“Nonsense!” I interrupted. “Control yourself and tell us something that’ll help us to get out of this infernal place.”
At that she did steady somewhat, and gave us a fairly good idea of an organization as perfect, I suppose, as was ever conceived. It was really the work of a genius in fear-compelled discipline—not Sadafuki but the man who had hired him, Koshinga, head of the Ko Lao Hui. And it seemed to confirm our impression that the valley was as proof against escape as a close-meshed net.
Mainly it was a system of guard and counterguard, of playing men against each other in incessant watchfulness. Thus was explained the two lines of sentries who surrounded the place. These were never permitted to intermingle. Guarding the workmen, they were no less guards upon each other; day and night they paced their posts in fear of each other, watching each other for neglect of duty. The punishment for neglect of duty was death; the punishment for not reporting such neglect was also death, but preceded by torture. All chance of affiliation or conspiracy was destroyed by separate housing. Thus slaves guarded slaves; there could be imagined no more perfect autocracy.
And the object of it all, she told us, the purpose for which men were brought to this valley never to leave it again till they died, was the manufacture of wooden rifle stocks.
“In three years there hasn’t been an escape,” she said hopelessly. “At first there were many attempts.”
“But there’s always a vulnerable point,” cried Hazard characteristically. “There’s always a way out. Now this discovery of his—”
“Listen!” I interrupted.
For perhaps a minute I’d been hearing something that interested me. I had, however, been weak enough to do my hearing the injustice of discrediting it, for if it were true that there were English speaking voices coming faintly up through the silent floors of the dagoba, then they could hardly be other than the voices of the men we feared.
Hazard, with his mind on that chimerical discovery, glanced at me a little impatiently, but his own ears caught the sound. His voice and eyes turned cold as chilled steel.
“Do you think it’s—” he began.
“I’m afraid so.”
“Then we’re— Well!”
His first words expressed the beginning of despair; his last word was a reaffirmation of supremacy over circumstances. There are men who, carrying their fight to the grave with them, will in this world at least never know defeat. I’ve never admired Hazard more than at the moment.
But the next moment I was forced to conclude that his courage was greater than his judgment, for he turned to the woman again and pursued his senseless inquiry.
“What is it? What does he think it is—that invention?”
“Why, it’s—it’s fear!” she faltered, staring at my disturbed face with evidently increased alarm.
“Fear!” repeated Hazard with a curious light on his face.
“Fear—a contagion! What do you—”
But then came a sound that shook even him to the soul, so that his question went uncompleted. It was a hoarse, inarticulate, animal-like cry, the cry of a man in rage, the voice of Sadafuki.
“My ——, Hazard!” I began protestingly. “Let’s—”
But Hazard turned swiftly to the woman again.
“What is it? Liquid, gas, or—”
“It’s—it’s both.”
“Where is it, then? Never mind that noise. Answer me!”
“It’s—it’s in the cave—at the end of the bridge.”
There were feet pounding up the stairs. There was another voice than Sadafuki’s—a voice that I well remembered.
“Those other papers prove it—that they’re imposters. Show them to us; there are signs they don’t know. We’ll make them admit—”
I never knew the truth of those other papers; probably they were papers that Hazard and I had failed to take from them, bearing the names we’d stolen.
Then again came Sadafuki’s roar. No doubt he was already convinced of our imposture.
“Hold them, Partridge—if you can—for a minute!”
That moment Hazard rasped those words at me tensely, he had leaped upon the woman and dragged her toward the door. Startled as I was by this unexpected action, she was infinitely more startled, believing, I suppose, that our talk of friendliness had really been a ruse and that she was to be handed over to Sadafuki. She shrieked wildly. This shriek and the sound of the struggle supplemented—as Hazard had intended they should—the words in Shensian that he called through the door.
“Open quickly! We have her!” The sentry had his orders and, machine that he was, he obeyed them in spite of the trouble below. The key went into the lock fumblingly, but he turned it at last, and pulled back the bar.
