by Ron Miller
“Haven’t the foggiest.”
We hadn’t waited for more than a couple of minutes when gunshots suddenly rang out. I couldn’t tell where they’d come from, with the sound bouncing around the rock-ringed arena. It made me mighty nervous, I can tell you, but our ponies stood there stupidly, absolutely unperturbed. This was all apparently old hat to them.
I was just looking at the rocks ahead—where our guides had vanished a few moments earlier—when a lone horseman came charging out of them toward us. He had a pistol in each hand and was banging away like a fool. He was coming directly toward us, fast as a freight train, without, apparently, any intention of slowing down. I glanced to my right and felt some small gratification in seeing Pat look worried for the first time since I’d met her. If that was going to be the last thing I saw on earth, it was worth it.
The rider was about ten yards away when he lowered his pistols, one pointed in my direction, the other in Pat’s. There was a flash and a bang and I felt my head suddenly jolted. Wet, gooey chunks poured down my face and I was sure that my brains had been blown out. It was just occurring to me how little sense that made when I heard another bang and saw Pat’s melon detonate in a spray of yellow flesh and liquid. She didn’t even flinch.
The rider shot between us like a rocket, swiveled and came to a halt a couple of yards in front, his shaggy little horse prancing as though its feet were red hot. The rider was a chunky little yellow man who looked like a cross between a circus dwarf and Fu Manchu. He was dressed head to foot in silk coat and trousers that were quilted, elaborately embroidered and trimmed, like his pointed hat, in furs.
“Haw! Haw!” he crowed. “Howdy thar, podners!”
“Two-Gun Tang, I presume,” said Pat.
CHAPTER TEN
Two-Gun didn’t turn out to be such a bad guy. After scaring the tar out of Pat and me, he holstered his smoking Colts and invited us to tea. I could see right away he had an eye for pretty girls. Something that wasn’t lost on Pat, either, and she batted her eyes at him like a shameless hussy.
About fifteen minutes of riding brought us into his camp—though it looked more like a small village to me. A dozen or so of those dome-shaped things the Mongolians call “yurts,” which were a kind of carpet-covered igloo thirty or so feet across. They looked like piles of old rags when seen from outside, but inside they were pretty comfortable—luxurious, in fact. Beautiful carpets that would have demanded hundreds of dollars in New York, elaborately carved and enameled woodwork, embroidered cushions: all the luxuries of home.
Two-Gun himself was a short, stocky little gink who hardly came to the middle of my chest. About the same could be said about him and Pat, though I don’t think he regretted the viewpoint very much. Once he’d shed a half dozen layers of quilted jackets and whatnot, he turned out to be only half the size I’d expected . . . which wasn’t much to start with. Still, it was pretty obvious that he was a tough egg and wasn’t about to brook any nonsense from a bunch of round-eyed foreigners no matter how good-looking one of them was. And by that I mean Pat.
We were led to the largest of the yurts which didn’t surprise me was Two-Gun’s. The walls and floor were covered with layers of beautifully woven carpets. There were big tapestry-covered pillows and squat little tables everywhere, too. The thing even had an iron wood-burning stove. But overwhelming all this was the treasure. Dozens of shields, spears, swords and knives glimmered brightly from the walls. The tables were cluttered with gold and silver plates, bowls, cups, samovars and other bric-a-brac.
At a gesture from the warlord, Pat and I made ourselves comfortable on a couple of cushions. Two-Gun squatted on a third, his back against the telephone pole-like central column of the yurt. This was decorated with clusters of brass, bronze and gold Chinese coins, tied up like strings of fish.He whacked a gong and about half a second later the place was swarming with servants, kowtowing and bumping their heads on the floor and gabbling like a flock of turkeys. They brought us tea and food and some kind of liquor that scoured my tongue like battery acid. Two-Gun apologized for not being able to offer us any red-eye whiskey and I told him that was hunky dory by me.
“All first-rate number one American hero-type cowboys drink red-eye rotgut whiskey,” he told me. “I am devastated to all the dickens to not be able to offer you great national beverage of Wild William Hickock and fine Doctor Holliday.”
