Chatting amiably, the twain came to the wharf and climbed the gangway of theWhang Ho. That anxious first mate, Mr. Parkinson, pitiably afraid lest he lose his billet and be turned adrift because he had failed to prevent the desertion of the crew, brightened perceptibly at sight of Charley Tong Sin and concluded that this influential young man had been persuaded to mend the troubles.
“Come to my room, if ye please,” said Captain O’Shea to the smiling comprador, “and I will summon my chief engineer. He will tell you that the steamer is not fit to make three knots an hour, and then we will go below.”
The shipmaster beckoned Mr. Parkinson to follow. The trio were passing through the wide hall of the main cabin when Captain O’Shea halted. Swinging on his heel, he stood facing Charley Tong Sin, who started slightly, for the visage of Captain O’Shea was stern and lowering.
What followed was instantaneous. The shipmaster’s fist shot out and collided with the jaw of the comprador, who measured his length on the floor and appeared to be wrapped in slumber. Only the toes of his neat patent-leather shoes oscillated gently. The expression of his face was singularly peaceful. The oblique eyelids were closed.
The aghast Mr. Parkinson sputtered in great dismay:
“My God, sir, what have you done? We’ll all go to jail for this. This is Jordan, Margetson’s right-hand man.”
“I have given him a sleeping-powder,” said O’Shea. “Take him by the heels while I carry the other end of him and we will lock him in a spare state-room. Put a guard over him. If he squeals, hit him again and keep him quiet.”
The mate was about to renew his protests, but his voice died in his throat. Perceiving that he wavered miserably, Captain O’Shea spoke once more, and his accents were hard:
“You can make your choice, Mr. Parkinson. Ye sail with me and you play my game or you can go ashore to rot and starve on the beach, same as when I picked ye out of the gutter. I have given this dirty young Chinese blackguard a taste of what is coming to him. Will ye fall to or shall I kick you out of the ship?”
“I—I will take your orders, sir,” stammered the other.
“Then help me get this steamer to sea. We will wait for no more Chinese sailors. Muster all hands on the upper deck.”
They came piling up from the hold and the dining-room abaft the galley, where most of them had been at breakfast. The inanimate comprador was no longer visible.
“Will you sail with me at once or lose the chance of making the voyage?” demanded O’Shea. “Some of you will have to shovel coal and others wash dishes and do seamen’s duty on deck. But I will pay ye extra for it, and we will take this old box of a steamer to where we want to go.”
The response was hearty and unanimous. The adventurers could think of no worse fate than to be once more stranded in Shanghai. They were well fed, they had slept in clean beds again, and their employer was a man who could be trusted to deal with them fairly. With a spirited cheer they scattered to their various stations. The chief engineer spoke briefly, his gray whiskers standing out in the morning breeze:
“Nobody but a wild Irishman would have thenerve to take this painted coffin to sea with a gang of misbegotten greenhorns to man her. I have steam enough to give her steerage-way whenever you’re ready to cast off, Captain O’Shea.”
“Then let go, fore and aft,” roared the master. “Are ye pilot enough to take her down the river, Mr. Parkinson?”
“I could do it with both eyes shut, but I’m not so familiar with the coast to the north’ard.”
“I have a pilot for the part of the coast and the river we are bound for,” grimly returned O’Shea. “He is locked in a spare state-room just now. He will know that part of China very well, for ’tis me opinion that he has been there before.”
Over a mournful, muddy expanse of the China Sea wallowed a top-heavy river steamer whose engines raised protesting clamor like an assemblage of threshing-machines. The gods of the air and water were in a kindly mood or else she would have opened up and foundered ere now. In the spray-swept wheel-house stood Captain Michael O’Shea, swaying easily to the crazy roll and lurch of theWhang Hoand scanning the low dim coast with a pair of glasses. Clinging to the window ledge beside him was a young man of a Chinese countenance whose raiment, the handiwork of a fashionable British tailor, was sadly rumpled and soiled. The whole aspect of the young man was rumpled, in fact, notto say excessively forlorn, and now and then he pressed his hand against a painful jaw. It was difficult to imagine that he had been an ornament of clubs, a pattern for the gilded youth, and the smartest comprador between Tientsin and Singapore.
The plight of Charley Tong Sin was made poignantly distressing by the fact that in the process of acquiring the vices of the Occident he had lost his grip on the essential virtues of the Orient. His native stoicism had been sapped and the fatalistic attitude of mind which meets death without so much as the flutter of an eyelid was eaten with dry-rot. In other words, the comprador was willing to pay any price to save his own skin, although his father before him would have suffered himself to be sliced to death by inches sooner than “lose face” in the presence of a foreigner.
