So! I was mistaken then. This was a counterplot to Koshinga’s—or was it?
Five hundred soldiers—what a handful against the forces of Koshinga! Pawns would they be in truth if Koshinga learned of their coming, and that in a sense not understood by Lomond.
But the parchment was crackling again, and that sound was accompanied by another, as if Lomond was at once rising and putting away his precious document. Evidently the interview was to be of the shortest.
“I should be given every assistance,” resumed Lomond’s voice. “From here I go to the Inn of Munificent Promise, where I shall remain until the third hour after midnight.
“Then I shall start for Foochow, where are the exalted battle-ships of my government. A guard should be provided me, with facilities for swift traveling.
“To Foochow is four days by pony caravan. There will be a delay for talk, and the soldiers will travel more slowly; but in nine days more they should arrive by the route that has been agreed upon.”
“All will be seen to. May your efforts prosper.”
Then into the Chinese voice there seemed to creep an almost imperceptible and very puzzling note of derision.
“May the honorable foreign soldiers live long,” he murmured. “May the earth evil called the Ko Lao Hui wither before them.”
POLITELY and without seeming to notice anything strange in the other’s tone Lomond led off on the ceremonial formulas that must precede their parting. By this we knew that they were to leave the room in inverse order to that in which they had entered it, Lomond first. So we waited in silence until their door opened and closed again and Lomond’s leather-shod feet passed outside our own.
Then Hazard beckoned me away from the wall. By this time I had digested what we had heard pretty well, and was not particularly surprized at the intensity of Hazard’s expression.
If both of us had not been accustomed to build much on slight things seen and overheard we should hardly have lasted as long as we had in our fight against Koshinga’s wily intellect; and it was now fairly clear to me that my first thought concerning the meaning of this interview had been correct.
We had not only touched the fringe of Koshinga’s plot, but had penetrated it entirely; only it was so infernally subtle as to be almost imperceivable. For instance, Lomond—seasoned international go-between as he was—had seemingly not perceived it.
“Of course you understand?” Hazard’s whisper barely carried to my ears.
“I think so. The scheme we suspected—to turn the people against Peking.”
“Exactly. Invasion by foreign troops— what government can stand that invites it? And the surrender in return of the Kiangsi coal-deposits—even more damning! But of course Peking knows nothing about it.
“This man in the next room is a Ko Lao Hui agent posing as a government official. Only I can’t see how he’s been able to carry off the imposture with Lomond.”
“Crook’s wit,” I replied. “You remember all his schemes have fallen through somehow.”
“What diabolical treachery!” Hazard murmured, the muscles of his usually impassive face tightening. “For that isn’t all of it. You remember what we heard from those samshu drinkers about the destruction of the foreign soldiers. Now we know what they meant.
“Koshinga lures these soldiers in; then he’ll destroy them. Peking gets in bad with whatever government they belong to, while Koshinga takes credit with the people, bolsters up his pose as China’s great patriot. What a devil’s plot! And it would have succeeded if we hadn’t happened to be here.”
“But how can we spoil it?”
“Easy enough. Notify the government, have Lomond arrested, find out what he knows about this man who’s tricked him. But he’s going. Let’s try and see—”
We tiptoed to the door. That other door had opened, and the man whom we had labeled Koshinga’s agent was passing out. We gave him time almost to reach the exit of the tea-house, then stepped quietly out into the steaming common room and looked after him.
When I saw him I had hard work to suppress a groan. Hazard touched my arm and we backed into the room again. He closed the door, drew two stools together, and we sat down facing each other across the corner of the table—all this in a bewildered and incredulous silence, which Hazard was first to break.
“The governor himself,” he breathed rather dully. “The governor of Kiangsi! Did you recognize him too, Partridge?”
“Yes. The governor in plain Mandarin robes meeting Lomond here secretly—and no wonder, for neither would want their connection known.”
“But it is inconceivable,” said Hazard after a long pause. “It is inconceivable that a man should be so stupid.”
“Well,” I said, trying to speak composedly, “when a mistake is so grave that its discoverers read in it a plot against its maker’s own power, then it’s about time—”
“It’s about time,” interrupted Hazard, seeming to grip all his faculties with an effort, “to take one’s reckoning again, and from a new tangent. Just how much do we know of this tangle after all? Let me think.”
He leaned back, folded his arms and closed his eyes, his chin falling forward on his chest—a way he had when he wished to cast off all disturbing stimuli and to apply to a problem that spirit of pure reason which he so often lauded as man’s best guide.
As for me, my reason had pretty well defaulted before our discovery. There is nothing so incurable as stupidity in high places, and if the governor himself was so blind as to play directly into Koshinga’s hands then there was nothing we could do to save him.
For of course Koshinga with his unequaled system of espionage would discover this thing—indeed the words of the samshu drinkers indicated that he had discovered it beforehand, and had already planned to take advantage of it. The whole empire would be stirred by the government’s betrayal of this one province; Koshinga’s cleverly advertised activities in opposition would win him millions of new adherents; and red riot and ruin would result.
