The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (14 page)

In the middle of my speech Li Ming Shan signed to me to lower my voice, though we were alone in the reception hall.

“The little bird (gossip) whispered the truth. The Ko Lao Hui are angry with Kwang-Ho. Death is sown in the night and springs up from the ground in the morning.”

“But why?” I asked sharply.

Li Ming Shan lifted his arms in mild deprecation.

“It is the taxes,” he explained gently. “From study I learned a certain truth, that the money paid by the people in taxes should be given back to them in service. Injudiciously I carried out that truth, abolishing squeeze. The national tax I sent to Peking but the local taxes, the
likin
and
lotishui,
I used in giving the people certain things you have seen. There are also schools in which are taught the old truths and the new, and ten water-wheels that lift the water to the highest fields. Thus I have promoted contentment; and for that do the Ko Lao Hui hate me.”

“The money should have been turned over to them?” I suggested.

Li Ming Shan bowed, smiling placidly.

“Are they not the patriots?” he asked with detached and half-humorous cynicism.

To me, he had very nearly defined patriotism, and it lay not with the Ko Lao Hui. I said something to that effect rather hotly.

“I have some thousands of
tael
in the treasury,” he went on to explain. “The Ko Lao Hui, through Shen Yun of Sian-Fu, made demands. There was no other town in Shensi who had not made patriotic contribution to the fund. When I made a polite refusal I was told I must die for the sake of the cause and at the hands of my own people, who must also be punished. Then Shen Yun went swiftly away and a blight came against the children of Kwang-Ho.”

“Against the children only?” I cried.

The thing was worse than we’d imagined, inconceivable.

Li Ming Shan bowed.

“It is the work of the baser devils.”

“And the people of Kwang-Ho, the parents—they do not know why their children die?” I asked, though I thought I knew the answer beforehand.

“They do not know. They will not know until the end of the sixth day of punishment, of which this is the third. Then they will be told, and that I, their magistrate, could have saved their children had I paid over the money which is theirs, and that the Ko Lao Hui falsely claim. Already the people clamor against me, who am their mandarin and magistrate and responsible for whatever comes over the town.”

“They will kill you when they are told,” I said briefly.

“They will kill me,” agreed Li Ming Shan in his gentle voice. “I do not fear death. We must all die—and why should we quarrel with the gods as to how or when? But the fate of the little children troubles me. However, having entered the path, there is no turning back.”

“You could pay the money now,” I suggested.

“Nevertheless, the six days of punishment would be completed. It is a warning to the other towns, that they may not be tempted to refuse tribute. All Shensi must make contribution to the Ko Lao Hui.”

“But how is it done—what weapon do they use?”

Li Ming Shan didn’t reply instantly. For a moment he sat silent, his beautifully kept hands folded lightly in his lap, his silk-clad, slender figure immobilely upright, his bright eyes staring straight forward. From his look, or possibly from his as yet unspoken thought, I got that suggestion of mysticism that one so often encounters—a weakening wind to the will—in the East.

“He who fights the Ko Lao Hui fights the air,” he answered at last. “Many thousand devils assist them. They send death from far off. It is past understanding. In this case,” he added in a more practical tone, “they strike the children while at play in the morning.”

It wasn’t at all strange to find this educated nobleman—I use that last word advisedly in its truest sense—succumbing apathetically to a belief in the invulnerability of the Ko Lao Hui. There’s no doubting the many merits of the Chinese; but the twin spirits of superstition and fatalism have long sepulchered the race.

I had decided that nothing more was to be gotten out of Li Ming Shan and that it was time to go, when Hazard spoke up in rather sharp assertion—

“If you cared to communicate with the Ko Lao Hui this afternoon, you could do so.”

The magistrate turned toward him and bowed courteously. Casting back to see where Hazard had got the information, I realized that it had been in the tone of Li Ming Shan’s answer to my suggestion that he could stop the killing by paying the money.

“A certain way has been left open,” said the magistrate. “A signal may be given and a message left in a certain place. But there are no Ko Lao Hui in Kwang-Ho.”

