Delphi Works of Robert E. Howard (Illustrated) (Series Four)

by Robert E. Howard

  Three times Yuen Lao rapped. Then the door swung silently inward, to disclose a veritable well of darkness. I could not even see who had opened the door. Yuen Lao entered first, motioning me to follow. I stepped in, Bill crowding close after me. The door slammed between us, leaving the dog on the outside. I heard the click of a heavy lock. Bill was clawing and whining outside the door. And then the lights came on. While I blinked like a blinded owl, I heard a low throaty chuckle that sent involuntary shivers up and down my spine. My eyes became accustomed to the light. I saw that I was in a big room, furnished in true Oriental style. The walls were covered with velvet and silken hangings, ornamented with silver dragons worked into the fabric. A faint scent of some Eastern incense or perfume pervaded the atmosphere.

  Ranged about me were ten big, dark, wicked-faced men, naked except for loin-cloths. Malays they were, tougher and stronger than any Chinese. On a kind of tiger-skin covered dais across the room an unmistakable Chinaman sat on a lacquer-worked chair. He was clad in robes worked in dragons like those on the hangings, and his keen piercing eyes gleamed through holes in the mask which hid his features. But it was the figure which stood image-like beside the lacquered chair which drew and held my gaze. It was the hatchet-man from whom I had rescued Yotai T’sao on the wharfs that morning.

  In a sickening instant I realized that I was trapped. Blind fool that I was, to walk into the snare. A child might have suspected that mask-faced snake of a Yuen Lao. He too was a Yo Than, I realized. And he had not brought me to the Honorable and Benevolent Yun Lai Kao. He had brought me before the nameless and mysterious chief of the Yo Thans, to die like a butchered sheep.

  And there he stood before me, Yuen Lao, smiling evilly. I acted instinctively. Square into his mouth I crashed my right before he could move. His teeth caved in and he dropped like a log.

  The masked man on the dais laughed. And in his laughter sounded all the ancient and heartless cruelty of the Orient.

  “The white barbarian is strong and fierce,” he mocked. “But this night, my bold savage, you shall learn what it is to interfere with the plans of Kang Kian of the Yo Thans. Fool, to pit your paltry powers against mine. You, with the striding arrogance of your breed.

  “Know, fool, before you die, that the ancient dragon that is China is waking slowly beneath the feet of the foreign dogs, and their doom is not far off. Soon I, Kang Kian, master of the Yo Thans, will come from the shadows, raise the dragon banner of revolution and mount again the ancient throne of my ancestors. Your fate will be the fate of all your race who oppose me. I laugh at you. Do you deem yourself important because the future emperor of China deigns to see personally to your removal? Bah! I merely crush you as I crush the gnat that annoys me.”

  Then he spoke shortly to the Malays: “Kill him.”

  They closed in on me silently, drawing knives, strangling cords and loaded cudgels. It looked like trail’s end for Steve Costigan. I, with two black eyes, ribs pounded black and blue, one hand broken, from one fierce fight, pitted against these trained killers. They approached warily. Bill, outside, sensing my peril, began to roar and hurl himself against the bolted door. I tensed myself for one last rush. The thought flashed through me that perhaps Bill would escape my fate. I hoped that it might be so.

  I drew back, tensed and watchful as a hawk. The ring was closing in on me. The nearest Malay edged within reach. He raised his knife for the death leap. I smashed my heel to his knee and distinctly heard the bone snap. He went down. I leaped across him and hit that closing ring as a plunging fullback hits a line.

  Cudgels swished past my head. I felt a knife lick along my ribs. Then I was through, bounding across the room and onto the dais.

  Kang Kian screamed. He jerked a pistol from his robes. How he missed me at that range, I cannot say. The powder flash burned my face, but before he could fire again I knocked him head over heels with a blow that was backed with the power of desperation. The pistol flew out of reach.

  The hatchet-man was on me like a clawing cat. He drove a long knife deep into my chest muscles. Then I got in a solid smash. His jaw was brittle. It crunched like an egg-shell. I swung his limp form up bodily above my head and hurled him into the clump of Malays who came leaping up on the dais, bowling over the front line like ten-pins. The rest came at me.