Captain Michael O’Shea’s method of extracting information from this kidnapped passenger had been brutally simple and direct. Charley Tong Sin was informed that he could make a clean breast of it or be thrown overboard. And the shipmaster, when he was thoroughly in earnest, had a way of conveying the impression that he meant what he said. He believed that he knew his man. The comprador was strongly reluctant to have his head lopped off by the sword of a native executioner, which was very likely to happen if this terrible O’Shea should turn him over to the Chinese authorities. Given the promise of immunity in exchange for a confession, he could flee to Japan or the Straits Settlements andlive handsomely in the society of other Chinese exiles with the funds that he had piled up during his brief and brilliant business career. Likewise there would be opportunities in shipping and commerce for a comprador of his uncommon ability.
“I would honestly enjoy killing you, Charley,” said Captain O’Shea as they stood together in the wheel-house of theWhang Ho. “You are a smart lad, but ye got too gay with me, and you overplayed your game when ye slipped under the counter of this steamer in a sampan in the dark of the night and got busy with the red paint. That sort of silly jugglery was the Chinese of it, I suppose. Now, I have tried to make it plain that your life is not worth a pinch of snuff to any one of us. There is not a man in the ship that wants to lay eyes on Shanghai ever again. They will be only too glad to quit the country if they have the price in their pockets, and I will give them the price. So ye must not hold to the notion that we are afraid of getting in trouble on your account.”
“I am worth more to you alive than if I am dead,” sullenly muttered Charley Tong Sin. “Is it not so? You think I will be handy as a pilot, as an interpreter? I have been doing a deuce of a lot of thinking. I am no fool, Captain O’Shea. I know pretty well when I am licked. I made a botch of it in Shanghai. You went blundering about like a buffalo, and I thought it was a cinch to get you out of the way.”
“’Twas the luck of the Irish that pulled me through,” said O’Shea. “Now we understand eachother, Charley, me lad. I am staking all I have—me life and me money—to get to the bottom of this infernal secret society you have mixed yourself up with. ’Tis an instrument I am for the good of humanity. And if ye turn state’s evidence to enable me to make a clean, thorough job of it, I think I am justified in giving you a chance to hot-foot it out of China.”
“Let us call it a bargain, Captain O’Shea. As we used to say in New York, I am up against it good and plenty. To commit suicide, as many Chinese would do in a fix like this, is all tommy-rot. Charley Tong Sin could have no more gin cocktails—what?”
“You can begin the confession right away,” exclaimed the shipmaster.
“One thing at a time,” cheerfully replied the comprador. “I will take you to the River of Ten Thousand Evil Smells and the village of Wang-Li-Fu. Then you will find many very interesting things to ask me to talk about.”
“And ye hope to give me the slip in the meantime,” and Captain O’Shea showed no ill-will. “Very well, Charley. One thing at a time. Now take these glasses and have a look at the coast. By my reckoning, we are far enough to the north’ard to begin to haul inshore.”
TheWhang Howas laboring abeam of a monotonous expanse of marshy islands and ragged shoals made by the silt of river floods. The shifting channels were poorly charted, for trade sought the inland water-ways. The fact that theTai Yansteamer, with McDougal and Jim Eldridge on board, had somehow found a passage leading from the sea convinced Captain O’Shea that he could do likewise with a considerably smaller vessel. Charley Tong Sin had admitted that he knew the way in, and he was no more anxious to be drowned than the rest of the company.
“With good luck we can scrape over the sandbars on the afternoon tide,” said the comprador, “and anchor in deep water for the night. I cannot show you where to go in the dark. There are no lights.”
TheWhang Hoedged steadily nearer the coast. Her crew gazed ahead at the frothing breakers that tumbled over the far-extended shoals, and appeared unhappy. By a miracle their steamer was still under them after struggling through rough winds and high seas, and now they were to be wrecked, so all signs indicated, in a God-forsaken region of sand and swamp and mud. However, there was no whimpering. Captain O’Shea, their overlord, had a trick of knocking a man down and then listening to his complaints. And he was as ready with a word of commendation as he was with his disciplinary fists.
“Mr. Kittridge, if we hit bottom, put it to her and jam her over,” he remarked to the chief engineer. “A chum of mine by the name of Johnny Kent that sailed with me and held your berth used to clamp his safety-valves when he had urgent need of steam. Did ye ever try it?”
“God forbid!” fervently ejaculated Mr. Kittridge;“but in this crazy tub a man will do anything. If you find yourself flyin’ to glory with a section of a boiler pokin’ in the small of your back, don’t lay it against me, sir.”
