The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (56 page)

And the next instant I was on my feet and somewhat astonished to find myself there. I was on my feet with my revolver extended, and I pressed the trigger before I knew it.

Sha Feng was standing beside me, and saying quietly:

“The clumsy, impatient West. It is no matter, but—”

And cutting into the first of his words had come those chopped off shrieks, which might have been belated and multiplied echoes of that cry which Hazard and I had heard when we entered the house—the cry which Ho Pu Bon had uttered when he died.

My aim had been for Li Fu Ching, but he had leaped aside at the moment of my shot. I think it was those shrieks, and not any sound from me, that impelled him. He leaped and ran with marvelous swiftness up the sloping bottom of the pool toward the door by which he had entered the room. I fired at him again but missed for I was also running, going forward toward the basin.

Li Fu Ching escaped through the door.

The three remaining Chinese, caught entirely off guard and unwarned by the cries of their companions, had lost their heads and were fighting each other to get through the opening in the bottom of the basin. One of them gave way and scurried around to the similar opening on the other side of the vertical door, and the remaining two plopped down through the hole together.

Even as they dropped they seemed to strain upward, as though” they had suddenly discovered a danger below that was greater than the danger above them. Even as they released their clutches on the edge of the door they made spasmodic efforts to regain them. But they disappeared as Sha Feng and I raced down the slope of the basin; and even in my excitement I wondered amazedly that after that outburst of simultaneous shrieks not another sound had come from the mysterious vault which had swallowed them all and swallowed Hazard, too.

Not a single sound; but was there now, as these last men descended, a flash of bluish light that showed for just an instant against the red rust of the iron door? Was there a crackling, and two other cries that blended into one, and that in their turn were instantly silenced? I was not sure.

There are moments in which incidents crowd upon each other so swiftly that no man’s brain can recall all of them. This was such a moment. Moreover, I was by now filled with a sense of fantasy such as I had never before felt even in those days of struggle with Koshinga, Master of the Extraordinary. Save for a certain purpose that had been born full-grown in my mind, nothing was clear to me.

I take no credit for that purpose, which was really sprung from impulse and might not have endured the test of quiet decision; but if I could I would descend to where Hazard was, share life with him as long as he lived and die with him if I must. Sha Feng would remain behind; he would cause that vertical door to swing to the horizontal again; he would shut us in with our enemies—and for that I could not blame him. Nevertheless I cursed him under my breath as he, guessing my intention, called out to me with what seemed, for one who had so far conducted himself so placidly, a strange rush of terror.

“Stop! Below there is death—death!”

Death! I knew it. But there might be a way out. “There is always a way out—always!” Hazard’s own pet motto flashed through my mind. If Hazard was still alive, and if I could reach him—

By then, still running, I had reached the opening; and though I checked myself by gripping the upper edge of the door my momentum still carried me forward, so that I looked over that door and saw what was on the other side of it.

The last of the Ko Lao Hui, whom I had believed to have fled into the vault, was still there, crouching low, his yellow face twitching. Instinctively I clubbed my revolver to strike him. He had time to drop through the opening to join his companions but instead he merely tried to dodge my blow. He was only partially successful. The butt of my revolver struck him glancingly on the forehead, stunning him and knocking him backward, so that he cleared the hole. My upper arm struck on the edge of the door with almost the full force of my downward blow; and my revolver slipped from my partially numbed hand.

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 happened 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.”