“Then you will do your servants a favor,” said Hazard. “Instantly you will speak good words to the Ko Lao Hui and tell them that the two strangers that have come to Kwang-Ho are their enemies and should be killed.”

I DON’T know whether Li Ming Shan or I was more surprized at this suggestion. Li Ming Shan expostulated politely. Hazard, however, only became more firm in his insistence that the Ko Lao Hui should be warned against us. To give the warning weight and added credibility, he even informed Li Ming Shan of certain of our recent movements and future plans that we had agreed should be kept secret. I remained silent, not wishing to confuse counsel by opposing him; but I couldn’t figure out what was in his mind.

At last Li Ming Shan agreed, though plainly with inward scruples. A message would be sent to the Ko Lao Hui within the hour denouncing us and urging our destruction. That message would doubtless reach the hidden membership that were working the society’s wrath upon Kwang-Ho before nightfall. Although Hazard, who monopolized our latter part of the conversation as I had the former, reiterated my declaration that we had come to Kwang-Ho to fight the Ko Lao Hui, I could feel behind Li Ming Shan’s courteous dismissal something like regret that we’d touched the matter. Plainly he didn’t relish doing that which would, to his mind, insure our death.

But before we got back to the inn I was quite of a mind with Hazard. A few words spoken by him convinced me—but just preceding those words was our first glimpse of Kwang-Ho’s incredibly cruel punishment.

Ahead of us a bare-legged, barefooted boy, bright-eyed and healthy looking, was playing in the middle of the gray, dusty street. We were almost upon him before he saw us. With childish fear he started to run ahead of us, probably toward his home. Of a sudden he emitted a cry of pain, as though struck by some invisible flying missile. He fell in the middle of the street and curled one leg around as if he would grip his foot with his hand. But the next instant he was up again, now sobbing bitterly.

He ran on for about a hundred yards, swaying with increasing weakness, and then dropped again.

When we got to him he was the center of a group of Chinese. They seemed not particularly excited. Before we could examine the boy a woman picked him up and carried him into a house and the crowd began to scatter, tossing this puzzling remark back and forth in the age-old fashion of a Chinese crowd.

“It is the devil that comes in the evening, not as powerful as the morning devil. He will not die.”

This corroborated the puzzling impression Li Ming Shan had already given us, that this strange death only came in the morning. It also considerably increased our perplexity, although, as we saw it later, the incident really contained a clue to the whole mystery. But it also brought me completely in sympathy with Hazard’s purpose, which he now revealed.

“The logical process takes time,” he said. “We can’t take time while children are dying. Now, the principal thing in this problem is to discover the weapon they’re using. If we draw their fire we’ll come close to discovering it. A thing that will kill children will kill grown men. And the men that have been set to punishing Kwang-Ho are probably only tools, non-original. They’ll use the same weapon, probably wielded differently. Anyway,” he apologized, “it had to come to open warfare sometime.”

Truly, the speediest way was the best. It had hurt to see that boy struck down.

We got back to the inn shortly before dark. That evening we talked to the innkeeper, an intelligent man who had traveled. Without seeming to believe in it himself, he referred to the villagers’ superstition that certain vultures were somehow connected with Kwang-Ho’s calamity. They were eight in number, he said, and for three mornings they had passed over Kwang-Ho just before sunrise, coming out of the hills in the west. Plainly, they brought the morning devil—the evening devil being, according to popular belief, quite another and less virulent individual.

Although the innkeeper rejected this, he had no other explanation to make of the mortality, which was quite outside his experience and hence quite unprecedented in human affairs. This was his modest statement. Again we heard that the children were always attacked while at play in the streets. When Hazard suggested that the parents should keep their children indoors, he replied with a variation of Li Ming Shan’s fatalism, that it would do no good, as the devils would follow those whom they wanted and might in revenge attack other members of the household. Shensi, it will be remembered, is as many days’ travel from Peking as Peking is from California, and as widely separated as to ideas.

Anyway, Hazard and I left the innkeeper with a mutual desire to rise in the morning early enough to watch the passing of the mysterious vultures. After all, we agreed, it was curious.

