“By ——!” Hazard cried sharply, and fired.
Now of course, although this whole flurry of action had for me no easily assignable immediate cause, I had up to this point accepted it readily enough, and without wonder. I did not know where we were nor where we were going; but Hazard and I had for a year lived under sentence of death by Koshinga, and always and everywhere we were in danger of attack by his followers. But the next instant I was witnessing unmistakable proof that this was no ordinary attack, and if recklessness of life be courage, I was also witnessing as fine an example of that quality as I had ever seen.
THE three Chinese who were left alive had gone over the crest of the ridge a little way above us, and were running on bare and nearly noiseless feet toward the still motionless body of the man we had left behind us. They had chanced their lives on our not looking back that way—a slender chance enough. One man fell, shot fatally through the chest, but the other two kept on regardless. Plainly their continued existence had no value beside the motive that urged them.
I pulled the trigger, and Hazard’s and Sha Feng’s revolvers made a simultaneous report. We shot to kill; we had to, for they were very near our companion. Two were down and done for. The third and last man flung himself at full length beside the motionless white man and thrust a swift hand inside the white man’s soiled jacket. For a moment the popping of our guns was like the sound of a rapid-firer, and then the Chinaman collapsed.
“Now if they had only known—” muttered Hazard grimly and then checked himself with a doubtful look at my face.
“What did they want?” I asked. “What is the meaning of all this?” Questions came in a rush to my lips, but Hazard was already hurrying down the rounded side of the sand ridge and Sha Feng and I followed him. Was I mistaken in thinking that Hazard, before he turned away, had shot a warning look at Sha Feng, accompanied by an almost imperceptible shake of the head?
What was this? Was there something that they had, in that swift exchange of glances, agreed not to tell me?
“Who is he?” I tried another question. “The white man, I mean?”
“His honorable name is Blalock,” replied Sha Feng. “He leads us to where the devil that is called Koshinga prepares to—”
“Lend a hand here, Partridge,” interrupted Hazard, who was by now bending over the man whom Sha Feng called Blalock. “It’s only a slight wound in the shoulder—see. His unconsciousness is caused by this blow on his head. He’ll soon be out of it. If you’ll get his coat off and peel back his sleeve—”
Hazard had doffed his knapsack, and was getting out a roll of bandage. He carried a small water-bag, too, and Sha Feng and Blalock were similarly equipped. It was the first time I had noticed it. I busied myself as he directed, resisting the impulse to take advantage of my opportunity of discovering what it was that Blalock carried that the Chinamen had so desperately attempted to secure. It was inside his shirt, for I could feel it there; it rustled like parchment, and then:
“Believe me, old man,” said Hazard gently, “it will be better if you don’t— And now,” he went on quickly, “let’s see to this wound.”
We dressed it, a simple enough task, and while we dressed it I questioned Hazard.
“I don’t remember a thing—hardly,” I said. “How long have I been out?”
“It’s been nearly two months, Partridge, since we found Koshinga’s loot. We left Peking that same morning, only waiting to notify the Government House of our find and to see to Tsai Mu’i’s safety.”
“Two months. And all that time—traveling?”
Hazard nodded.
“Where are we?”
“Pretty well over the edge. This is the Western Gobi, Central Kansu. These mountains to the south are the Nan Shan. We left the last town yesterday, Kan Chow. This used to be a trade route, the principal trade route into Turkestan and East Asia and Europe, but now you see the desert has conquered. Even Kan Chow is going.”
“Ah!” I said rather vacantly. “I remember that town.”
“You see,” Hazard went on quickly, as if to divert my mind from these disclosures, “the desert keeps creeping down. This afternoon, when the wind comes up, you’ll have a chance to observe the process. There used to be cities to the north; they’re buried; and where we’ve been walking were foot-hills; they’re buried, too. And—” he paused and regarded me steadily—“you’ve heard of the Sacred Pass?”
“Heard of it!” Instantly I was all eagerness. “Why, Hazard, you know—”
“We hope,” he said, “that we’re on our way to it.”
