It fell down through the circular door. At the same instant Hazard’s voice—and my heart leaped at the sound of it—rapped up at me peremptorily:
“Partridge! Stay out, for God’s sake!”
And again, a vivid flash of bluish light. A loud crack, like the snapping of a bent piece of planking, or like the sound produced by a bolt of electricity leaping across a narrow space. I was staring down into that opening from which came Hazard’s voice and into which my revolver had fallen; but fortunately the very force of my impact upon it had flung me back a little from the door.
For at the instant of the flash I saw my revolver in the air midway between the lower edge of the iron door and a glimmer of water below. I saw that for the wink of an eyelid my revolver was the central point of that jagged flash, the conducting medium for the released death which tore its way upward from the water to the metal above.
And I remained where I was. I thought I understood in part. What was it Sha Feng had said? A double-edged weapon? A devil changed into a guardian angel?
“Are you all right, Hazard?”
“All right! I’m all right.”
“Your servant asks a million apologies,” came Sha Feng’s exasperatingly deliberate voice from behind me. “The waters which I, even in my ignorance that you were coming, or of the coming of Li Fu Ching, had made to flood the bottom of the vault, are waters of—”
“They are waters surcharged with electricity,” I snapped, somewhat angry with myself for having been so slow to guess what was really the key to the whole affair.
“That is as you say it in your language. So it was that Koshinga guarded his treasure, and your friend and I found a way to turn it against him.”
There was indeed plenty that I didn’t yet understand, but it was written that I should wait for that understanding. For at that moment there sounded behind me a deep-throated and wordless growl, of immense volume, hardly human; and I whirled to find Koshinga himself glaring at us out of eyes that gleamed like a leopard’s.
VII
KOSHINGA, who was in body a giant; in features a deracialized monstrosity; in intellect a prodigy; in brutal egotism devil-like; in spiritual perception zero: Koshinga, who had been three centuries in the fashioning—as will be told later—and who fitted the purpose for which he had been made as a machine-gun fits the purpose of slaughter. Embodied strength, without scruples, pity or any weakness whatsoever; strength intended to crush down the opposition of ordinary men as a thresher flails a straw—such was the man who had discovered us in the very act of robbing his treasure-vault. Koshinga, with one companion.
If he had been alone, I should have trembled before him. As it was I know not what instinct of self-preservation made me shrink with an even greater dread from the ape-like travesty of a man who accompanied Koshinga, and whose right hand was flashing to his mouth.
Sha Feng had spoken of Koshinga’s presence here. That remark had startled and frightened me enough at the time, but in the pressure of the last few minutes I had completely forgotten it. Now I knew that Koshinga, true to his policy of concealing his whereabouts whenever possible even from the bulk of his followers, had been in hiding somewhere in the house all this time.
Until he had heard that first pistol shot, he’d had no idea that things were not going altogether according to his plans, that Li Fu Ching was not proceeding uninterruptedly with his work of removing the treasure to a safer hiding-place. But one glance must have given him the approximate facts of the situation.
Also he must have felt sure that Sha Feng and I were not alone, that we had help stationed somewhere or messengers on the way for help—that, in brief, his ill-gotten wealth was lost beyond hope of recovery. For he bellowed with that madness in his voice that Hazard had prophesied:
“Fools! You have done what you will regret doing. Be it on your heads, the ruin that will engulf the world if I can not control the brew of power I go to mix.”
And, for it lay not in the traditions of the Ko Lao Hui that Koshinga should without great need peril his own life by active conflict, he leaped backward through the door.
But I fumbled for the gun that I did not have, and my fear, as I have said, was not of Koshinga.