“Doc Holliday would never have died of TB,” Pat said hoarsely, “if he’d had any of this stuff within reach.”
“Hi yo, Silver!” said Two-Gun, downing a tumblerful.
The bandit was not particularly anxious to talk about seaplanes. Instead, he had about a thousand questions about his favorite Hollywood cowboy heroes. I never went in much for watching movies myself—I was always too busy making them—but Pat seemed to have been on a first-name basis with every cowboy actor in the business. Something which I wouldn’t have doubted for one second.
It took Two-Gun about ten minutes before he spotted the giant Colt that hung at Pat’s waist.
“Goldurn it!” he cried. “That there’s one fine shootin’ iron you got there, ma’am!”
She slipped from its holster, flipped it around so she was gripping the barrel and handed to the warlord. He took it with much the same expression with which Galahad had accepted the Holy Grail.
“Eighteen seventy-seven model?” he asked reverently.
“Eighteen seventy-eight,” she said. “Forty-five caliber and a seven and a half inch barrel. My granddaddy didn’t like to fool around.”
I could see that Two-Gun wanted that thing more than he wanted his next breath. “It is surely a mighty big shootin’ iron for such a little lady,” he said, hopefully.
“You think so?” she said and held out her hand. He reluctantly handed over the revolver and she’d no sooner got hold of it than she’d cocked and fired it with such blinding speed that I never saw her hands move. The noise was deafening.
Two-Gun turned and glanced up at the big central pole. There’d been a cluster of Chinese coins hanging there, those coins that have holes in the middle that make them look like big bronze washers. It was now jingling nervously.
“You better look at that big coin in the middle,” Pat suggested, holstering her weapon.
Two-Gun reached up and turned the coin aside. Behind it was a neat hole in the wood about a half inch wide. She’d plugged the coin through its hole.
“Wal, I’ll be plum jiggered!” he said.
Then we got down to business. Or at least Pat and Two-Gun did. I suppose it shouldn’t have come as any big surprise that Pat spoke fluent Mandarin—with a Mongolian accent, too boot—so I left the two of them to haggle the sale of the seaplanes. The food and drink had me half groggy and I suppose I must have dozed off because the next thing I remember is Pat sticking the toe of her boot into my ribs and telling me that we were now seventy grand to the good and that now would be a pretty good time to be on our way back to the Venture.
“Seventy thousand, huh? How’d you get the runty little bandit to agree to so much?”
“Remember those westerns Englehorn brought along for the crew to watch? Well, I promised em all to Two-Gun, along with the projector.”
“That was pretty darn—” then it dawned on me. “What the hell is he going to do with a movie projector out here? There’s no electricity within a hundred miles!”
“Shut up!” she hissed, “or you’re going to queer the whole deal!”
It was too late to head back to the Venture, so we accepted Two-Gun’s hospitality for the evening. I’ll give the fellow credit: he put on a swell show for us. Food and drink and all sorts of musicians, acrobats, magicians, tumblers, wrestlers and dancing girls. Especially dancing girls, though I could see that Pat was none too happy about them. Maybe she was unhappy about how much I was obviously appreciating them, but perhaps I’m just flattering myself. Maybe they were just lousy dancers.
This all went on until God knows when, but the next day w
as well underway by the time Pat and I emerged from our yurts. We’d each been given our own to sleep in, which I found disappointing. But I’d had no way to argue with Two-Gun and, frankly, knew there was no point in even starting an argument with Pat.
I was having trouble just seeing in color, but Pat, damn her, looked as though she’d just stepped out of the swankiest Manhattan beauty parlor. Even her clothes looked freshly pressed. How she can do this is utterly beyond me, but it’s really annoying.
Two-Gun wanted us to hang around, but I told him we had to get back to the ship. After I promised, though, to send him a load of Western pulps as soon as I got back to the States he couldn’t wait for us to leave. He did offer us an armed escort, however. Not only would they get us back faster, but there’d been rumors that the Japanese—who’d give their last bowl of rice to get Two-Gun’s head on a pike—had been nosing around the region. A gang of blood-thirsty Mongols surrounding us would be a comforting insurance policy.
