These blubbering, crazed, and naked camels rocking into the valley like so many camel ghosts, and something really terrifying about them.
The governors were roused.
In an incredibly short time the whole camp was up and active. These were livestock people— more used to yaks than camels, but recognizing in this stampeded herd more value than a century of goats would ever bring.
* * * *
Old Tsarong wasn’t long in putting two and two together. This was the munition train they’d come to meet. Something had happened to it. But what? Where were the men? Where was the freight?
Through the thin air of daybreak they heard that distant revolver shot. After that, there were the muted staccato barkings of a small-arms battle.
While the governors were still shouting conflicting orders, a special shout went up and the people fell aside as if tossed by an invisible plow and through this furrow—beautiful as a dream-horse and as elusive—they saw the horse of the Bogdo go trotting by.
“Torang!”
Torang they believed to be as holy as its master. They saw it saddled but riderless, unblemished, uncannily wise when it came to its keeping on its way. Wasn’t it likely that it was ridden by a ghost?
It had come very close to that.
In less than a minute after Wong had fired— and died—Shattuck recognized that this was no place for an abbot’s horse—or any horse. He had an overwhelming gust of pity for all horses, camels, dogs—and men! These men had fought the Gobi until they were as cruel as the Gobi itself! He’d sent Torang home.
This wasn’t a chain of reasoning.
His reasoning all went into the fight—clear, precise, perceptive with a thousand eyes only opened in times like these.
Still with that revolver he’d taken from Wong in his left hand and the great scimitar in his right, he plunged on further into the pass.
Already the place of his first stand was being choked with cast boxes, and blue steel brought a flash of clairvoyant memory. He’d seen these self-same boxes, and at least a part of what was in them, back in Samarkand.
He cut more pack ropes and dodged. Camels slipped and straddled and disappeared. Horses were being kicked forward by hard-faced Mongols.
Shattuck would remember those faces. When the world needed fighters, these were fighters. But they’d have to be led, bled, crucified, to be taught the things they’d known before when they conquered half the world.
One was poking a gun in his face when Shattuck dodged under the horse’s belly and cut the gunman down from the other side. An instant later he’d fired his first shot and had seen the horse jump from under its rider as if the fellow had been roped.
The confusion saved him a dozen, a score of times.
“Back!” he shouted. “Or you’ll all be killed!”
“Ya-ming!”
That was shorter: “Sure death!”
Some of the riders were trying to turn back to regain the desert.
Camels were retching, moaning, grinding their teeth. Some thudded to a fall and squealed as panic wrenched them to their feet again.
A sudden weakness blew a breath over Shattuck. It was like the first whiff of the anaesthetic before an operation. But he felt no pain.
He gathered his nerves to a tighter pitch.
“Ya-ming!”
“And that means you,” a calm voice echoed in his brain.
“Let me do this first,” his thought replied.
He was drawing the great blade across another pack-tie when a Mongol struck down at him with the loaded butt of a whip.
At the same moment Shattuck fired.
Bullet and bludgeon both went home.
“I’m taking him with me,” was the Fighting Fool’s last thought.
CHAPTER XII
A bunch of the dokpas—faces black with grease and their dank hair making them look like devils on a frolic—were looting what they could find in the Throat of the Wolf.
They screeched and laughed. They stripped the dead and kicked the dying, leaving a number of naked and humiliated corpses in their wake.
Then they made the one gorgeous and outstanding discovery of the morning. They’d not only found the white devil of the preceding day— he who had called himself Shadak Khan—but leaning over him, trying to lift him, trying to recall him to life, one of the most beautiful female creatures they had ever seen.
They’d all heard legends about the Kashmiri maidens. They told filthy stories of their own invention about their affairs with such. They vaunted of local conquests that had Kashmiri conquests beaten a mile.
But here was the real thing. So they believed. Anyway, it was the first of her species any of them had ever seen. They crowded toward her and the white man like a pack of wolves at a spent doe.
Mahree was no spent doe, though, even if she had traveled for one full day and one full night over a terrain that would have strained a yak.
She turned to fire. Her eyes shone green. Her forehead seemed to flatten.
Before the boldest of the dokpas could carry out his plan of stepping on Shattuck’s face and seizing her at the same time she’d literally brained him with a sliver of rock.
The unfortunate thing about this was that it gave an idea to the more cunning wits of the crowd. The dokpas also groped for rocks. At least two of them failed to do their groping fast enough.
Mahree threw a rock splinter with the free-shoulder grace and power of a professional ball-player—although she’d never seen one. She scored two perfect hits. Then a rock like the end of a sledge-hammer caught her shoulder and she staggered.
She was staggering, trying not to fall, when she saw another sort of lama coming through the gorge. He’d seen what was happening. His hands were up. He was shouting things that Mahree couldn’t understand, but which the expression on his face told her were prayers on her own behalf and denunciation of the dokpas.
The black faces got his message. They turned on him with howls. One of them with a stone all ready let fly at him and scraped his head. The young lama covered his face with his hands and arms and kept on coming.
It was his only way of fighting back.