“Then Koshinga is going to—”
“Wait a minute.”
Having finished with Blalock, Hazard was about to examine the motionless Chinamen. But Sha Feng had already done that, and he announced the result impassively—
“All dead.”
Whereupon Hazard turned to me again.
“I was right about Koshinga’s next move, or at least he,” and Hazard indicated the still unconscious Blalock, “assures me that I was. And perhaps you remember Koshinga’s words when he found he was about to lose his war-fund. Koshinga’s about to make his biggest play, and his most dangerous, to himself and to the Republic and to the world. He’s about to produce the proof of the claim of his followers that he’s the rightful head of the Buddhist and the Taoist hierarchies, as well as of the Ko Lao Hui. If he succeeds, the revolution is an achieved fact, already successful, whatever becomes of Koshinga. If he fails—but if he’s left to himself, he won’t fail. And Blalock here has a plan—”
“Blalock!” I looked distrustfully at his haggard, unconscious face, full of sagging lines of weakness. “Why Blalock’s plan?”
“Why, he’s our guide here, the only man who knows the way. But you’d better let him tell you when—”
“He should know the way,” I cried sharply, pausing in my act of passing the end of the bandage under Blalock’s armpit.
“Why?” There was a hurried, anxious note in Hazard’s voice that convinced me that he knew what I had found even before I pointed it out to him—pointed out that tiny, indelible brand, composed of three Chinese characters intertwined, with which we had long known that each member of Koshinga’s Inner Circle of Lesser Rulers was marked. A means of easy identification in case of broken faith, I suppose, and here it was, under Blalock’s arm.
“Because Blalock’s himself a Ko Lao Hui, of the highest rank next to Koshinga,” I replied. “Bought by Koshinga, no doubt, as we’ve known other white men to be bought—a master of some branch of Western science selling his knowledge. Hazard,” I appealed to the man who had companioned me so long and who in all that time had held no secrets from me, “didn’t you know this?”
Hazard’s face, worn bone-lean by hardships and very taut about the mouth and chin, expressed a momentary and very unaccustomed uncertainty. He looked up at Sha Feng and I followed his look. Sha Feng’s expression was inscrutable.
“Why, yes, I did,” said Hazard. “But,” he went on swiftly, “these are Ko Lao Hui who attacked us, nevertheless, and the attack was principally on him. Partridge, I’m going to speak plainly to you.”
“Why on earth,” I demanded, “should you speak in any other way?”
“Well, then, before he,” nodding at Blalock, “awakes. The first point is, that you’ve been out of your head a long time. That poison, whatever it was, affects the mind more than it does the body. And we don’t know—”
“How soon I’ll go out of my head again,” I put it bluntly as Hazard hesitated.
“Well, yes,” and Hazard tried to smile. “Not at all, I trust; but if you do, you’d talk. And there’s something I don’t want Blalock to know. Something that I’d have to tell you, if I were to explain why we’re following him at all.”
“Something connected with this?” and I touched the bosom of Blalock’s shirt inside which there was the feel of a fold of paper.
“Well, yes,” said Hazard disquietedly. “If you could forget that
—”
“I can’t promise to forget it,” I interrupted him, “but at least I’m mum. I get your point of view. I don’t blame you. I never felt saner in my life, nor more apt to stay so, but of course—”
“You had one lapse into sanity a while back,” apologized Hazard, and I knew he referred to the time when I had unraveled the mystery of the House of the Myriad Lights. That had been super-sanity, super-clarity of mind, altogether different from my present feeling of normality, but I let it pass.
“All right,” I said. “So much for the first point. What’s the second?”
“The second is, whether you want to go on like this, blindfolded. I’ve brought you so far because I couldn’t bear to leave you behind in your condition. Besides, there wasn’t any place where I could leave you, where you’d be safe from the Ko Lao Hui. You remember Li Fu Ching escaped; that meant that our disguise was no longer useful.
