The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (9 page)

With that the conjurer backed three paces, bowed ceremoniously, turned and walked rapidly into the village.

Now I was rather impressed by his warning. It must be sincere, for he could have nothing to gain by it, and it was apt to be intelligent, pretenders to occult knowledge being usually well informed at least as to what is doing in this world.

If I weren’t possessed of considerable curiosity, I’d hardly have been in Sz-Chuen, pursuing a sort of saffron will-o’-the-wisp; so it was with vastly increased interest that I turned again to the yellow river and searched it as far as I could, southward.

Between me and the nearest bend, which was a third of an English mile away, there were two junks, but in neither of them was there any sign of a white man.

I reflected that there were several reasons why I wouldn’t welcome the shattering of the illusion that I was the only one of my race within at least a hundred
li.
Also I reflected that, if there were such a person, he would be in a bad way—that is, if the conjurer’s words had meaning. There’s no solidarity like that of the junkmen’s guilds; some thousands of years of laboring in common have fused them until they’re as capable of united action as armies. And the heads of the guilds are practically all members of the Ko Lao Hui. So, if sentence had been passed against the newcomer, it would be fulfilled.

And then I saw him. He was seated just in front of the small cabin ’midship of the last junk to come into view around the curve. A long line of trackers writhed along the dike in front of his craft, dragging it toward me at about two miles an hour, while a
laodah
in the stern and two polesmen in the bow guided it and kept it off the bank.

There was something peculiar about his crew. There was something ugly and menacing—but it had covered half the distance to me before I discovered what it was. It was a very distinctive and suggestive thing: alone of all the trackers on the river, his were not singing that age-old chantey of labor.

Gradually I made out the appearance of the man, for whose boat this distinguishing mark had probably been ordered. Strength and agility, I judged, lay in the slender frame beneath his loose hunting-coat and riding-breeches. But his tanned face, shadowed by a straw helmet, was harder to read. It was good-featured, young, beardless and—enigmatic. I couldn’t make out just then in what the enigma consisted.

All the way up to me he gave me but one look, and I thought he was going on.

But, just as I was about to turn away, he snapped out half a dozen words to his crew. The
laodah
threw the heavy helm hard over, and the trackers swung the prow of the boat inshore. The polesmen eased the prow into the muddy bank. Then, at another word of command, they dropped their poles and sprang to the top of the dike, carrying with them the end of a sort of light planking that lay in the bottom of the boat. They dragged this end toward me and dropped it almost at my feet.

It formed a dry bridge to the boat, an invitation. Yet, when I looked at the boat’s master, he was glancing carelessly up-stream to Sz-Chuen. Evidently he was forcing himself upon no one; he left me the easy option of withdrawal. It rather pleased me, and I stepped upon the gangway.

AS I entered the prow of the junk, the stranger rose with peculiar ease and swiftness and bowed. Now I corrected my first impression—I saw that his thin-featured face was really in no way remarkable, merely a good-humored, intellectual college man type of countenance. True, it was distinguished by a pair of rather small, very bright, microscopic-looking eyes. The enigma lay in this very lack of the extraordinary. One hardly expects the commonplace in a man traveling alone in the heart of China and beset by such hostility and peril as the conjurer’s words had hinted.

“Good morning,” he greeted me, crisply courteous.

I clasped his extended hand, receiving a singularly wiry and powerful pressure. Then I heard his
laodah
shout to a junk that had just come up behind that he would be under way again in a minute. Doubtless the
laodah
had his instructions, and I determined to press the interview. Blood calls to blood, and, if he were as inexperienced as he looked, this fellow white man needed help badly.

“I was waiting for you,” I told him.

Perhaps I was mistaken, but I thought his right hand moved a little closer to the side pocket of his hunting-coat, the bulge of which suggested a revolver.

“You knew I was coming,” a bit tensely.

“I was told. The Chinese knew it, of course. The word’s going ahead of you. I wanted to warn you that you’re in danger.”

“Thanks!” I couldn’t understand his smile—was it foolhardiness or courage? “But, of course, I knew it. Forewarned, forearmed. I think I’ve provided against everything.”