One of the black-face ruffians already had his hands on him when from behind and above the young lama a hand plunged down with a knife in it. That was one good knife that was apt to be lost forever. The dokpa went down with the blade out of sight in his shock of hair.
That was Juma’s knife. It was Juma, looking more than his six-foot seven, who had followed John Day here—Champela, whom he’d found in the Lamasery of the Soaring Meditation. Champela himself was just setting out, having heard that Torang, the abbot’s horse, had but then returned without the Shadak Khan.
Champela and Juma had then run the length of the valley. But Mahree, even so, had got there first—a long first, having followed some instinct of her own.
Juma cried to heaven as he tried to pull his precious knife from the dead man’s skull. It wouldn’t come. It was a tussel as short as it was fierce—Juma’s struggle with the stubborn knife.
He was losing seconds, and in any sort of fight Juma never lost any time. He spat on the corpse and almost, without looking, had found the throat of another black face with his able hands.
The others were in full flight. Champela came to Shattuck’s side. He lightly touched a temple; he thrust his fingers into Shattuck’s shirt.
It was clear that he thought at first that Shattuck was dead—the end of a dream, the eclipse of a great adventure!
Mahree, with all that she had left of consciousness—after that wallop with a rock— centered in her eyes, let out the beginning of a wail.
“Ai-ya-yat I have killed him! He went away because of me! And I meant nothing! I loved him only as a sister!”
“Hush!” said the prime minister of Shadak Khan. “He’s not dead!”
It was a message that went up to old Juma, too.
Juma, having just killed two men, one by stabbing and one by barehanded strangl
ing, was leaning over with a great deep tenderness burning in the secret cavern back of his old-eagle eyes.
“Allah Akbar!” he said.
He gently pushed the prime minister aside. He stooped and picked up Captain Trouble, as if that famous Fighting Fool was the merest infant.
“Friend,” he said, “if you know any effective magic, I’ll see that you get a couple of those runaway camels.”
“Get him quickly to the tent of the governors,” John Day said. “You put them out and I’ll do my best.”
CHAPTER XIII
Shattuck was getting well. As soon as they were able to move him again they’d carried him up the valley to the Lamasery of the Soaring Meditation where there were some authentic records of Kubla Khan.
They’d found—by a well authenticated miracle, it was claimed—Kubla’s sword where Shadak Khan had dropped it when he fell—as he thought—dead. And the sword was presented to the new khan by the old dogpo himself—the divine incarnation who had the power, it was generally believed, to look into the past lives of others.
Perhaps the good old man saw something in some past life of this modern Captain Trouble, something that linked him with the life of Kubla Khan.
It was, according to the secret books, about the time that an avatar should come about to purge the world before the coming of the Great New King.
The times were full of portent.
Tibet itself would have to be purged. There were mysteries in Tibet such as the world never dreamed of, John Day said. There were hollow mountains he knew about where the secret libraries of the ages had been stored away.
“Couldn’t you and I find them?” Shattuck asked.
“We’d find them, all right; but how about the guardians?”
“What sort of guardians?”
“If I thought we had a right to get into those caves we’d get into them,” said Captain Trouble.
“There you go! I thought you’d had enough of fighting for a time!”
“I’ll never have enough of it so long as there is anything worth fighting for.”
Unknown to Shattuck, there was a scribe in the monastery making a record of his stay. Some day, it was argued, such a record might be as valuable as such a one concerning Alexander the Great would be.
“And, according to the horoscope that three of the astrologers in three different lamaseries cast up, this man Shadak Khan, was going to have a number of stirring adventures.…” He had one, in fact, before it was considered advisable for him to leave his bed.
He awoke one night to see a huge dokpa crawling into his room on all fours. It was this fact that discovered to Shattuck the identity of the man, because, walking on all fours like that, he revealed a limp in the shoulder where he’d been stopped by a bullet the day he tried to saber Shattuck from behind.
“Ah, go on and get out of here, you big bum!” said the Fighting Fool in English.
And that’s what the big bum did—sneaked out and never showed himself again.
Juma had sent for his people, for Juma also would be lingering on in the valley indefinitely. He’d become as you might say the official steward of the loot—camels, horses, boxes of machine-guns, small arms, and ammunition.
Juma loved especially to sit in when Captain Trouble and his prime minister talked about cleaning up some robber band or other and starting an independent state where men could be free and women happy and everyone would get enough to eat—with a few punitive expeditions now and then, just to keep your hand in.
But, best of all, was when the two of them were alone on some upper terrace of the lamasery and the earth so uptilted about them that it almost seemed they were among the stars. Then it was no mere correction of some poor robber band that engrossed them. They talked greatly of great conquerors—men who had been sent into the world to boost men on—by struggle, pain, self-mastery.
There was the inevitable struggle between Asia and Europe—the never surveyed frontiers of China and Russia, for example; the necessary merging of nations that still hated and feared each other; there was the growing challenge of Africa—a riddle as ancient and profound as that of the Great Sphinx.
And when it was all over, when they had the world cleaned up, why, maybe then, they’d go back to America and settle down, like Cincinnatus, on some quiet farm.