“I intended to leave you in Kan Chow; but every man there had been warned to have nothing to do with us—that’s why we’re finishing the journey on foot. And then, too, I had an idea—Partridge, this is our last adventure against Koshinga. Either we defeat him here or it’s the end for us and for every other white man in China. With the hundreds of millions of Taoist and Buddhist fanatics under his control—well, you know what it’ll mean. And so I thought—”
“That I’d want to go through to the finish. Certainly you thought right. Now, a question that I don’t think you’ll mind answering. What day—”
But I was interrupted by a sudden movement on the part of Blalock, who, with the first glimmering of returning consciousness, clutched swiftly at his breast with his right hand. His hand closed over whatever it was that was inside his shirt, and then lay quiet.
“Tomorrow is the prophesied date of the meeting between Koshinga and the high priests,” whispered Hazard swiftly. “We’ll make it—at least Blalock says we will. Cultivate Blalock, Partridge, get him to talk and you’ll know—”
At that instant Blalock’s eyes opened. And within fifteen minutes we were on our way again.
IX
A STRANGE, wild way it was, which presently grew frightful with dust and sun-glare. The time of the attack upon us had been mid-morning, and every moment the heat of the desert increased until we seemed to be walking between two infernos. An inferno of sky, clear and hot like melted glass; of earth, which absorbed the heat and flung it back again; so that the air and all the landscape quivered before our eyes as if tortured by the tiny devils of radiation.
Blalock led the way, cutting diagonally into the Nan Shan foot-hills to the southwest, through a country that was as blasted, dead and desolate as any on earth. I followed him close, for I was minded to take Hazard’s advice, and to have talk with him. It would be very difficult or it would be very easy; for my short observation, in my right senses, had convinced me anew of a fact I’ve already hinted. Hazard and Sha Feng, in their long caravan journey toward the unknown, had been guided by a man who was little more than half-sane.
And I didn’t have to wait long for an opening. Presently I “was startled by hearing Blalock talking to himself. It was only a low-toned muttering, but there was no other sound anywhere save the padding of our feet upon the sand, and it carried easily to me over his hunched shoulders. He was repeating the name of our enemy over and over again in a tone that indicated hatred.
“Koshinga, Koshinga, Koshinga.”
I closed up on him, resolved to pretend that my own mental disability still endured, in part at least, and as far as memory was concerned.
“Koshinga! What do you know of him?”
And Blalock, glancing at me sideways, replied with a rather wild laugh:
“What do I know? I know—much.”
That last was an anticlimax, probably dictated by caution. What he had intended to say was, “everything.” And I resolved instantly to test the depths of his knowledge. There was little enough about Koshinga’s history that hadn’t a possible bearing on the event that lay ahead of us, the event that had been planned by the same brain that had planned Koshinga himself.
“I used to think I knew a little. Now I seem to have forgotten. And it seems to me that I should know, if I’m to understand—”
“You must know,” interrupted Blalock sharply, “if you’re to understand what we’re going to do, if you’re to help—”
He had spoken fervently and yet it seemed to me that a cunning note underlay that fervor—a note of falsity. I was glad to remember Hazard’s hint that he wasn’t wholly trusting Blalock.
“But who is he?” I pursued as Blalock’s voice trailed off. “Who is this Koshinga? Of course I remember him; he appeared in the House of the Myriad Lights just before something put out my mind. But his origin—where did he come from? And why isn’t he a miracle? I know that his coming was prophesied; I know that there are medallions and daggers and pieces of statuary centuries old containing representations of his face, line for line, and that there never was such another face on earth.”
“A miracle!” Blalock laughed loudly. “A miracle! Bah!”
I led him on. It wasn’t difficult; he appeared to me like a man obsessed with hatred of Koshinga. If I wasn’t mistaken, in that obsession lay the reason for his madness. We were at one in our hatred at least, whatever duplicity on his part might lie between us. And so, on that blazing road which was leading us to what we knew not, I heard for what was, I think, the fourth time, the little known story of Koshinga’s strange line of descent, of his actual creation to order by an indomitable human will.