Presently Hazard spoke slowly and with an air of detachment:
“Now to get back to first principles, from which we’ve strayed a long way. What’s certain and what isn’t?
“It’s certain Koshinga’s brewing revolution, for one thing. It’s almost certain Koshinga’s hand was in the killing of the three governors preceding this one—concerning the manner of which killing, by the way, we know nothing yet.
“It’s also almost certain that they were killed by his secretary, Ho Shih Chang—his attack on the present governor is evidence of that. But that would seem to prove that the present governor’s death had also been ordered by Koshinga—but here we find him playing Koshinga’s game for him.
“Well, he is merely a fool then. But would Peking be likely to give a fool the dictatorship of Kiangsi?”
“As likely as they would be to send down a traitor,” I said. “But they’ve done one or the other, we know.”
“Ah, but suppose they haven’t. Let’s consider that they haven’t. Let’s consider that they did what we should expect them to do, that they sent down a loyal official and an intelligent one.”
“But that’s impossible,” I objected, “for this man—”
“Nothing’s impossible,” Hazard interrupted. “Consider the combinations possible in a deck of cards and then try to conceive of the infinite variety of combinations in the human deck of some billions of people, all different. Nothing’s impossible.
“But let’s stick to the point. These two suppositions are facts, say. The key to the riddle is there—there!
“Now what do we find? What do we know—what else do we know that will help? Let me think!”
I was getting a glimpse into Hazard’s mental processes, into the methods that made him the most efficient solver of human problems that I have ever seen. Thus he would nail a supposition to the wall of his mind; he would study it; he would group around it all the known facts, trying out its relationships, testing its explanatory powers, creating f
rom his imagination other possibilities and so attempting to create an orderly and self-proving whole.
This mental jugglery was kaleidoscopic in swiftness, microscopic in exactness and usually unfailing in results. Where there was a riddle there was a key, though the finding sometimes took weeks; but now at the end of five minutes:
“By ——!” he cried suddenly. “I have it.”
The impact of the idea acted upon him like an electrical shock. The front legs of his stool came down to the earthen floor with a thud. In the same movement he leaped to his feet with leopard-like swiftness; and he towered over me, leaning forward, ready for action as a bent spring.
I stared up at him.
“I have it,” he repeated, yielding to one of his very rare fits of excitement, “and there’s no time to be lost. Fool that I was, not to, see at once—
“Partridge, we’ve been lucky, lucky! And to think that I nearly failed to take advantage of our luck, nearly failed to see how that episode of the abducted sedan-chair dovetails completely into this which we’ve called a mystery—how it explains everything! Come, we must go to the yamen.”
“To Liu Po Wen’s yamen? ” I asked with my mind busy trying to reconstruct that street episode which I had almost forgotten.
“No; to the governor’s,” corrected Hazard. “For don’t you see— But first—”
He broke off, jerking his head backward in the way he had when he was retracing the steps of his reasoning. For a moment he tattooed nervously with his knuckles on the table, his eyes fixed on vacancy. Then—
“First,” he said in quite his normal voice, “we must write a letter.”
Then he drew from an inner pocket of his coat a fountain pen, a pad of paper and an envelope. Sitting down, he addressed the envelope to Lomond at the Inn of Munificent Promise and then scratched a note hastily. When he had finished he handed it to me. It read:
When you would deal with a man, be careful he has authority. When you would shear a sheep, be careful a wolf is not hidden under the fleece. These trite Chinese sayings have particular reference to your arrangements made this hour with the governor of Kiangsi.
This is written not out of any regard for yourself, but in some consideration for the five hundred good men whom you would unknowingly betray to death. If you would know how you have been duped, be in the governor’s yamen within an hour.
I looked up from the note bewilderedly.
“But the governor has authority.” I objected. “Peking gave him plenipotentiary power.”
“It did,” said Hazard, “and yet—he hasn’t it.”
The sentence was enigmatic, but he suddenly developed a hurry that precluded any further questioning. This was not altogether like Hazard, who usually proceeded deliberately upon a scent.
His haste and consequent silence suited me not at all ill, the satisfaction of curiosity being such a keen delight to me that I am not averse to having the process well spread out. But I remember thinking at the time that such haste might easily be dangerous; and indeed the next minute Hazard perpetrated one of the very few mistakes I ever knew him to make.
He despatched the note to Lomond by the hand of a reliable tea-house runner. Then we left the tea-house for the street, and almost immediately were in rickshaws on our way to the governor’s yamen.
III
THE Summer’s sun was blazing noon-high by now, and dust added to the city’s discomfort—din, dust and packed humanity, a riot of strange smells and noise and color beneath a savage sky. We passed quickly into the district of the lower order of shops; and here the Ko Lao Hui, easy to be picked from their idleness and the vice on their faces, were as thick as yellow-jacketed wasps gathering for a feast of meat.
Everywhere they were grouped together, slant eyes speaking devilry, twisted brains plotting murder. This was unmistakable—and there were other signs.
One sign was the scarcity in the streets of women and children—always and everywhere the chief sufferers in such an upheaval as was promised. Nor did it need keenness of vision to see that much of the law-abiding populace hung in the strain of a great uncertainty, debating furtively toward which side it would be safest to throw its strength in the coming struggle—no cowardice, this, but a lesson of self-preservation learned in much civil conflict.