GHOST LANTERNS, by Alan B. LeMay
THERE were seven of us aboard the schooner Terrapin when she sailed north from Maranhão. There were still seven of us the third day up, when we were becalmed somewhere out of sight of the Brazil coast. But during the next three nights, four men disappeared.
We were lying in the flat calm of the doldrums when it happened. A flat, glistening sea, like hot, blue steel; a blazing sky, so glaring that it threatens to put out your eyes; hot, heavy air, that presses against you and bears you down; motionless sails, an idly drifting ship, a steamy smell of tar—that is the doldrums by day. By night the biggest thing is the silence.
Somehow, the doldrums seem worse on a little ship; and the two-masted schooner Terrapin, beating up and down in the catch-as-catch-can cocoa-trade, was little, very little. Perhaps it is the sense of confinement on a little, becalmed ship that makes a man want to get off and walk; or perhaps it is the dullness of a small crew. Nothing happens to break the stifling monotony. Or, if things do happen, as they did on the Terrapin, they are such that you never want to see them happen again.
Of the seven of us Cap Dorkin was the hardest boiled. He was a short, square-built man of indeterminate age, with the fishy kind of eyes that show the whites below the irises. Three of his four-man crew were similar—of the surly type of seamen. Jimmy, the cook, was of the other type, round-faced and merry. I was the fourth man of the crew, and was supposed to be mate, which meant that I slept in the cabin instead of the forecastle.
There was one other, a passenger named Harris; he was probably the only passenger the Terrapin ever had, a roughly dressed man with a fat, smooth face. And these were the seven of us that started the voyage from Maranhão to Santiago.
We were becalmed late in the afternoon of the third day up from Maranhão after two days of sluggish progress; sunset found us weltering under sails that caught not the slightest breath of air. The night was heavy and still, and not until morning did anyone suspect the thing that happened in the dark.
Dorkin was the first to notice something wrong when we woke for breakfast.
“I don’t smell no coffee,” was the first thing he said. “Shake a hoof forward and see why that fat slob of a cook ain’t cookin’.”
There was no one in the galley, and the stove was cold. Nor was the cook in the forecastle, nor about the deck. Joe Bates and Sharky Steve were stretched out near the capstan, lounging drowsily.
“Where’s Jimmy?” I sung out. “And why ain’t he slinging the rat-killer?”
Joe and Sharky looked blank.
“Guess the old man must have him aft,” Joe offered. “Don’t we eat no more?”
“If Jimmy don’t come forward a-hopping,” Sharky added, “I figure to up with a mast and knock down that there cabin. I’ve eat every now and then for forty years, and I figure to keep right on.”
“Well, he ain’t aft,” said I.
They sat up, at that. I turned to go aft, but paused with an afterthought.
“Where’s Bill Grimes?” I asked.
“Ain’t he aft neither?” asked Joe.
“There’s somethin’ pequiliar goin’ on here,” decided Sharky Steve, getting to his feet, “and I figure to know what it is. Bill ain’t been forward all night.”
“Naturally not,” said I; “it was his watch.”
“That don’t account for it,” said he, and I turned and went aft, the two seamen at my heels.
Cap Dorkin took the news of the disappearance without a word. He squirted tobacco over the rail and set about to search the ship, the rest of us following along, and Harris, the passenger, trailing after and looking blank. We found nothing. That is, nothing but
one thing.
Hitched to the taffrail, and trailing in the water astern, was a half-inch line that had been coiled on the deck when last noticed. Cap Dorkin snatched at the line and hauled it in; but there was nothing on the end of it, and we knew less than we did before.
The men were gone.
“Maybe they gets in a fight and falls overboard,” suggested Joe Bates. “And drowns, locked in each other’s arms, as y’ might say.”
“All without makin’ a sound, I suppose,” sneered Sharky Steve.
“Maybe they falls down a hatch and busts a leg,” Joe advanced. “An’ can’t yell, bein’ knocked cold as a herring.”
“Followin’ which the rats eat ’em, leavin’ no trace,” Sharky supplied. “Can’t you think up no more o’ them good ideas?”
“Get forward,” ordered the captain, and they went.
That day we lived miserably, sweltering under a melting sun, and eating little of the stuff that Sharky Steve scraped together in the galley. Forward and aft there had come over us that stolid uneasiness that falls upon men in the presence of circumstances unnatural and unexplained.
Cap Dorkin was especially silent and stubborn. Harris asked permission to search the ship again, and got it; but he found nothing more. After his own special search Harris was disposed to discuss the affair with Dorkin; but the captain was short of speech.
“Well,” Harris would start up again, “what could have happened to them?”
“I dunno,” Cap Dorkin would reply.
“Did you ever hear of anything like this before?”
“Like what?”
“Like these two men disappearing, this way?”
“I dunno.” From the captain no further opinion was to be drawn.
Up forward there was a different sort of talk going on between Joe Bates and Sharky Steve.
“These here is bad waters at best,” commented Joe. “I’ve heared of queer things goin’ on in these seas before now.”
The Adventure Megapack Page 47
