“Well, it’s hard to say,” replied Hazard. “We’ve this much of fact to go on. We know what Sha Feng’s present business is; to find the money Koshinga has accumulated for his war-fund by extortion from the people. A sum so enormous that its withdrawal from the currency of China makes the Republic a secret bankrupt and Koshinga the real money-king of the East. And we know that money’s somewhere around Peking, or at least we’re pretty sure of it. It’s all in bullion, and bullion’s hard to move. And of course Koshinga had it close at hand when—”
HE PAUSED. Early in the trip we had tested both Tsai Mu’i and the driver to see if they understood English. There was no danger from them; but we had both been requested, and had solemnly promised, never while Koshinga lived to let pass our lips any reference to Koshinga’s recent attempted master-stroke of capturing practically the entire government of China while it was assembled in the Government House discussing measures against him.
It wasn’t politic to let the public know how very nearly he had succeeded. But I understood Hazard’s reference. Money is the best backer of power even in the Orient; Koshinga might have needed it to bolster up the one-man Government that he had planned to establish on the ruins of the Republic; and he would have had it near.
“Then there’s the dope we’ve picked up,” Hazard went on thoughtfully. “Indefinite enough, most of it. I wish I understood the meaning of that street-saying that seems to be so common: ‘The treasure of Koshinga will be found only under the waters of death.’ But I’m wandering. The point is, if this message really is from Sha Feng, it’s probably in connection with his search for the treasure.”
Hazard spoke without enthusiasm, a lack that I’d noticed in him before when discussing Sha Feng’s quest.
“But I don’t see why he should send for us,” I objected. “Why not the Government House, if he needed help? As soon as we get rid of the carter I’m going to try finding out what else she knows, that she hasn’t told us,” and I glanced toward the woman.
“She’ll tell us only what she wants to, for she’s Chinese. And since Sha Feng’s Chinese too it’s likely even she doesn’t know much.”
“Well, we’ll hope for the best,” I said, parting the sections of the hood and looking out again. Hazard leaned over and peered out also. We were just then passing the great Lama Temple, filled with innumerable images of that Chinese Pantheon in which the people were so rapidly losing faith—creation of a vicious and grasping priesthood whose power was passing.
“I don’t know,” replied Hazard slowly, “that it would be best for Sha Feng to get hold of that treasure just now.”
“Why on earth—” I began, astonished at that avowal.
“Because of this,” said Hazard. “Remember the song we’ve just heard. ‘Koshinga, who was Lao-Tse, and Gautama also.’ And remember that the prophecy to which those words refer is supposed to come true just two months from yesterday. And in a place the location of which no one knows except the leaders of the Ko Lao Hui—the long-lost Sacred Pass.”
“But we’ve agreed,” I said, “that that is one of the Ko Lao Hui prophecies that will never be fulfilled. That Koshinga will refuse to jeopardize his power—”
“But he’s permitting his followers to continue to believe it. He’s permitting that song to be sung, as it’s been sung for centuries. Still, I agree that Koshinga will never join forces with the priesthood unless he is compelled to. But a desperate man will do anything; a desperate egotist like Koshinga would pull the world down on his own head. That last defeat hurt him; so did the blocking of the revolution in Kiangsi.
“He’s been balked everywhere lately. If I know him at all, his temper’s on a hair-trigger; but he’ll never pull the revolution until he’s sure of at least temporary success. And the support of the Taoist and Buddhist hierarchies would give him that surety, and a holocaust of humanity that would satisfy even him. Only, wouldn’t the loosed forces be too strong even for him?
“That’s his fear, I think; but if he loses this war-fund that’s cost him years of extortion to accumulate, I think he’ll decide to take a chance. So I’d as lief its recovery would be postponed until there’s no chance of his springing the trick—until there’s no chance of his proving, in whatever way that it’s been determined for him to prove it, that he’s the incarnated spiritual authority of the East.”
