The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (12 page)

Chinese are proverbially dilatory, anyway. As it was, he had no reason to believe we’d already found the pearls. Swiftly I tried to decide what would be in his mind. It would be this: he would get us killed; he would send the coolies on their way; then at his leisure he would return and pick up the pearls. That would be the purpose of his harangue, the words of which came jumbled to our ears.

“The devil!” muttered Hazard. “Shall I shoot him? No; it’s hardly worth the chance. They might rush us.”

BUT, if I knew my Chinaman, nothing but shooting Li Fu Ching or silencing him in some way would prevent them from rushing us. Invariably the sluggish nerves of the Chinese coolie class require strong stimulus to rouse them to action; sometimes a mob stimulates itself by loud chanting and yells and jabbering, but always it will give itself up to the impassioned spellbinder.

And Li Fu Ching was eloquent, as most Chinese are under stress, melting gutturals, labials, sibilants and aspirants into an endless monotone more compelling than the fieriest accented speech. I caught a few words of his deadly urging. He was appealing to the spirit of the guilds: we had trespassed upon their property, the river; we would rob them of things that were theirs.

Now Hazard did an irritating thing. In apparent indifference to the death that fronted us, he tried to reason out how Li Fu Ching had known that the pearls were here.

“I’ve never been able to solve that,” he said. “Or rather I’ve found so many solutions. One is that he was a Boxer chief; that he saw the looters making way with the pearls and the image; that he detailed a trusty subordinate and the men whose bones lie here in pursuit, and that none returned. But that’s far-fetched. There are other simpler explanations. For instance—”

I tried to keep my temper, but I lost it then.

“For —— sake—” I began and then stopped in discouragement at the utter futility of appeal.

True, he had claimed to have almost a chance-proof plan of saving us. But already the coolies were crying to each other excitedly; those in front were crouching as wild animals do before the spring, with strength showing in every line of them. They had knives in their hands, a few pistols; we’d be overwhelmed in the mass of them. It would be no use to beg, no use to resist.

“Before they take me, I must die,” said Mu Ting.

What an ancient and universal plea that is! Yes, it was the cry of a Chinese woman. Once have the wells of Shensi, and once of Peking, been choked with the dead bodies of women who have thrown themselves there to escape the rabble—and that within two decades.

I turned upon Hazard furiously.

“You boasted—” I began again.

He didn’t seem to hear me.

“Well, it’s about time,” he murmured thoughtfully and as calmly as if he held all the future in his own hands.

And he stooped and seemed to be doing something with a light, stout cord that lay near his feet.

I stared at him; I hadn’t perceived that cord before, but I saw now that it stretched outward toward the mouth of the cave, and I realized that he had dropped it behind him, a connecting link to the dike, as we had entered.

There is nothing as terrifying as the inexplicable and, under certain circumstances, nothing as reassuring. When understanding is lacking, anything is possible. And, if I hadn’t at bottom been possessed of some little instinctive confidence in Hazard, I’d hardly have yielded my fate to him so readily. Anyway, at that action of his my spirits swung away from hopelessness.

“What are you—”

But I was interrupted amazingly, and a moment later changed my question—

“What have you done?”

For he had pulled the cord sharply, and that instant there had boomed through the cave the sound of a muffled explosion.

“Merely completed the obvious,” replied Hazard calmly.

The madman had blown up the dike. Or rather he had blown up one end of it. Away from that end the Chinese leaped, some into the water, some toward the center of the dike, forcing their comrades back in a solid mass. This was all to the accompaniment of shrill cries of astonishment and terror, which drowned out Li Fu Ching’s voice. An instant later the water burst through the dike, with a rushing, gurgling sound, and reached toward us like a lapping tongue.

“You’ve drowned us,” I accused Hazard.

“Certainly,” and there was exasperating amusement in his voice. “You might have surmised what I intended to do. Didn’t I say Li Fu Ching would find it hard to collect from us if we were drowned?”

“Faugh! You’ve played into his hands. You’ve simplified things for him. Now the junkmen will never know there were pearls here. Li Fu Ching will send them away, then come back secretly himself with some of his own Peking ruffians. He’ll drain the cave at his leisure and take the pearls from our dead bodies.”

“That’s the way I figured it, too,” and Hazard chuckled maddeningly.

“Well, you—” I began. Then I realized the folly of expostulation. After all, we couldn’t have escaped anyway. “When did you plant that—mine?” I asked.

“Last night, while you slept. But compose yourself; we’re not dead yet. While we’re waiting for whatever’s to come, let’s try reading a riddle. The riddle of this cave, I mean—of the bones and the pearls and the image and how they all came here. Can you make it out now?”

As I remember it, it was rather a relief to find an excuse for turning away from the face of death. And there was to be an interim. The Chinese were laughing now—low, sly, cruel-sounding laughter. They realized the deadly joke we’d played upon ourselves and knew we’d be killed without further act of theirs. So, with my mind working rather jerkily, I considered the problem Hazard suggested, which all of a sudden I discovered to be no problem at all, in the light of our own predicament.

“Why, it’s simple now,” I cried. “The event is merely repeating itself. The cave was dry-bottomed in those days, as it is now; all we’ve done is to reconstruct a natural dam. They were all drowned as we’re to be drowned.”

“Just how do you figure it?” queried Hazard curiously.

“I suppose,” I said slowly, “that the Austrian looters fled into this cave, closely pursued by the Boxers. It was customary for the Chinese to carry large quantities of powder for their muzzle-loading rifles. A fight, a chance shot exploding a keg or more of this powder, which would naturally remain on the junk close in upon the dike—yes, that’s what happened. It must have been a great explosion, destroying the dike completely. See how these rocks are shattered to pieces.”

“I think that’s the only possible explanation,” corroborated Hazard. “Every one that wasn’t killed by the rocks was drowned. The water must have come in a solid wall, not slowly, as it’s coming now. I figured on only starting it.”

“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.”