Instantly Hazard dragged the door open and leaped out upon him. I caught the woman as Hazard released her, put her back of me and started to follow. But Hazard had gripped the sentry about the waist, pinning his arms to his side, and so he held him for a moment, motionless. Then Hazard lifted him bodily, flung him headlong down the stairs and leaped through the outer door upon the balcony and from the balcony to the bridge. The angle of the bridge was such that in three steps he was out of my sight.
OF COURSE, in another man, Hazard’s action would have suggested flight. In his case I had no thought of desertion; rather I was filled with a certain unreasonable hope, even when I looked down the stairway and saw Sadafuki, his evil face a picture of mad, befooled egoism, running up the bottom steps. I recalled that Hazard was never a man to act blindly, without a plan; habitually he thought ahead, even in the heat of conflict. It was only that thought that kept me from utter despair and from flinging myself down upon Sadafuki and dying with my hands gripping his throat.
Without realizing I had picked if up, I found myself flinging away from me an earthen pot of dwarfed shrubbery that had decorated the landing. It struck Sadafuki on the chest and staggered him, but he came on. Behind him were the two white men whose arrival had destroyed our pretenses, behind them Sadafuki’s bodyguard, gibbering wildly, waving their revolvers, frenzied with their master’s frenzy, fearfully furious to do his will. One of them discharged his pistol, and the bullet whistled past my shoulder.
I sprang back into the room I’d just left. With a cry that I suppose was half delirious, I perceived the heavy bar that had held the door. For a moment at least I could carry out Hazard’s injunction to hold the rush. I tore the bar out and, clutching it near the end like a baseball player, swung it out across the head of the stairway.
“I’ll kill the first man up,” I shouted in English.
The rush checked itself, as a body loses momentum. It came on and stopped. At that moment Sadafuki proved himself the true tyrant; he stopped and bellowed an order to those below to advance and seize me.
There was, of course, no doubt as to their obedience. Then, they would have gone into flames at his command; they would have thrown themselves upon their own knives; they would have killed their own brothers. Such was his power at that moment. I suppose obedience, fear-compelled at first, had grown into an instinctive thing, habitual, a matter of reaction to his commands.
And that power doomed me, of course. I could kill one or two, but in the end they would get me. I would be overborne and done for without even a chance at Sadafuki whom I hated then with a berserker rage. It was very hard to keep from making a sally, but Hazard had ordered me to hold them.
Hazard! Where was Hazard?
One’s thinking processes do not dally at moments like these. All of a sudden I laughed harshly. I remembered Hazard’s credulous interest in Sadafuki’s nightmare talk of empire. I remembered that in Hazard’s hand, as he fled, was Sadafuki’s keys, snatched from the grip of his servant. I remembered that at the other end of the bridge across which Hazard had run was the door to the underground chamber in which the woman had said was stored—what?
“Fear!” she had said.
Had Hazard’s mind also succumbed to that monstrous folly?
“Altogether ignoring those other contagions—the contagion of fear—power to turn whole peoples into gibbering cowards—” Fragments of Sadafuki’s talk, and the woman’s flitted through my brain.
I laughed again. At that moment Hazard leaped in from the balcony. In the crook of his arms, pressed against his chest, he carried a great glass receptacle, like one of those huge retorts in which acids are sometimes kept. It was so heavy that he staggered with it. But, half-turning, he lifted it above his head with an enormous effort and flung it down the stairway.
IV
WHAT followed was a natural thing. It had nothing to do with Sadafuki’s wild imaginings—nothing. I admit with Sadafuki that the borderland of science is a shadowy one within which all inventions, from the flint ax to the flying machine, have lain. But it isn’t good to believe that borderland reaches farther than the limits of the physical world. In that last day when the stars shall fall crashing from the skies, there is that in man which will still hold him erect and unshaken among the ruins.
