The Blue Dragon: A Tale of Recent Adventure in China

by Kirk Munroe

  CHAPTER XIX

  AN EXHIBITION OF THE RAIN-GOD'S ANGER

  Mongolians, including Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, can get alongwith less sleep than any other of the world's people; and Jo, in spiteof having travelled and learned to speak English, still was a trueMongolian. Therefore, he awoke quite refreshed after two hours of sleep,and, moving with the utmost caution, so as not to arouse Rob, he lefttheir strange hiding-place, carefully closing and fastening its doorbehind him. Then he swiftly made his way back to the city, where heskirted its wall to the farther side, and forced an entrance througha now dry culvert or water-gate. After showing himself at the severalguard-houses, that, if necessary, he afterwards might be able to provehis presence in the city that night, he went to his own quarters, wherehe made preparations for a journey. He ordered a horse to be brought,saddled, and ready for travel, and sent for his lieutenant, a man who,though older than he, was possessed of so little influence as still tobe under the orders of his junior.

  To this officer Jo turned over command of the guard, telling him that heconsidered the escape of the foreign devil, who had eluded them by theexercise of magic arts, to be an event of such grave importance that hewas about to report it in person at Pao-Ting-Fu, and possibly to Pekinitself. The young captain named these places in order to throw possiblepursuit off the scent, for he had decided to carry Rob in exactly theopposite direction, or back over the way he had come, to Hankow. Havingthus arranged affairs to his satisfaction, he set forth at sunrise,riding by way of the very gate through which Rob had made so hasty anentrance the day before.

  Jo was ready to leave the city a full hour earlier than this, and wantedto do so; but even greater authority than his would be insufficient toopen the gates of any Chinese city before sunrise, and so he was forcedto await that hour.

  Once in the open he rode with all speed, hoping to reach the temple ofthe rain-god before any worshippers should appear, and while Rob stillslept. In this, however, he was disappointed, for, though he reached thetemple in advance of the priests who served it, and who, having joinedin the pursuit of the foreigner, had been forced to spend the nightin the city, he was dismayed to find a certain number of worshipperskotowing and burning incense before the great image. These were wretchedfarmers from the near-by country, who, having no work to do in theirburned-up fields, and with death from starvation staring them in theface, had come in desperation to the only source they knew of from whichaid might be asked.

  Another company of these people, who reached the place at the same timewith Jo, were provided with fire-crackers, with which they proposed toarouse the god's attention if he should happen to be asleep. A bunch wasexploded as soon as they entered the temple, and to their awed delightthe efficacy of this proceeding was immediately apparent, for the imageof the rain-god trembled, and a muffled sound came from its interior.Evidently the god, who alone was all-powerful in this emergency, hadbeen asleep, but now was awaking to the gravity of the situation. Withheads in the dust, the worshippers humbly bowed before his image andimplored his aid. Loudest of them all was the young officer who hadforced a way to the very front of the assemblage.

  His prayer was in Chinese, of the mandarin dialect, which no onepresent, except he, understood. Strange as it was to the ears of hisfellow-worshippers, it also contained words of another tongue stillstranger, that their ignorance did not permit them to recognize. Thus Jowas able to call out, under guise of a prayer, and undetected:

  "It's all right, Rob. I am here, and we are safe so long as you keepquiet."

  At this point some one at the back of the temple uttered a loud cry, atwhich all the bowed heads were raised. Jo looked up with the others,and, to his dismay, saw the great right arm of the god slowly lifting asthough to impose silence upon those who persisted in annoying him withtheir unwelcome clamor. At this phenomenon the superstitious spectatorsgazed in breathless suspense, and when the arm suddenly dropped backinto its former position they sprang to their feet.

  They were not so much frightened as they were awed; for in China it hasoften happened that the gods have seemed to enter certain of their ownearthly images, and by well-understood movements or sounds have causedthese to express their will to the people. It was reported that the veryimage of the rain-god now under observation had been thus favored, andupon previous occasions of grave importance had made motions of the armsor head that only the priests could interpret. So the people now waitedin terrified but eager expectation.

  Nor were they disappointed; for no sooner had the arm dropped than thehead of the image, which was big enough to hold a man, was seen to bein motion. It certainly was bending forward and assuming an attitudebenign, but so terrifying that the awe-stricken spectators instinctivelypressed backward. As they gazed with dilated eyes and quaking souls thegreat head was bowed farther and farther forward, until suddenly, with aconvulsive movement, it was seen to part from its supporting shouldersand leap into the air.

  The crash with which that vast mass of painted and gilded clay struckthe stone pavement, where it was shattered into a thousand fragments,was echoed by shrieks of terror as the dismayed beholders of this direcalamity plunged in headlong flight from the temple. Never beforein all the annals of priesthood had been recorded a manifestationof godly anger so frightful and so unmistakable. From this time on,that particular temple of the rain-god was a place accursed and to beshunned; for if after this warning any person should enter it, he wouldbe crushed to death beneath the body of the idol, which surely wouldfall on him.