WE LAY awake on the
k’ang
a long time that night discussing the problem, but with no added light. It wasn’t at all hard to understand the heaviness of Kwang-Ho’s punishment, for rebellion against tyranny is the most contagious thing on earth, and if the other towns in Shensi were to remain in the line of tribute bearers, Kwang-Ho must be forced into that line. And the castigation was indeed the most severe that could be devised, for the peasantry of China in general is a sound and healthy people, loving its offspring intensely and only belied by the reputation of the coast scum. But as to the nature of the discriminating death the Ko Lao Hui was sending upon the town, we couldn’t as yet even surmise.

At last we slept, alert even in our sleep as we’d learned to be and with our hands never more than three inches from our revolvers. We were to arise at five, an hour before sunrise; and I remember I nudged Hazard and Hazard nudged me at exactly the same moment, so well had we trained ourselves to wake on schedule. Five minutes later we’d passed out into the courtyard.

We found it deserted, even the animals having been gotten under some sort of shelter from the heavy night dew. Indeed, quiet lay over the whole town, a relief after the plaintive cries of yesterday. If, as was almost certain, there were others that watched for the coming of the ill-omened birds, they watched in silence—peeping furtively, I imagined, out of half-opened doors and unscreened windows. I made some sort of joke at our own folly in not keeping shelter over our heads, if indeed the vultures shed death from their wings. But I found Hazard wasn’t in a joking mood.

“Well,” he said, “say what you will, if the flight of the vultures actually takes place every morning as they say, it’s as unaccountable as the deaths, only less momentous. Vultures haven’t any such habits, if I remember my natural history. And when two things are separately unaccountable it’s only natural to feel they might explain each other.”

“No doubt it’s food that draws them,” I suggested.

“Exactly. It couldn’t be anything else. But if there’s food to the east of the town, why do they return nightly to the west of it? If it was the nesting season there might be an explanation, but it isn’t.”

We were silent a while, watching the sky over the black hills to the west. As usual, the morning was to be a cloudless one. Everywhere the heavens were brilliant with stars, save in the east, where they were paling before the sunrise.

“Besides, it’s too early in the morning,” said Hazard at length. “It’s too early for them to start. And, see, there they are.”

He pointed them out by stepping behind me and laying his arm over my shoulder. I followed the line of his extended arm until, very close to the horizon, my eye caught a group of black specks. I counted them—one, two, three—eight.

“It’s the same number,” I said.

“Now why?” murmured Hazard softly. “Why?”

They came on swiftly, and they couldn’t have been far from the town when they rose. It was hard for me to reasonably account for my undeniable feeling of uneasiness as they approached it. I reminded myself that men have always revolted instinctively from the carrion bird. Its somber color, its rapacious beak and head, its peculiar heaviness and stiffness of wing, its every unlovely characteristic have long been associated in the mind with all that is grim and sinister and related to death. Nevertheless I followed their course with fascinated eyes.

They were undoubtedly going to pass directly over us, over the center of the town.

They did. And as they passed I heard a sound which we mistook at the time for a faint rushing of wings. Nevertheless I thought I heard Hazard shudder.

“I felt—” he half-whispered and stopped.

“What did you say?” I asked in a peculiarly hushed voice.

“Nothing.” Then, after a moment, with reluctant frankness, “I started to say I felt the passing of death. It’s nonsense, of course—nervousness and the eerie sight of those damnable birds.”

Well, I wasn’t so sure of that, even then. One of Hazard’s qualities was a certain keenness of intuition that often threatened conflict with his reasoning—and never quite did.

But I said nothing, and in silence we watched the vultures speed away in a long, wavering line to the east. Soon it was apparent they were going to light somewhere near the crest of Tung-Whan. Now they were a mere black streak against the lesser blackness of the mountain. Now they had disappeared, melted into it entirely. We watched a long time but they made no reappearance against the brightening sky. Whatever they had left behind them, they themselves were safe on that densely wooded summit.

“The children have bare feet,” exclaimed Hazard suddenly and seemingly apropos of nothing, after that long silence. “They alone have bare feet!”