“The successor of the gentle Buddha and the philosophic Lao-Tse,” I mused. “Heavens, Hazard, when I think of it and of what it would mean—certainly the rule of his Satanic Majesty in Asia for a while anyway—why, it’s impossible!”
“Well, the Tai-ping Rebellion must have also seemed pretty incredible before it happened,” returned Hazard grimly. “Millions killed because one Chinaman proclaimed himself the yellow Christ. No, in Asia nothing’s impossible that relates to fanaticism. And there never was such a rallying point for fanaticism in the world’s history as this Koshinga—never! The Government will hold off, too, until it’s too late. It’s afraid to interfere with the priests.”
“I know. I wasn’t doubting. I was only permitting myself the luxury of a Western view-point for a minute. By the way, Hazard, that white man we were talking about yesterday, the one who seems to be tortured by fear or something—he’s still following us. He saw us get into this cart.”
“The devil he did,” said Hazard. “I wonder if— But here we are at the North Gate.”
Conversation was naturally ended until we had passed through that gate, which was guarded by trim Chinese sentries, standing with soldierly erectness in the shadow of the great Tatar wall, fifty feet high. So we passed into the comparatively uncrowded section of the city outside that wall—a place of trees and of great, quiet compounds lying dark under a quiet sky jeweled with millions of starry points.
There seemed something contradictory in that sight. It seemed hard to reconcile the vast, eternal calm of those heavens with the mad passions of the tiny men who lived under them, such as were expressed in the song we had just heard, such as have from the beginning of man’s time on earth given rise to such ruthless ambitions as the one we were combating.
But I reflected that somehow in the scheme of things they must be reconciled, since they both exist; and now as we turned a corner of the twisting road we saw a little ahead of us the dark contour of the foot-hills; and in the midst of them an earth-born glittering that fairly rivaled those stars.
“The House of the Myriad Lights indeed,” I whispered. “They’re still going, and it’s well past midnight. Ho Pu Bon likes his display.”
“I wonder if it’s merely display,” questioned Hazard.
“One thing,” I said; “before we come to it, I’m going to have another try at getting Tsai Mu’i to speak.”
But I didn’t succeed. It was after we had dismissed the carter, a little distance from the house, that I again questioned her. She responded by developing a complete inability to understand me at all; she was, as Hazard had said, a Chinese, It was hard to understand her silence, if she were really Sha Feng’s messenger. However, she had had her way with us. We had gone too far to withdraw now.
Was she indeed a beggar woman? There had been many signs besides her agility in entering and leaving the cart that increased my doubt of it.
But presently when we reached the gate of that brilliantly illuminated compound we found matters for greater wonder.
III
SHA FENG may have invited us here, but Sha Feng was not here to receive us. Nor, it seemed, was any one else. The gate was open. The porter’s lodge was empty. The grounds inside the gate were sprinkled with softly glowing incandescent globes. And the place was silent—silent as an empty tomb.
“Now this,” murmured Hazard, “is quite the queerest thing yet.”
And after we had passed through the second gate, moving as if every shadow concealed a menace, as if an enemy lurked behind every shrub and grotesquely shaped statue, I echoed him.
“A rich Chinese household without servants! But i
t’s impossible. Is the household itself here?”
“God knows what—” began Hazard.
And then he was checked by something that, breaking into the eerie silence, made the hair on the back of my neck to stir a little, and drew from Tsai Mu’i a low, poignant cry. Sharp and full of fear was that cry, but I would have sworn that it was not fear for herself—a strange sound to come from the lips of one who might be supposed to be deadened by suffering. But I paid her little attention in the sudden compelling mystery of what we had heard.
From somewhere ahead of us had come a man’s scream, chopped off instantly. A death-cry, I was sure. There was an echo flung back by the cliff, which the artificial light made visible, hanging like a threat over the rear of the house. Then that unnatural silence settled down again, oppressive, even appalling.
“Sha Feng?” I muttered in a whisper.
“If it was, he had need of help and he needs it no more. But let’s hope— Well, forward!”