  Carried beyond myself on a red wave of desperate battle fury, I caught up the lacquered chair and swung it with all my strength. Squarely it landed and I felt my victim’s shoulder bone give way. But the chair flew into splinters. Then a whistling cudgel stroke laid my scalp open and knocked me to my knees. The whole pack piled on me, hacking and slashing. But their very numbers hindered them. Somehow, I managed to shake them off momentarily and stagger up.

  A big Chinaman I had not seen before bobbed up from nowhere and got a bone-breaking wrestling hold on my right arm. A giant Malay was thrusting for my life. I could not wrench my right free. So, setting my teeth, I slugged him with my broken left. I went sick and dizzy from the pain of it, but the Malay dropped like a sack.

  But they downed me again, as my berserk fighting frenzy waned. They swarmed over me and forced me down by sheer weight of man-power. I heard Kang Kian yelling to them with the rage of a fiend in his voice, and a big dark-skinned devil raised his knife and drove it down for my heart. Somehow, I managed to throw up my left arm and take the blade through it. That arm felt like I’d bathed in molten lead.

  Then I heard the door crash and splinter. A familiar voice roared like a high sea. And something like a white cannon-ball hit the clump of natives on top of me.

  The press slackened as the group flew apart. I reeled up, sick, dizzy and weak from loss of the blood that was spurting from me in half a dozen places. As in a daze, I saw Bill leaping and tearing at dark, howling figures which fell over each other trying to get away. And I saw a white giant ploughing through them as a battleship goes through breakers.

  Big John Clancy!

  I saw him seize a Malay in each hand, by the neck, crack their heads together and throw them into a corner. A dusky giant ran in, lunging upward with a stroke meant to disembowel, only to be stretched senseless by one blow of Big John’s mighty fist. The big Chinaman — a wrestler, by his looks — got a headlock on Clancy. But Big John broke the hold, wheeled and threw the wrestler clear over his shoulders, head over heels. The Chinaman hit on his head and he didn’t get up.

  That was enough for the Yo Thans. They scattered like a flock of birds, all except Kang Kian, the masked lord. He sprang for the fallen pistol. Before he could reach it, Bill, jaws already streaming red, dragged him down. One fearful scream broke from the Yo Than’s yellow lips and then Bill’s iron jaws tore out his throat.

  Big John came quickly toward me. “By golly, Costigan,” he rumbled, “you look like you been through a sawmill. Here, lemme tie up some of them stabs before you bleed to death. You’ve lost a gallon of blood already. We got to git you where you can git dressed right. But for the time bein’ we’ll see can we stop the bleedin’.”

  He ripped strips from his shirt and began to bandage me. Bill climbed all over me, wagging his stump of a tail and licking my hand.

  I gazed at Big John in amazement. I had thought my own vitality unusual, but Big John’s endurance was beyond belief. He looked as if he’d been mauled by a gorilla. I was astounded to realize the extent to which I had punished him in our battle. Yet he seemed almost as fresh and fit as ever. My smashes which had blackened his eyes, smashed his lips, ripped his ears, shattered some of his teeth and laid open his jaw, had battered him down and out, but had not sapped the vast reservoir of his vitality. I had merely weakened him momentarily and knocked him out, that was all, and accomplishing that feat had taken more of my strength than it had his.

  “I supposed you’d be laid up for a week after our fight,” I said bluntly.

  He snorted. “You must think I’m effeminate. I wasn’t out but a few minutes. And when I’d got back my breath, I was ready to go on with the fight. Of cours
e I’m kinda stiff and sore and tired-like, right now, but that amounts to nothing.

  “When I’d got my bearin’s I looked around for you. Froggy and them had a hard time convincin’ me that I’d been licked, for the first time in my life. I’ll swear, I still don’t see how it could of happened. Anyway, I started right out to find you and take you apart, because I was mighty near blind mad. A coolie had seen you go into the Alley of Bats and I followed, not long behind you. I know Canton better’n most white men, but I got clean tangled up in all them alley-ways and courtyards.

  “Then I heard your dog makin’ a big racket. I knowed it was yours, because they ain’t but one dog in China with a voice like his. So I come and found him roarin’ and plungin’ at the door and I heard the noise inside. So knowin’ you must be in some kind of a jamb, I just up and busted in. Who was them thugs, anyhow?”