Undoubtedly it was human, that negro-ish thing that raised a blowpipe to its black lips—and now I realize that in the wording of that assertion I have betrayed my own doubts. Should it be he or it, thing or man, I do not know. In the biological laboratory in which Koshinga had been fashioned, other and viler creatures might have been fashioned also, and by similar processes. Spiritual and moral sense aside, Koshinga was a superman. This imp of his was no more than four feet high, and it was shaped like a spider-monkey, but it was clothed after a fashion in dark cloth and there was a certain venomous intelligence in its eyes.
A revolver cracked somewhere to my left. It was not Sha Feng that fired that shot, nor of course was it Hazard. A bullet smashed the forehead of the creature at which I was staring in horror. At the same moment something struck my left forearm, something that stung and burned for an instant. Then I ceased to feel it at all. I ceased to feel anything but a cool numbness that raced with my blood current toward my shoulder.
I saw Hazard coming out through the hole in the bottom of the basin with a face that was drawn and white. Sha Feng was staring at me.
“I’ve got it at last, Hazard,” I cried; “the poisoned dart.” I knew it was killing me, yet I could not get my right hand up, to pull it out. It came to me that it didn’t matter, that Koshinga’s poisons were infallible.
And of a sudden—those who know me will understand—I wanted to know before I died the exact reason for all that I had witnessed: how Sha Feng had got into the vault under the water, how he was imprisoned, how he had got out again, how Hazard and he had managed to turn the deadly current against the Ko Lao Hui, how—
“Why did you—” I began. “Why, why—” I stammered, swaying a little on my feet.
Then I was overcome with another wonder, for suddenly a strange form took shape in the air before my eyes. It varied greatly, now tiny, now enormous, now running swiftly toward me with feet on the floor, now dancing vaguely against the growing blackness; but it was always the face and the body of the man with the overbright eyes and the look of ever-present horror; the man whom I had suspected of madness, who had watched us start for this place, who had for days been following and watching Hazard and me. It was he who had shot the creature that had wounded me, for he had a revolver in his hand. But now he was aiming at me.
Some one seized me by the arm which the dart had entered. Again it was the newcomer. There came a loud report, and a terrible pain that drove numbness out of that arm and racked my body. Then I was carried somewhere. I was carried a long way.
IT CAME to me that I had left Peking, that I was in a cart which bumped along rough country roads day after day. Now the hood of that cart would be opened and Hazard’s face would peer in at me, or Sha Feng’s or the face of that man who had shot me and whom I now knew to be mad. When this happened I could see mountains, sometimes distant, sometimes near. Then there was the desert and the camel smell, and from a rocking which was not unlike that of a small boat in a gentle sea, I knew I was carried in a litter between the humps of a camel. At night there was rest under the stars.
I began to be troubled in mind; and it seemed strange to me that I was not troubled over this journey nor where we were going nor what was ahead of us. Somehow I understood that Hazard had learned more of that vast conspiracy between priests and Ko Lao Hui which Koshinga had hinted and that we were on our way to defeat it; and I felt quite sure that I would recover in time to play my part in that defeat.
But it was the puzzle that had been with me when I was stricken that bothered me; and when Hazard’s face, queerly blurred, approached me, I overwhelmed him with questions, but I could not understand in the least what he replied. I knew this was useless, that it was a monomania, that it didn’t matter in the least how the thing had happ
ened and that I would be better employed in trying to discover the results; but my sick mind kept brooding over the matter and I couldn’t stop it.
Until one morning, before the Gobi dust began blowing, I spoke, and knew that I spoke, quite lucidly to Hazard.
“I’ve figured it out for myself, quite as you would have figured it. Nod if I’m right; shake your head if I’m wrong. You said there was one central fact that explained everything—that was the electrification of the water. The porcelain bottom of the pool—porcelain is a non-conductor. The cable conducting the electricity passed through the iron bottom of the pool. The electricity came from the city power plant. That’s why the house was so well-lighted, to explain its use.