The Oriental is a callous breed, and wild animals fighting to the death are not so mad nor so inhuman as he can be in his hour of victory.
Koshinga understood this well; and when he struck he would strike hard, and with the momentum of that first blow might carry all Kiangsi before him. And Hazard and I knew well that Kiangsi was but an outpost of our enemy, or rather a key-rock to that empire-wide avalanche which Koshinga had planned—an avalanche which, once started, would crush millions.
Could that key-rock be held in place, loyal to the republic? As our rickshaw men edged and wormed and worried their way through the tortuous maze of streets—so symbolic of the workings of their makers’ minds—I found myself doubting it greatly.
The tinder was ready for the spark; the fuse had been laid and almost lighted, and nothing stood in the way of the conflagration but what Hazard and I had learned and what we might do. And now it seemed quite clear to me that we ourselves could do nothing.
Mull the matter over in my mind as I would, I could not even divine what errand we could possibly have in the governor’s yamen. That was as impossible for me to understand as was the matter of Hazard’s note to Lomond—a note which, as I now saw, contradicted the very premises upon which Hazard had based his reasoning.
Starting out by assuming the intelligence and integrity of the governor, he had ended by accusing him of duping Lomond and consequently betraying his own government, and by implication of betraying into the hands of Koshinga the foreign expedition whose intervention he himself had authorized. And Hazard’s act in warning and summoning Lomond proved that whatever the object of our present errand it was based on the assumption that the latter characterization of the governor was the correct one.
It proved one other fact, and a very disquieting one. Whatever else was true, we were going to the yamen of the man in whose hands lay all Kiangsi, to this governor of the strangely dual personality, not as friends, but as enemies. Yamen walls contain many secrets, and once inside them we would be in his power.
If he were Ko Lao Hui as well as governor we would be doubly in his power. Once he had learned our identities he would have only to pass along his knowledge in order to rid himself of us, and us of the world, there being many thousands of Ko Lao Hui in Nanchang who would take more than an even chance of death for the reward Koshinga had offered for our killing. I wondered if Hazard had thought of that.
Well, the best way out is usually forward. By now we had passed from the turbulent business section; and I leaned back in my rickshaw and watched the long brown compound walls topped with broken glass as we spun slowly past them.
Piercing these walls at intervals were great arched doorways beyond which one got glimpses of courtyards decorated with vases and flowers and an occasional forest tree. We had passed into the wealthier residence section, restricted and exclusive, yet over which the yellow destroying flood might presently be pouring.
Hereabout was our destination; and presently the coolies rounded a certain corner, and I found myself alighting before the great, dragon-decorated gate of the yamen.
Hazard’s method in attaining the governor’s presence was peculiar and would hardly have worked anywhere but in China, where officials are proverbially at their servants’ mercy concerning privacy and all conduct of business.
The master of the porters’ lodge came out kowtowing low. Hazard led him aside, and a sum that equaled six months of the servant’s pay passed between their fingers.
Then Hazard showed him a strongly worded government document directing all citizens of China to assist us, at the same time whispering vigorously in the porter’s ears. The porter’s eyes blinked respectfully at sight of the screed; but imme
diately a controversy seemed to arise between them.
Hazard insisted upon entering; the porter objected. Hazard started up the stone walk that led from this gate to the second compound with the porter backing away before him, gesticulating and disputatiously jabbering—but not too violently.
I followed Hazard, appreciating the trick but with some forebodings as to its effect upon the governor. Evidently Hazard wished to take the governor unaware, while the porter was at once earning his bribe, obeying the government order Hazard had showed him and saving his “face” concerning his duty to his master—leading us to the governor by the very act of disputing our passage.
Other yamen servants, getting the cue somehow, discreetly turned their backs—which easy compliance with the deception in no way altered my conviction that any of them would do murder at their master’s command. And in this fashion we passed through three stone-walled, tile-floored courtyards, and finally came to a heavy wooden door in the inner wall of the third.
Beyond this door was a fifty-foot corridor between high walls unbroken by doors or windows. As soon as we entered this corridor the porter gave up pretense of opposition and began pounding at another heavy door at the farther end of it.
Hazard and I followed more slowly; and though in China it’s no hyperbole to say that walls have ears I chanced the whisper:
“That was clever, Hazard, if you wanted to catch the governor off guard. But hardly if you care for his good-will. Men have been given the lingchi (death by slicing) for less than this in the old days.”
“The old days that aren’t so old after all,” replied Hazard, who had again added to his Sikh’s disguise the deceptive mask of the commonplace. “There’s a lot I’d like to tell you, but it isn’t safe, and I’ll only say this: the governor’s good-will is an absent quantity. From now, Partridge, it’s blade against blade; but—”
WE WERE too close to the door, against which the porter was still hammering, for further talk. It was however at least a minute before a wicket in the middle of the door opened inward, and the governor himself peered out, his face still heavily bandaged, but this time with his eyes unspectacled.
The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge Page 32