  I told him quickly about Yotai T’sao and the Yo Thans. He growled: “I mighta knowed it. I’ve heard of ‘em. I bet they won’t put no snake sign on no more Americans very soon. Come on, let’s get outa here.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you, Clancy,” I said. “You certainly saved my hide...”

  “Aw, don’t thank me,” he grunted. “I couldn’t see them mutts bump off a white man. And you’d sure give ’em a tussle by yourself. Naw, don’t thank me. Remember I was lookin’ for you to beat you up.”

  “Well,” said I, “I hate to fight a man whose saved my life, but if you’re set on it...”

  He laughed gustily and slapped me on the back. “Thunderation, Steve, I wouldn’t hit a man which has just stopped as many knives as you have. Anyway, I’m beginnin’ to like you. Who’s this?”

  A tall man in European clothes stepped suddenly into the doorway, with a revolver in one hand.

  “Wells!” I exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

  “Following a tip-off I got earlier in the evening,” he said crisply. “I got wind of a secret session of the Yo Thans to be held here.”

  “So you are a Secret Service man after all,” I said slowly. “If I’d known that, I might not have all these knife-stabs in my hide.”

  “I’ve been trailing the Yo Thans for some time,” he answered. “Working with special powers invested in me by British and Chinese authorities. Whose this dead man?”

  “He called himself Kang Kian and boasted that he was the mysterious lord of the Yo Thans and the next emperor of China,” I answered, with an involuntary shudder, as I glanced at the grisly havoc Bill’s ripping fangs had wrought. Wells’ eyes blazed. He stepped forward and tore away the blood stained mask, revealing the smooth yellow face and clean-cut aristocrat features of a middle-aged China-man.

  Wells recoiled with an exclamation.

  “My word! Can it be possible! No wonder he delayed the aid he promised the government, and only promised, I can see now, to avert suspicion. And no wonder he was able to keep his true identity a secret. Clancy, Costigan, this is the Honorable and Eminent Yun Lai Kao.”

  “What, the philosopher and philanthropist?” Clancy, who knew Canton, was even more amazed than I.

  Wells nodded slowly. “What strange quirk in his nature led him along this path?” he said half to himself. “What a mind he had. What heights he might have risen to, but for that one twist in his soul. Who can explain it?”

  Clancy, who knew the Orient, seemed to be groping for words to frame a thought.

  “China,” he said, “is China. And there’s no use in a white man tryin’ to figger her out.”

  Aye, China is China — vast, aloof, inscrutable, the Sphynx of the nations.

  * * *

  BLOW THE CHINKS DOWN!; OR, THE HOUSE OF PERIL

  First published in Action Stories, October 1931. Also published as “The House Of Peril”

  A FAMILIAR stocky shape, stood with a foot on the brass rail, as I entered the American Bar, in Hong-kong. I glared at the shape disapprovingly, recognizing it as Bill McGlory of the Dutchman. That is one ship I enthusiastically detest, this dislike being shared by all the bold lads aboard the Sea Girl, from the cap’n to the cook.

  I shouldered up along the bar. Ignoring Bill, I called for a whisky straight.

  “You know, John,” said Bill, addressing hisself to the bartender, “you got no idee the rotten tubs which calls theirselves ships that’s tied up to the wharfs right now. Now then, the Sea Girl for instance. An’ there’s a guy named Steve Costigan—”

  “You know, John,” I broke in, addressing myself to the bartender, “it’s clean surprisin’ what goes around on their hind laigs callin’ theirselves sailor-men, these days. A baboon got outa the zoo at Brisbane and they just now spotted it on the wharfs here in Hong- kong.”

  “You don’t say,” said John the bar-keep. “Where’d it been?”

  “To sea,” I said. “It’d shipped as A.B. mariner on the Dutchmanand was their best hand.”

  With which caustic repartee, I stalked out in gloating triumph, leaving Bill McGlory gasping and strangling as he tried to think of something to say in return. To celebrate my crushing victory over the enemy I swaggered into the La Belle Cabaret and soon seen a good looking girl setting alone at a table. She was toying with her cigaret and drink like she was bored, so I went over and set down.

  “Evenin’, Miss,” I says, doffing my cap. “I’m just in from sea and cravin’ to toss my money around. Do you dance?”