“Well, Sha Feng came to the house first, some time during the day, suspecting that Koshinga’s money was hidden there. Of course he found it vacant, as we found it. Then he investigated it, and found the pool. ‘The treasure of Koshinga will be found only under the waters of death’—that saying probably came to his mind. Anyway he drained the pool. He could do that by wading into it and stopping the inlet pipe. When he came to the house, the water was harmless, for Ho Pu Bon had turned the current off before leaving. He wanted to have everything ready when he came back to the house to get the money out for the carters.”
A sort of dizziness was coming upon me anew and though I could not hear my voice I knew it was growing fainter. “Am I right so far?” I questioned swiftly, and Hazard nodded with a look of wonder.
“Then Sha Feng found the button which controlled the door, and pressed it as you pressed it. So he learned its secret and got into the vault. He got into the vault, and discovered Koshinga’s treasure; and then found he was a prisoner, for there’s no way to open that door from within. Koshinga and Li Fu Ching would take care of that, would take care that any one who found the treasure would be imprisoned, even with the pool drained. So Sha Feng is fast in the vault. But here’s a thing I missed. First he must have observed and examined that other opening in the bottom of the basin, the one like a manhole, that was still filled with water when I went to sleep. He must have done that.”
Again Hazard nodded, and I went on with a queer weak feeling of triumph.
“Then comes Li Fu Ching, and the spy that informed him of Ho Pu Bon’s plan to steal the money, and Koshinga. Naturally they’d flood the pool that Sha Feng had emptied, switch on the electricity that Ho Pu Bon had switched off; and Li Fu Ching and his man left for help to carry away the treasure. Koshinga hid somewhere. Then Ho Pu Bon came back—and died of the death that had been put back into the water.
“Then we enter. But by that time Sha Feng must have discovered some way of controlling the current from inside the vault—another switch. He must have heard us talking and been uncertain whether we were friends or enemies, for we talked so low he couldn’t hear our words. Being uncertain, he kept the electricity out of the water, but didn’t call to us. Then I left the room and you stayed and Li Fu Ching came back again.”
Hazard’s lips moved, and I thought that he asked—
“How do you know these things?”
“Because it’s the only way, the only way things could have happened. As you have told me,” I smiled, “ ‘there’s only one possible cause for an accurately determined effect.’ Well, Li Fu Ching came back, and you were driven into the water; and you were lucky enough to find the button which controlled the door with your foot. So you joined Sha Feng and together you— No, Sha Feng must have already arranged the trap which did for the Ko Lao Hui. He must have arranged a way of electrifying the water which had accumulated in the bottom of the vault. The cable must have been insulated, he could drag it from its fastening, and—and so he came out and you remained. That’s been explained. But how did he come out?
“I know,” I answered my own question hastily. “There’s only one way again. The way men escape from crippled submarines. That manhole was really an iron tube, with a partition in the middle and a removable cap on the end. I see the partition closed, the cap removed, the lower part of the tube drained of water, Sha Feng inside it.
“Now you replace the cap, open the partition and let in the water, and Sha Feng swims up into the pool. Reason for this arrangement, and for the arrangement whereby the water could be electrified from within the pool as well as from without? Koshinga’s fondness for secret hiding-places, inexplicable ways of escape and hidden weapons. Is all this right, Hazard?”
Hazard was now only a dark blur before my eyes, but I thought that he inclined his head.
“I wanted to know. My ruling passion,” I tried to smile, “curiosity. And now, now,” and I knew the swift rushing in my veins and the pounding in my ears and the sense of lightness that possessed me for the coming of delirium, “now we go to drag down the devil from the high places, and to fight the forces of hell upon earth.”
It was delirium, but it was not so far from the truth. Hazard tells me that after a minute I murmured again:
“There is a man with us who should be distrusted, although he is mad. And although he saved my life by shooting away the barb and the poison from my arm. A new way of cauterizing— But he should be distrusted because he is a ——”
And then I slept again, for days upon days, while the caravan slowly made its way westward across the Gobi. Sometimes I knew that I was walking in my sleep. Indeed, I learned afterward that after the first week of that journey my body seemed to have entirely thrown off the effect of the poison and that there were many things that I did automatically. It was only my mind that remained dormant. I am told that there are certain known poisons that may be combined to produce that effect if a quantity is injected into the blood that is just short of sufficient to produce death.