“But, say there, podner,” Tang said, “perhaps I have a big-time offer you will find much more interesting, maybe, eh?”
“Well, I can listen anyway,” I said and this is more or less what Tang had to say, but in less broken English:
Northeast China, he explained, was being torn between communist and anti-communist forces—a tension not made any easier by the railroad that Russia had recently built in Manchuria, which the Japanese had just recently recognized as the independent state of Manchuko. This was all part of a plan they were enthusiastically and euphemistically calling “The Greater Southeast Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” It was a great-sounding name, but it was only a plan to oust all “foreign” influences from the area. And by “foreign” they meant “European,” of course. That is, that’s what it seemed to be on the surface. In reality, it was a really a brazen scheme to replace foreign domination by Japanese domination. And what it was all about was what lay beneath China.
It was no more news to me than it would have been to you that the Japanese islands are poor in natural resources. They’ve got only small amounts of coal and timber, no oil to speak of and very few minerals. As an industrialized nation, the Japanese are almost totally dependent upon imports. As a result, they are keenly on the lookout for new sources of raw materials . . . and China is just lousy with the stuff.
Since Manchuko is ostensibly a sovereign state threatened by both Russia and China, Tang continued, Japan was using that as an excuse to offer it military “protection.” The Chinese government in Nanking, terrified of provoking an open conflict with the Japanese, had turned to the League of Nations. Not satisfied with the League’s wishy-washy response, Japan walked out. Now it looks as though all-out war was imminent.
“Meanwhile, the devil Japanese,” Tang concluded, “have placed P’u-i on throne. He is last of Manchu emperors but is veritably only durn tootin’ puppet for Nipponese horny toads.”
“That’s a pretty raw deal for you folk,” I said, “and you have my sympathy.”
“Ah! But you can make much help, Mr. Denham, podner, yessiree! You and the ever-gracious Miss Wildman.”
“I don’t see how.”
For the past four years, he explained, the Japanese army had been waging war on those they called “bandits.” They seem to resent their raids on the Dalian-Mukden trains. There had been some terrible battles, such as when Lao Pi-fang led fifteen hundred brave men against a Japanese garrison. Lately, the Japanese had been using aircraft against the rebels. This tactic had broken up many of the old gangs.
“So what can I do?”
Tang carefully explained it to me, but I still didn’t get it. The gist of it all, though, was that he wanted Pat and me to make a semi-official visit to P’u-i’s court on his behalf. He hoped we could make a case for him before he arrived in person. Apparently he figured that having a couple of Westerners acting as his emissaries would impress the emperor—though I doubted it very much. Still, I couldn’t see any real harm in it for us. Besides, it might be a real break for me to get palsy with the Emperor of China. Lapdog of the Japs or not, he had to be a valuable person to know. And I was thinking of being able to drop his name at cocktail parties. “The Emperor of China? Oh, you mean old P’u-i! Aw, he and I are old drinking buddies from way back!”
Pat was all for it, of course, since it meant adventure and that was plenty enough excuse for her. I think she also figured there might be a way to make a buck out of it.
“What do you know about this P’u-i?” I asked.
“Not a lot,” she replied. “Only that he’s declared his name to be Henry and that he’s the last of the old Manchu dynasty. He’s only about thirty years old and has had a pretty tough time of it, what with one thing and another. He renounced the throne back in 1912, when he was only five, though he continued to live in the Forbidden City and was treated with enormous respect. In 1917, however, some warlord or another—and whoever can keep track of them all?—finagled a way to get P’u-i back on the throne. Within the week, the opposition bombed the palace from the air. This discouraged his supporters no end. They abandoned him and he was once again an ex-emperor.”
“He must have been getting pretty discouraged by that time.”