And until that day there will be no power on earth created of force that shall not fall with its creator.
The instant Hazard threw that peculiar weapon I was by his side, looking down the stairway. And so I saw my last of Sadafuki’s face.
From ferocious rage it had turned, at sight of that catapulted retort, into a living mask of terror. Then—it was not. It had disappeared. The missile struck him with the force of a cannon-ball and death took swift vengeance. He fell backward and two others fell with him—the two Chinamen who were moving forward at his command. They wriggled out from under the thing that had struck them; but he lay quivering, his arms outstretched, the shattered glass container lying with one jagged edge across his throat and pouring its reddish contents over him.
From that a fluid emerged with a boiling sound, a white vapor that was yet not like steam, for it was heavier than air, and spilled down the stairway.
I do not think that vapor reached the faces of the leading Chinese before they fled. I think they turned immediately at sight of their master’s death. It is true their shrieks were terror-filled, but it is also true that they were shot through with a great joy. And if they were wholly possessed by fear, why did the two white men, sole representatives after Sadafuki’s passing of the power of the Ko Lao Hui, fall before they reached the landing, punctured by a dozen bullets?
“He is dead. The Great One is dead.”
So the Chinese yelled as they ran; and through the sudden vagueness and turbulence that comes over my memory at this point, I recall yells from below answering them. I recall a great scampering and crashing of doors. I recall rushing with Hazard back to the store-room and fetching therefrom retort after retort of that liquid that seemed to me then so potent, and hurling them away from me. After the second trip there seemed from the silence no more Chinese left in the dagoba, so the rest of the containers we flung from the bridge. They smashed on the ground and added their gaseous product to the vapor that was already pouring out of every aperture in the first floor of the dagoba.
It diffused through the air and, still hanging close to the ground, was borne by the wind up the valley.
Ahead of it, or enveloped in the front of the thin, white mist, ran the Chinese who had escaped from the dagoba, flinging their arms high, shrieking out:
“The Master is dead. The Great One is dead. The ocean-ghost children have killed the Master.”
HAZARD and I came back to the dagoba, got the now sobbing woman and, standing with her between us on the balcony, watched that madness and frenzy of flight, contagious even as Sadafuki had said, keep pace with the vapor, keep pace with the running and the shouting, as far as we could see up the valley. The men working in the fields flung down their tools, and the armed guards first stared stupidly at the confusion and then added their cries to the tumult and mingled with the mob.
They were like driftwood before a flood, a pale flood of immaterial mist. I do not know how long we watched them, nor what was said. Hazard has claimed that the last container of it was broken and that we had escaped even a whiff of it. It may be true. One says many things under excitement.
I know that at last the hum and rasping roar that came from the gunstock factory at the head of the valley died down. Then a thin, light smoke, reddened with licking tongues of flame, began to rise above its roof, and up the black and precipitous rocks, looking at that distance like scurrying ants, hundreds of figures swarmed.
And then we ran also.
There was a reason for this. If intuition hadn’t warned us, logic should have told us of our danger. For there was the burning plant at the base of the falls—a plant near which we should have conjectured the probable presence of explosives—there were the madly fleeing Chinese filled no doubt with hatred of their prison-house, and wild for its destruction; there was the dam over which the water tumbled and the great reservoir beyond.
We ran across the bridge and clambered up the rocks, dragging the woman after us. I don’t know whether there was hysteria in our flight. We had climbed perhaps a hundred yards, straight up the face of the cliff, when the valley was filled with a great booming, as if a hundred cannons had exploded.
We looked toward the burning factory, and it wasn’t there. Nothing was there. There was a great, jagged hole in the cliff behind it, a rift that extended far up, and then that was gone. It was obliterated by the falling water.