  She eyed me amusedly from under her long, drooping lashes and said: “Yes, I do, on occasion. But I don’t work here, sailor.”

  “Oh, excuse me, Miss,” I said, getting up. “I sure beg your pardon.”

  “That’s all right,” she said. “Don’t run away. Let’s sit here and talk.”

  “That’s fine,” I said, setting back down again, when to my annoyance a sea-going figger bulked up to the table.

  “Even’, Miss,” said Bill McGlory, fixing me with a accusing stare. “Is this walrus annoyin’ you?”

  “Listen here, you flat-headed mutt—” I began with some heat, but the girl said: “Now, now, don’t fight, boys. Sit down and let’s all talk sociably. I like to meet people from the States in this heathen land. My name is Kit Worley and I work for Tung Yin, the big Chinese merchant.”

  “Private secretary or somethin’?” says Bill.

  “Governess to his nieces,” said she. “But don’t let’s talk about me. Tell me something about yourselves. You boys are sailors, aren’t you?”

  “I am,” I replied meaningly. Bill glared at me.

  “Do tell me about some of your voyages,” said she hurriedly. “I just adore ships.”

  “Then you’d sure like the Dutchman, Miss Worley,” beamed Bill. “I don’t like to brag, but for trim lines, smooth rig, a fine figger and speed, they ain’t a sailin’ craft in the China trade can hold a candle to her. She’s a dream. A child could steer her.”

  “Or anybody with a child’s mind,” I says. “And does — when you’re at the wheel.”

  “Listen here, you scum of the Seven Seas,” said Bill turning brick color. “You layoff the Dutchman. I’d never have the nerve to insult a sweet ship like her if I sailed in a wormy, rotten-timbered, warped- decked, crank- ruddered, crooked-keeled, crazy-rigged tub like the Sea Girl.”

  “You’ll eat them words with a sauce of your own blood,” I howled.

  “Boys!” said Miss Worley. “Now, boys.”

  “Miss Worley,” I said, getting up and shedding my coat, “I’m a law- abidin’ and peaceful man, gentle and generous to a fault. But they’s times when patience becomes a vice and human kindness is a stumblin’ block on the road of progress. This baboon in human form don’t understand no kind of moral suasion but a bust on the jaw.”

  “Come out in the alley,” squalled Bill, bounding up like a jumping- jack.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s settle this here feud once and for all. Miss Worley,” I said, “wait here for the victor. I won’t be gone long.”

  Out in the alley, surrounded by a gang of curi
ous coolies, we squared off without no more ado. We was well matched, about the same height and weighing about l90 pounds each. But as we approached each other with our fists up, a form stepped between. We stopped and glared in outraged surprise. It was a tall, slender Englishman with a kind of tired, half humorous expression.

  “Come, come, my good men,” he said. “We can’t have this sort of thing, you know. Bad example to the natives and all that sort of thing. Can’t have white men fighting in the alleys these days. Times too unsettled, you know. Must uphold the white man’s standard.”

  “Well, by golly,” I said. “I’ve had a hundred fights in Hong-kong and nobody yet never told me before I was settin’ a bad example to nobody.”

  “Bad tactics, just the same,” he said. “And quite too much unrest now. If the discontented Oriental sees white men bashing each other’s bally jaws, the white race loses just that much prestige, you see.”

  “But what right you got buttin’ into a private row?” I complained.

  “Rights vested in me by the Chinese government, working with the British authorities, old topper,” said the Englishman. “Brent is the name.”

  “Sir Peter Brent of the Secret Service, hey?” I grunted. “I’ve heard tell of you. But I dunno what you could do if we was to tell you to go chase yourself.”

  “I could summon the bally police and throw you in jail, old thing,” he said apologetically. “But I don’t want to do that.”

  “Say,” I said, “You got any idee how many Chinee cops it’d take to lug Steve Costigan and Bill McGlory to the hoosegow?”

  “A goodly number, I should judge,” said he. “Still if you lads persist in this silly feud, I shall have to take the chance. I judge fifty would be about the right number.”

  “Aw, hell,” snorted Bill, hitching up his britches. “Let’s rock him to sleep and go on with the fray. He can’t do nothin’.”

  But I balked. Something about the slim Britisher made me feel mad and ashamed too. He was so frail looking alongside us sluggers.