  So the people fled, spreading far and wide the dreadful news, and onlyone among them dared return to the temple and brave the rain-god'sanger. This one, of course, was Jo, who, startled and alarmed by whathad taken place, had fled with the others. But he had paused while stillwithin the shelter of the grove, and, flinging himself to the ground forconcealment, had allowed the others to pass on without him. When all haddisappeared he arose and returned to the temple. As he re-entered itsdust-clouded doorway he was confronted by a spectacle at once so amazingand so absurd that for an instant he gazed at it bewildered. Then heburst into almost uncontrollable laughter.

  The image of the rain-god already had acquired a new head, dishevelledand dust-covered, to be sure, but one endowed with speech as well aswith motion, and which, when Jo first saw it, was violently coughing.

  "I say, Jo Lee," called out a husky voice from this new feature of thegiant image, "I think it was a mean trick to go off and leave me shutup in that beastly place. I mighty near smothered in there, and I don'tsuppose I ever would have got out if an earthquake or something hadn'thappened. It almost shook down the whole house, and it knocked the roofoff as it was, nearly burying me in falling plaster besides."

  "It isn't a house," explained Jo, laughing hysterically in spite ofhis habitual Chinese self-control. "It's the image of a god. Don't youremember crawling into it last night? I don't know how its head happenedto tumble off, but I expect you did it yourself. And now you havemanaged to give it a new one, a hundred times more useful but not halfso good looking. I never in all my life saw anything so funny, and ifyou only could see yourself, you'd laugh, too."

  "Maybe I would," replied Rob, with a tone of injured dignity; "but ifyou were as battered and choked as I am, you wouldn't laugh--I knowthat much. Of course, I remember now all about this thing being a god,only I was so confused when I woke up that I forgot all about where Iwas. I only knew that there had been an explosion of some kind, andthat I should smother if I didn't get out. I could see a little lightup above and tried to climb to it by some ropes that I found dangling.Two of them gave way slowly, while a third was so rotten that it gaveway mighty sudden. Then came the earthquake and an avalanche of mud thatnearly buried me; but I managed somehow to climb on top of it, and hereI am. Now I want to get down and out, for I don't like the place."

  "All right. Drop down inside, and I will open the door."

  Accepting this advice, Rob withdrew the head that had looked so absurdlysmall on top of th
at great image, and in another minute slid out of theopen doorway far below, in company with a quantity of debris.

  "Whew!" he gasped. "That was a sure enough dust-bath. Now let us getoutside and into an atmosphere that isn't quite so thick with mud."

  "Wouldn't you rather remain in here and live than go out and meet acertain death?" asked Jo, quietly.

  "Of course; but, even so, we can't always stay shut up in this oldrat-trap."

  "No, but it will be safer to leave at night, and also we have much to dobefore we shall be ready."

  "Have we?" asked Rob. "What, for instance?"

  "It is my plan that you should travel as a priest under a vow ofsilence, until we reach Hankow, while I go as your servant. If it isagreed, then must your head be shaved in priestly fashion, your skinmust be stained a darker color, and we must obtain garments suitable."

  "That's all right, so far as the priest business is concerned, if youthink I can act the character; but you are way off when you talk aboutgoing to Hankow, for I am not bound in that direction. You see, I havejust come from there and am on my way to Pekin."

  "But the road to Pekin is filled with danger."

  "So is the road to Hankow. I ought to know, for I have come over it,and I am certain, from the posters I saw displayed in every town, thatHo-nan is a Boxer province by this time. Besides, Hankow is twice as faraway as Pekin."

  "It is reported that all foreigners in Pekin have been killed."

  "Including members of the legations?"

  "So it is said."

  "Well, then, the report can't be true. In the first place, the foreignministers would have called in troops of their own countries forprotection upon the first intimation of danger. In the second place,to kill a foreign minister is to declare war against that minister'scountry; and I don't believe that even the Chinese government is sofoolish as to declare war against the whole world. At the same time, ifthere is to be any fighting I want to be where I can see it, or at leastknow about it, which is another reason for going to Pekin. Besides, Imust go there, for it is in Pekin that I am to get news of my mother andfather. Only think, I don't even know for certain if they are alive. Ifyou didn't know that about your family, wouldn't you want to go whereyou could find out?"

  Jo admitted that he would.

  "By-the-way," continued Rob, "speaking of families, I thought you had awife. Where is she? Are you going to take her with us to Pekin? Wasn'tshe awfully glad to see you when you got back from America?"

  For the second time that day the young Chinese laughed. "Yes," hereplied, "I have a wife. I think she is in Canton, for that is where myfather left her when he came north. No, I am not going to take her toPekin. No, she was not glad to see me when I came back from America, forshe has not yet seen me."

  "If I had only known your wife was in Canton, and where to find her, Ishould have called," said Rob, soberly.

  The idea thus presented was so absurd that Jo laughed again as at a goodjoke, for in China no man ever calls on the wife of another.