The dam had gone; the thousands of tons of water behind it was free. The sudden bursting forth of that pent-up energy was tremendous, indescribable. There seemed something angry and vindictive in that flood. It came on in a solid wall, twenty feet high, of boiling, bubbling wrath. On its surface were tossed like playthings the great timbers of the factory whose wheels it had turned so long. It swept away the village that had been the home of slaves with one sweeping gesture. It rushed down the valley, filling it from side to side, wiping away everything.
It reached the dagoba, swept it from its foundation, lifted it and flung it against the cliff with insensate rage. Thereafter for a while its turmoil increased as its pressure heaped up from behind and fought for the narrow outlet. Presently it subsided, but its old channel was gone, and the Hidden Valley, leveled like a floor, had become—and still remains, I believe—merely the widened bed of a swiftly rushing river.
HOW Hazard and I, hours afterward, descended from where we had watched this thing and found among the ruins of the spattered dagoba food to last us on our long journey through the mountains and enough silver sycees to give the woman a start toward a new life, and how we finally reached Sian-Fu, where we turned her who had been Sadafuki’s wife over to the hospitable missionaries who would keep her until an opportunity came to travel to the Coast and thence to the States, would make a pointless narrative. The story has been told of the destruction of Sadafuki’s kingdom.
Of the discovery he claimed to have made—that monstrous phantom of his brain—we learned nothing more. When the woman was fit for it, Hazard questioned her, but she would add nothing to what she had already told us.
“For the welfare of mankind”—so she justified her silence, and we didn’t press her.
Out of that and what she had said previously and Sadafuki’s few words in our first and only interview, Hazard has built a theory that, if true, would make this the most important exploit in our whole campaign against the Ko Lao Hui, not even excepting our final adventure against Koshinga himself. And of course he finds justification for his belief in the happenings of that last hour.
But I hold that Sadafuki’s power had within itself a flaw that in any case would soon have brought it toppling down. And it is certain that the vapor traveled no faster up the valley than the news of Sadafuki’s death. It was not fear that animated and enfrenzied the fleeing coolies, but the breaking of the chains of fear.
The Tablet of Shun
I SUPPOSE no one has known complete epicurean luxury until he has loitered through a Chinese dinner. I’m also quite sure
that no Westerner, eager to be on a vital errand, has otherwise learned the full torture of enforced delay. If it was merely to tax my nerves that Ho Whan held me to his hospitality before taking me to Hazard, he succeeded admirably.
Now and then a ripple of uneasiness, of disappointed expectancy, seemed to break the surface of the mandarin’s Oriental phlegm, hinting to me that he had some other purpose. In any case I couldn’t escape without openly expressing my doubt that he was acting under instructions from Hazard, and to do that would probably destroy altogether my chance of getting to Hazard.
Since we had begun our search for Koshinga, head of the lawless and revolutionary Ko Lao Hui, Hazard and I had brothered each other in many perils and, I think, with some courage. From the moment of his broken appointment with me that afternoon at the Tea-House of the Many Winds, however, fear had held me by the throat. That fear had not been lessened a whit by the arrival, a few minutes later, of Ho Whan’s courier.
There were three reasons for this. We knew ourselves always in peril, marked for death by the Ko Lao Hui, and the break in Hazard’s plan was at least an indication that he had been overtaken. Furthermore, it was a definite rule of ours never to send word to each other through any one whom we hadn’t agreed was to be trusted.
Our first distrust of Ho Whan, acting governor of Shensi, had increased each of the four days we pursued the seemingly hopeless task he had insisted that we undertake—the recovery of a mysteriously important bronze tablet stolen from his yamen. So, from the moment I received it, I had been convinced that the purported message the courier bore, saying that Hazard needed me and that Ho Whan would take me to him, was but bait to lead me into a Ko Lao Hui trap.
The bait, however, I apparently swallowed without suspicion. If danger there was, Hazard—by the logic of his broken appointment—was probably already caught. If he still lived, he needed me, and I, at least, would have the advantage of walking into the trap open-eyed. I did what I believed Hazard would have done had our positions been reversed.
The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge Page 17