After a long time I got the impression that there was trouble. Of trouble about food, which some one would not sell us; camels, the owners of which refused longer to serve us; and donkeys, which could not be hired. We were in a village which was called Kan Chow; a starved, perishing ghost of a village, with mud-brick huts all tumble-down, and ruinous. The faces of the people were brown, gaunt and hopeless, but they sneered and gibed at us savagely.
“Clearly, the enemy’s been here before us,” said some one in a voice that sounded like Hazard’s.
And it seemed to me that we left that town on foot with a hundred savage voices shouting after us:
“He who was Lao-tse the mighty,
Who was Gautama, maker of gods—
He comes again, even Koshinga.
The priests will tell of it, the white paper will talk.
The warriors will gather under his banner.
Ten thousand dragons will come to assist him.
Sha! Shao! (Kill! Burn!) Koshinga comes.”
Then suddenly I came to my senses entirely and for keeps. It was the crash of revolver shots breaking into an absolute stillness that did the work. There were four of us lost in an immeasurable world of sand. To the right this sand was level as a floor to the horizon; but to the left it ran up in ascending even-surfaced ridges to a blackness of mountain-tops in the distance. And it was from over the top of one of those ridges which we had been about to climb that the shots came.
I went to my face in the sand. Hazard and Sha Feng did likewise. The Unknown, the man with the burning eyes, cried out as he fell; and then there was a thud, as if his head had struck upon a projecting rock. I reached for my revolver and found it and with a great rush of joy because I was myself again, jerked it down upon the seemingly empty sand-dune.
“There’s one thing to do,” I said, and the quietness of my own voice surprized me. “Advance by rushes; that’s the ticket. Clearly we can’t stay here.”
“Partridge!” Hazard cried incredulously. And then, “Thank God, thank God!”
VIII
AHEAD of us there was a slight rustling. It might have been the wind stirring a bush, had there been a bush on all that lifeless landscape. A Chinaman’s face poked cautiously over the top of the ridge. I fired and the
face disappeared, but I knew from a spurt of sand that I had missed. Four yellow hands clutching revolvers appeared suddenly. Four more shots were fired, and one of the bullets dusted my face with sand.
My sudden return to reason had startled Sha Feng and Hazard into momentary forgetfulness of their danger. But now they turned their faces ahead again. I saw that Sha Feng’s hand seemed well accustomed to the feel of his revolver, and instantly I began to squirm ahead. Whoever were our enemies, I felt that I could trust my companions to keep them down.
A revolver cracked behind me. I didn’t look up, but my ears told me that one of our attackers had tried for a shot, had been himself struck, had struggled to his feet and fallen to the sand again, where he lay quiet. Now I stopped my advance, leveled my own gun at the ridge and waited for Hazard or Sha Feng to go past me.
It was Hazard who came, crawling swiftly. Then Sha Feng passed both of us and took up a position at the bottom of the ridge. A moment later the three of us, creeping abreast, had reached the crest of it. A dead Chinaman sprawled grotesquely on top of the crest.
A glittering lizard peered at us inquiringly from a rounded heap of sand, unafraid, its very instinct for danger destroyed, so long had it been since any other form of life had invaded this desolation. There was nothing else; the unique and profound desert stillness, through which I now vaguely remember traveling for a long time, had settled down again. And yet Death must lurk very near. We kept down.
“What is this? Where— Who are they?” I whispered.
“Hush. Ko Lao Hui, sent out to stop us.”
Hazard had twisted half-way around, and was looking back toward the place where we had left our fallen companion, he whom I, even in my own madness, had declared to be mad.
The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge Page 44