“I wouldn’t have the slightest doubt about that, especially since the Manchus still had high hopes of getting him back in power. This time they figured they’d succeed if they could get help from one of the Western powers. Under the pretty transparent ruse of being the boy’s tutor, an Englishman named Johnston became the liaison between Britain and P’u-i. The kid was so impressed by the British history that Johnston taught him that he chose the surname Henry for himself. He also finally came to realize that he was a prisoner in the Forbidden City. He tried to escape a couple of times, but never made it. God knows where he thought he could go.
“When he was fifteen he married a very beautiful young girl named Wen Shu—though I understand that everyone calls her Elizabeth now. Probably another result of P’u-i’s anglophilia.
“About ten years ago or thereabouts, another warlord—one Feng Yu-hsiang—attacked the Forbidden City. But this time it was not to restore the emperor to the throne. Feng was both a Communist and a Christian—it’s true! don’t laugh!—and a sworn enemy of the Manchus. The kid managed to escape the palace and Johnston found him refuge at the Japanese legation. This was not out of kindness on Johnston’s part, however. He hoped the Japanese would declare P’u-i emperor of Manchuria, thereby giving the Japanese an excuse to invade Manchuria . . . which they did in thirty-one.”
“Yeah, I noticed. Yulin was crawling with Nips.”
“They’ve declared the existence of a new country, called Manchukuo, which the Chinese government—who’ve declared P’u-i a traitor, by the way—refuses to recognize. In fact, the only countries to have recognized Manchukuo are Japan, Italy and Germany—and you can make of that what you will.”
The emperor was ensconced, Pat said, in the new capital created by the Japanese, a place called Chang-chun. I told Tang thank you very much, but that we’d decided to forego a trek back to Yulin. Instead, I asked him to send a messenger to Englehorn with our money and word that we’d be meeting him down river instead. He was to use whatever money he needed from the sale of the planes to provision the ship and to join us at Ying-kou in ten days.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Pat and I took a train to Chang-chun, a journey of a little more than two days. Tang was taking his own route since it would be too dangerous for him to be seen anywhere in the countryside between the mountains and Chang-chun.
This left me plenty of time to think about Pat. Since we were spending virtually every waking minute together you’d think I would have gotten to know the girl better, but you’d be dead wrong. At the end of those sixty hours I knew not much more about her than I had after the first 120 seconds.
She did let a few things slip, however . . . though maybe she did so deliberately. I don’t think Pat ever said a word in her life that hadn’t been carefully fil
tered through that impressive brain of hers. In any event, I glommed onto every tidbit she let drop, like a hungry elephant sniffing up circus peanuts.
She had a third or fourth cousin, it seemed, one she admired to the point of hero worship. She didn’t say anything quite like that, of course, certainly not in so many words . . . but it was pretty clear from the way those weird eyes of hers glowed like incandescent bronze when she spoke of him, the way they focused on some spot in infinity, the way her cheeks glowed under her golden tan. I had no idea who the big lug was but I wanted to kill him. In all the time I’d known Pat, I’d never heard her utter a word of praise or admiration for any man other than this mysterious relative.
She was too careful to mention his name or even where he lived—though I assumed it was in New York . . . no other city would be big enough. He was some sort of genius, I could tell that much, but I couldn’t figure out what he was supposed to be a genius at. Sometimes I thought he was some sort of private detective and then maybe an engineer, but then she would make him sound more like a doctor or surgeon. He also invented things which apparently made Edison look like a weekend tinkerer. But just when I was thinking the cousin was a cross between Einstein and Pasteur, she made him out to be a circus strongman who could bend steel rails between his toes. So I had to toss Paul Bunyan into the mix. One thing was pretty clear: if I believed even half of what she said there were enough nuts in the Wildman clan to keep Sigmund Freud in clover for life.
Like I said, the trip took five days. There were no sleepers or berths, naturally, so we had to make do sleeping in our seats. It was strange watching Pat do it. She would be sitting bolt upright, looking out the stained window at the flying landscape and then she would shut her eyes and bingo, just like that, she’d be asleep. Nothing else would change—she would just start breathing a little more slowly and deeply . . . but I knew she was in a deep slumber. She would wake up the same way. One moment her eyes would be closed and the next they would be wide open and alert. Frankly, it gave me the willies.