He went on, taking Tsai Mu’i between us. If she was a friend, she deserved protection; if she was not, she needed watching. Once I took her by the elbow to assist her up some steps, and for the first time noticed how rounded and soft her arm was under the ragged sleeve. I thought she was trembling; but there was nothing significant about that. The chilly hand of King Fear had touched all three of us.
And still we went on. With Hazard and me, in our long matching of wits against Koshinga, courage was always bolstered up by the thought of the enormity of the evil we combated. But with the woman it was different. What was it that drove her forward in spite of her terror? What was it that had driven her earlier in the evening to brave Li Fu Ching’s assassins?
We passed through the third gate. Beyond this gate began the low, sprawling dwelling-rooms of the place, stone-walled, interspersed with garden spaces. Indeed, the whole place was really a garden, of which these rooms were a part.
We moved with the extreme of caution from room to room, finding much in the way of arrangement and furnishings which we might have admired under other circumstances. But now the furnishings impeded our search, and the artful arrangement confused us; so that we worked through them for perhaps half an hour and found nothing but signs of very recent occupancy.
And everywhere lights—lights, and the haunting shadow of tragedy betokened by that eerie cry.
So we searched fruitlessly until we had come nearly to the rear of the house. Finally we entered a bedroom opening off the one fairly continuous corridor. Against the farther wall of this room was a large teakwood bed, every inch of which was exquisitely carved. Upon a Chinese chair near this bed lay a complete outfit of mandarin garments—gown, undervest, loose silk trousers, underwear, silk-topped felt slippers, everything—all flung down there carelessly as if their owner had hastily disrobed.
“Hum!” muttered Hazard, fingering the fluffy pile. “Now how many days, hours or minutes have these lain here? It’s minutes;” he answered his own question. “For see, this fold hasn’t had time to settle normally, nor this one.”
True, the silks lay all too loosely to have been there long.
“Now, if we can find out who discarded these—” and I started to search the garments hurriedly. Presently I made a find, and another one; and Hazard and I studied them together.
An envelope full of railway and steamship tickets, and a letter. The tickets were properly viséd, and were issued in the name of Ho Pu Bon, owner of all this magnificence; they called for first-class transportation from Peking to Tientsin, Tientsin to Kobe, Kobe to San Francisco.
The letter was written in Chinese, which Hazard understood but indifferently. I whispered the substance of it to him. A certain Peking guild of carters acknowledged the receipt of an order from Ho Pu Bon, and assured him that ten freighting carts would arrive at the House of the Myriad Lights early on the morning which would in a few hours dawn.
We put the tickets and letter back where we had got them and tiptoed out of the room. I had got very little out of them, save that Ho Pu Bon had been in the house but a short while ago, and was probably here still, alive or dead; but Hazard’s eyes were gleaming like steel.
I had, of course, connected Ho Pu Bon with the cry we had heard, either as assailant or assailed; but I think Hazard’s mind had already leaped past that conclusion. I think he already surmised the one great motivating cause which lay behind all the curious circumstances of the night, to which must now be added Ho Pu Bon’s solitary stay in a house from which he had driven every one else. But even Hazard could not foresee our next find.
WE STOLE down the corridor, with our revolvers in our hands, and with Tsai Mu’i following us mutely. Every step we took with trepidation. Now and then, at a silent signal from Hazard, we stopped sharply, hoping to surprize and discover any one who might be trying to cover his own movements by the sound of ours. But we heard nothing. Except for that seeming death-cry we heard nothing in all our passage through the house. And that was at least strange, for where was the assailant of whomever had been struck down?
Presently we came to what we judged to be the rearmost room of the house. It was much larger than those we had inspected before, softly matted, set about with teakwood benches, illuminated with many electric lights arranged around its wooden walls.
In the middle of the room was a great circular bathing-pool, perhaps forty feet across. Just to the right of the door by which we entered the room from a rather dark corridor were the steps and upper end of a diving-chute, which curved down until its lower end dipped into the pool.
