in mourning, and another.”
Just then our muleteer turned off the street into a courtyard. Its brown, hard-packed earth floor was cluttered with donkeys, mules, two-wheeled carts with wide-projecting axle-trees, sacks of grain and bundles of cloth. In a corner six camels, night-travelers, lifted their ugly, empty heads and stared at us with seeming insolence. A mixed group of traveling merchants, muleteers and coolies, drawn together by the fascinations of “turn-over,” stopped their game and joined in that stare, but in a minute were intent again on the rapid play of the copper coins.
The innkeeper, a middle-aged, cleanly clad Chinese, was half-way across the courtyard, approaching us with a succession of low bows. Across the further side of the courtyard was the gray-walled inn, long and narrow, with many small cubicles. The one which Hazard and I were presently sharing was at least cleaner and more comfortable than any in which we had recently slept.
Also we found in the place a bathtub hollowed out of stone, a barrel-shaped affair, the product of huge labor. And the brick stove upon which we proceeded to cook our own food—which for caution’s sake we always carried with us, together with our bedding, on mule-back—was marvelously furnished with a tin chimney, the first “carrier-away-of-smoke” we’d seen in nearly a moon.
The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge Page 10