“You must know,” said Blalock rapidly, vindictively, “that this is not the first Koshinga, but the fifteenth. The first Koshinga was a pirate, master of the seas around Formosa a little over three hundred years ago—a Chinese pirate. It was that first Koshinga who established the Ko Lao Hui, whose first work was to be the overthrow of the Manchus and the restoration of the Chinese to power.
“But that was only the first work; next was to come the union of Asia and the conquest of the world. And all the schemes to that end, which this last Koshinga is attempting, were bred in that first Koshinga’s brain like maggots. Including the prophecy of the coming of the last Koshinga, which prophecy, as you say, came true.”
“But why isn’t it a miracle, then?” I inquired.
Blalock again laughed scornfully and replied with that swift but half-hysterical fluency which comes to one who had brooded over a subject too long for the good of his reason.
“That’s what it was intended to seem, of course. And it was a miracle of clever foresight, if you like—a miracle of long planning. Here’s what happened. The laws of heredity and environment were put to work. It’s a perfectly good theory that a rightful ruler of the world should be completely deracialized, or rather that he should have the blood of all races in him.
“Well, the Koshinga family tree was mapped out ahead to that effect. Koshinga brought a Dutch girl from Formosa to start the line. Other wives were to be kidnaped, carried off, each of a different race or mixture of races, which were designated in the law laid down by the first Koshinga. Of course, there were always foreigners coming to the China Coast. The first-born son of each Koshinga became the succeeding Koshinga. The other children were put out into the ranks of the Ko Lao Hui before they could know their parentage. There was heredity working. As for environment—”
I thoroughly believed what he said; and indeed any time during the past year I would cheerfully have taken any chance that might have enabled me to put the proof of his statements before the world. Still I interposed an objection here.
“But isn’t the secrecy involved in all that rather improbable?”
“For China and the Chinese of the past three hundred years?” questioned Blalock with a fleer of nervous anger. “Why, even today I could tell you of a place—” He checked himself quickly. “But, as I was saying, the Koshingas naturally had absolute power. They were hidden away, seeing no one but the subordinate members of
the Ko Lao Hui, to whom instant death was the punishment for disobedience.
“Here was progressive brutalization, the development of egotism, through fifteen generations. And everywhere in that secret home of the Koshingas, pictured on the walls, inlaid in the floors, carved into the furniture, was—this face. This hideous face!”
AND suddenly Blalock, with something between a curse and a snarl, jerked from the side pocket of his coat a medallion. It was a medallion of yellow gold, set with jewels that were worth a fortune; but the thing that drew a gasp from me was that the center of it was indeed engraved in the unmistakable likeness of Koshinga’s face, line for line, feature for feature—the deracialized and well-nigh dehumanized face of our enemy.
“An ideal,” went on Blalock, “which was worshiped and striven after by fourteen generations of Koshingas—the face of Koshinga who was to come, and who would rule the world. There was your secondary influence—your environment. That was the way the present Koshinga was produced, after the model conceived by the first Koshinga. It was no miracle, but the operation of natural law.”
And Blalock put the medallion away again.
“True,” I said; “but how to prove it?”
“Ah, but that is what I shall do. I, who am greater than Koshinga, because I shall destroy Koshinga. I shall rise in the meeting and denounce him to the priests—”
I began to see another reason, besides the latent duplicity that now and then showed in his manner, why Hazard and Sha Feng were not trusting their guide with any plan they might have in mind. This man was himself an egomaniac of the first water.
“The priests?” I questioned. “What do you mean?”
Whereupon Blalock went on to explain what I understood already; that when the foundations of the Ko Lao Hui had been laid there had also been laid the foundations of the plot where by the present Koshinga hoped to prove himself the rightful head of the Buddhist and Taoist hierarchies.
Through song and story and prophecy the masses of Asia had been prepared for this event; and the debased three-quarters of the priesthood would welcome it, would welcome anything that would tend to bolster up their failing power. And the high priests were coming, said Blalock, from every part of China and from Tibet and Mongolia besides, to the Sacred Pass, where Koshinga was to meet them and prove his claims.
The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge Page 45