“Ah!” grunted Hazard as he stepped inside the room. “Modernized, modernized. There aren’t ten such homes in— What’s that?”
I heard Tsai Mu’i whimper aloud; I heard that whimper change into a sob of relief. I followed Hazard’s look and saw a dark, huddled something lying on the matting very close to the water’s edge.
MY FIRST thought was that if it was a dead body, it could not be Sha Feng’s, for it was too great in girth.
We walked over to it quickly. The dead man lay on his face. When we turned him over, the contorted face of Ho Pu Bon stared up at us.
“Ah!” whispered Hazard. “It needed just this to—”
Upon his face was a queer mingling of exultation and depression. It was as if he saw a little ahead of us a triumph which would ultimately prove a disaster. And that look, which I did not at all understand, remained on his face through our examination of the body, with its bewildering results.
We had half-expected that underneath the flowered dressing-gown the body would be found nude, prepared for the bath which the man had evidently been about to take. But what we could not have expected and could not explain was that from head to heels there was no mark on Ho Pu Bon’s body to show the cause of his death.
“And yet,” said Hazard a moment later, “to judge from the cry we heard, death must have been practically instantaneous. There’s no poison that I ever heard of that would act so quickly. Besides, how could he have been poisoned? Certainly not subcutaneously, not by means of any weapon, for there’s no weapon but leaves a mark. And yet the blow must have been delivered here, on this spot. None but a perfectly well man goes for a midnight bath. And then—”
Hazard paused, for once utterly at sea.
“Well,” I put in, “it strikes me that this midnight bath is about as hard to explain as the killing. It’s not like a Chinaman.”
“And particularly,” said Hazard, “it’s not like a man of any race who had on his mind what Ho Pu Bon had on his.”
We were talking, of course, in the most cautious of tones, but Hazard’s voice was still queerly elated.
“I don’t get you,” I replied. “What do you mean?”
Hazard’s brows came together swiftly, as if he were concentrating on the effort to present a whole argument in a few sentences.
“I mean that the constant temptation to acquire almost inconceivable wealth will drive even a Chinaman mad. I mean that Koshinga’s hoard is her
e, in this house; that it was placed in Ho Pu Bon’s custody, and that Ho Pu Bon planned to make away with it.
“Evidence number one, our summons here by Sha Feng, whose one present object in life is to recover that money. Number two, Ho Pu Bon’s dismissal of his servants, for of course there might be spies among them. Number three, his return here alone. Number four, the tickets to America and the letter from the carters, showing that he planned to flee and to take something of great bulk with him. Number five, his death, sharp, swift and inexplicable, the sort of death that Koshinga deals. All these can’t be coincidences. Mad, indeed, he must have been, to think that Koshinga, who trusts no one, would trust him, would not put a double guard upon the treasure.”
“I believe you’re right, Hazard,” I admitted after a moment’s swift weighing of probabilities. “But how would he hope to get the money out of the country?”
“How do they get opium out of the country? There are ways of doing those things. But now—where is the money? How on earth was Ho Pu Bon killed? Why this impulse to a midnight plunge? And, most important of all, how long before whoever killed Ho Pu Bon will return with help and probably remove the jeopardized treasure? For of course, Ho Pu Bon’s faithlessness means that he may have told others about it.”
“Another question,” I added bewilderedly; “where is Sha Feng?”
“There’s an answer to all of them, probably one central fact that explains them all. But what?”
IV
THOUGH the night was warm, I found myself shivering a little. What assurance had we that the next instant we would not also fall victims to whatever ghastly tool of death Koshinga had used against Ho Pu Bon? I glanced around the room swiftly, almost furtively, at the innocent-looking teakwood furniture, at the unbroken surface of the swimming-pool with its dark, light-absorbing bottom which rendered the water almost opaque, at the diving-chute which dipped down into that water, and curved upward and backward to the doorway. My eyes fell on Tsai Mu’i, who was standing in a strained attitude just inside the room. I dropped the dressing-gown over Ho Pu Bon’s body and beckoned her forward.
The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge Page 41