Now that sounded rather bumptious, but much may be forgiven inexperience, and my desire to help him increased. Also—I don’t deny it—my curiosity pressed hard upon my prudence. And, by the way those sharp eyes of his were studying me, I judged he wouldn’t really be averse to a better opportunity of getting acquainted.

“My name’s Partridge—John Partridge,” I told him. “I was really looking for passage north.”

“Partridge!” Suddenly his face lit up; clearly he’d hoped for that name. “I thought it might be you. I’ve heard of you, you see. About a passage north—well, perhaps you’ll not want to come with me far. But you’ll want your baggage.”

I smiled.

“I’m superior to Thoreau’s immigrant,” I said. “You know, Thoreau regretted not that he had so little but that he required so much. I have about eight pieces of baggage—in my pockets.”

Evidently he’d expected that.

“Then—Hazard is my name. They’re getting impatient behind. You can come on to the next town, anyway, and further if you like, after you’ve heard my story.”

He turned toward the shore and gave an order. The polesmen slid back the light planking, followed it and seized their poles. As they pushed the boat off, the trackers bent to the rope again, still in that sullen and uncharacteristic silence. Slowly we got under way.

“I’ve a rather peculiar story to tell you,” said Hazard.

He hesitated a moment, and then—

“Exhibits first,” he said.

We were still standing, swaying a little with the motion of the boat. The little cabin ’midship was just at our backs. The young man with the clean, scholarly face turned half round and tapped lightly on the frame of that cabin, the doorway of which was filled merely by a curtain of dirty brown canvas. Receiving no response, he drew the curtain lightly back.

On the customary pallet inside the cabin there curled asleep a more than ordinarily good-looking young Chinese woman, well clad in a long light-colored jacket and trousers of brocaded silk. Her feet were encased in embroidered slippers, and she wore her long hair braided down her back, maiden-wise.

“Mu Ting,” said Hazard briefly, drawing the curtain close again. “My partner in this enterprise.”

I stared at him.

Then he drew me down upon the seat and, with very great care that he wasn’t observed by any of the crew, took something from inside his coat. The way he held it made it hard for me to observe it fully at first, and, when I did, I doubted my eyes.

It was a small image, not more than a foot high, made of iron, but, by the way he held it, singularly light. The iron was curiously scarred and pitted. The body of the thing was human-like, and the face was supposed to be human but fell short by several incarnations. Marred as it was by some agency I couldn’t yet guess, that face still represented intelligence without spirit, power without conscience, deracialized brutality, a devil’s nightmare.

It was a face I’d seen before and a conception that had made history.

“This,” explained Hazard, “or my acquisition of it, was the beginning of the whole affair. Which consists,” he went on, “in the recovery of the pearls of the deceased Empress Dowager, lost in 1900.”

I whistled my incredulity.

“Truly,” I remarked, “you are both mad and doomed.”

But Hazard merely smiled as he put the image carefully back again in a sort of pouch he’d made in the lower lining of his coat.

“I knew you’d feel that way,” he said.

II

SO WE went on up the Pei-Ho, past
li
after
li
of young, green rice, each small rectangular patch of which has supported its village-dwelling family since the gray dawn of history.

Even my interest in Hazard’s story didn’t prevent me from observing how like active brown ants were the tireless coolies, hoeing, weeding, planting or forcing the water through the irrigation ditches from field to field with their small wooden sluicing wheels.

They themselves seemed touched with the magic wand of perpetuity, working there as they had in the beginning. A patient, plodding people, mainly good—and yet how incomprehensible sometimes in their passion!

I wondered how the Western races would stand the test if the dream of the leaders of the Ko Lao Hui were to come true and all these yellow people were united—but Hazard was speaking again of the image inside his coat.

“I can well imagine it,” I replied, as he repeated that it was responsible for his presence on the Pei-Ho.

“Yes!” He looked at me sharply, as if he suspected my words had more than a surface meaning. “It’s an ugly-looking thing enough, no race, morality or soul—animal individualism, that’s all. A sort of fulfillment of the Nietzschean promise.

“Well, I’ll tell you the way it was. I bought the image a month ago from a merchant in the village of Kucheng, which you may know is on the Pei-Ho about a day’s journey below this point. He held out for a secret sale, though all the village knew he’d fished it out of the river about twenty
li
above Kucheng a week before. It was because of its peculiar ugliness that I bought it, and also because everybody seemed rather scared of it, without knowing why.”

“Wait a minute?” I interrupted. “Was it fished from the bottom of the river, or was—”

“No, it was floating down-stream. It’s iron, but it’s hollow and considerably lighter than water.”

“But I noticed pits in it, like rust pits or erosion—”

“True,” cried Hazard rather eagerly. “That’s why I know—but let me tell you. Two weeks after I bought the thing, I arrived in Peking. And exactly one day later I was drugged in a tea-shop and carried off some way to a thieves’ hole in Chi’en Men, where I woke up bound and threatened with torture because I wouldn’t tell where I got it. I wouldn’t tell, of course, because, if I had, I’d have died the sooner. They couldn’t afford to let me escape. Death stared me in the face whether I told or not—only it was so dark where I lay that I couldn’t see the shadow of my own eyelids.”

“You’re skipping a lot,” I reminded him.

“I intend to. Unessential details are confusing. How these people discovered I had the image, I don’t know—but, then, walls have eyes as well as ears in Peking. They got it; they also got me, and they’d have given me the forty-nine tortures to make me tell where I procured it. That shows how highly they valued the information.”

“Well?” The matter-of-fact way he told this wild story rather added to its credibility.

“Well, I was rescued. A little while after the departure of the Chinaman who made me those promises, the door opened again. The atmosphere of the place was pretty stupefying, and I didn’t hear it open or close, but I heard some one crossing the room toward me. Then I felt the sharp, cold touch of steel, a cutting edge, on my wrist. Of course, I thought it was death, but the knife slipped under the cords. Though she didn’t speak, I realized it was a woman who was saving me. She left immediately, but, after I got the ropes off me, the rest was easy. One mud wall of the place opened on the street—that is, it did after I’d kicked a hole in it.”

“But they had the image.”

“Yes, though I didn’t know they had it till I got back to my compound and found it gone. Then, half an hour later, Mu Ting, whom you’ve seen—” he nodded backward toward the cabin—“arrived at my compound. She brought the image with her, carefully wrapped up, of course. It was testimony to the fact that it was she who’d cut me loose in that dark room.”

“But you said something about the Empress Dowager’s pearls,” and I smiled a little at the absurdity. “How does it connect up?”

He hesitated, a moment.

“I’ve heard that you speak Pekingese,” he stated.

“Fairly well.”

“I think I’ll let you talk to Mu Ting, then. She’s the authority on that affair. You may be able to learn more than I did, for my understanding of Chinese is still pretty clouded. But first, you know there’s a chance of such a find?”

The last sentence was half question, half assertion.

“I know, of course, that the Empress Dowager was supposed to have one of the finest collections of pearls in the world and that they are said to have been left behind by her when she exited from Peking to escape the consequences of her support of the Boxers. If she did, then there’s nothing incredible in the tale that they were carried off by looters. There was plenty of it in 1900—looting, I mean.”

“They’ve never been heard of since. But—Mu Ting!” he raised his voice. “I thought I heard her stir,” he added.

WE WERE both silent for a moment then, waiting. I had, of course, plenty of food for reflection. There was one—no, there were two things I knew that Hazard didn’t concerning the little metal image and its possible connection with the Forbidden City in the time of the Boxers, and both these facts rather tended to lend his tale the light of possibility.

But, while I mulled things over, I purposely watched the occupants of a junk that was just about to pass us, going downstream. It could be no coincidence that in this, as in the last three craft that I’d observed, all chattering and chanting stopped as it approached us, and every oblique eye, usually so incurious, was turned on us fixedly as if marking us by command.

Truly, whatever the cause, the conjurer’s warning hadn’t been an idle one.

Then I heard the curtain behind us rustle, and I rose and turned rather eagerly to greet the woman.