“I like the way ye talk, Mr. Kittridge. Stand by your engines, if ye please, for we will be in the white water before long.”
TheWhang Hosheered to one side and shouldered past the outermost shoals. O’Shea took the wheel, and Charley Tong Sin, cool and quick-witted, told him how to follow the turbid, twisting channel that wound its course between the sea and the wide mouth of the estuary. More than once the steamer scraped the oozy bottom, hung and shivered while the breakers pounded her, and then stubbornly forged ahead, timbers groaning, boilers hissing, propeller kicking up clouds of mud astern. It was evident that the channel had shoaled in places since any other steamer had made the passage, and it was not at all certain that theWhang Hocould stand the strain of forcing her way to sea again.
“I have not been here since two years ago,” said the comprador. “It is worse than I expected, you bet! Ai oh, a man that sails with you dies a dozen deaths, Captain O’Shea.”
“I find it more comfortable than living in the best hotel in Shanghai,” very pointedly returned the shipmaster as he climbed the spokes of the big wooden wheel with hands and feet and wrenched theWhang Hoclear of a hungry sand-spit. By now she was fairly in the midst of the marshy islands that extendedfrom the watery main-land. The violence of the surf was broken and the tide moved in broad, sluggish currents. Mr. Parkinson, who was swinging the sounding lead, shouted that the channel had deepened to five fathoms. The steamer had survived the passage.
Two miles farther inland she let go anchor in a wide lagoon. The afternoon had waned. A cloudy twilight was closing down. On every hand stretched a flat, unbroken region of swamp and creeks and rivers. No villages were visible nor groves of trees against the sky-line to mark the situation of a temple. A few small fishing-boats with ragged sails fled at sight of the foreign steamer. The comprador waved his hand to starboard and exclaimed:
“Yonder it is, the River of Ten Thousand Evil Smells, as you call it in English. Wait till the tide goes down, and you will find out pretty quick why the Chinese give it that funny name.”
“’Tis a filthy-looking country,” quoth Captain O’Shea. “It looks like one great big sewer, with the yellow water and the sludge and the slime on the banks.”
“It was all very well drained one time, long ago,” explained Charley Tong Sin. “Then there were many people and towns. The Tai Pings destroyed the canals and played the dickens with everything. And nothing has been repaired, so the people don’t live here any more.”
“And where is this place called Wang-Li-Fu?” demanded O’Shea.
“Six miles up that stinking river. You think you will see the Painted Joss to-morrow, Captain?”
“The Stinking River and the Painted Joss! You are loosening up, Charley. I am near the end of me journey when you say things like that. I have heard of them before.”
“Two other foreign men—only two—have seen the Painted Joss, and it was unfortunate for them.” The comprador said this softly and with an evil grin. He had overstepped the mark. Captain O’Shea gripped him by the neck and shook him savagely as he thundered in his ear:
“Any more of that, and I will forget the bargain we made. One of those men was a friend of mine, and by rights I ought to drill ye with a bullet as a favor to him.”
Between chattering teeth Charley Tong Sin, suddenly abject, begged for his life. Presently he moved restlessly from one deck to another, but always a man followed and kept watch of him, as Captain O’Shea had ordered. The ship’s company, most of them off duty and wearied with the stress and hardships of the voyage, gathered under an awning stretched between the deck-houses and talked in low tones. This melancholy, empty landscape had a quality curiously depressing. With the falling tide the swamps and the muddy banks were laid bare and the air became foul and heavy with the smell of decayed vegetation, of ooze, of dead fish. The ebb and flow of salt-water failed to cleanse and sweeten these sluggish streams and stagnant lagoons and abandoned canals.
The men who had followed Captain O’Shea to this place were no longer so many vagabonds and failures struggling for survival. They had been welded together, in a way. They were an organization with something likeesprit de corpsand could be depended on to act as a unit. Such a feeling as this brings to life dead self-respect and shattered confidence. They knew not at all what the morrow might bring forth, but every one of them was anxious to play the man, to stand the test, to redeem himself in his own sight, to justify Captain O’Shea’s faith in him.
It was not a night to invite sleep. The adventurers felt the immense loneliness of this loathsome anchorage. It was unlike the populous China which they had hitherto known. One might believe, with the natives, that ghosts and demons had power to curse and blast a region in which some violation of thefung-shui, or sacred rites of wind and water, had angered the supernatural influences. The breeze died to a dead calm. The lifeless air reeked with the stenches from the mouth of the River of Ten Thousand Evil Smells.
It was drawing toward midnight when Mr. Kittridge came on deck and said to Captain O’Shea, who was sitting with a group of his men:
“I shall have to start the pumps, sir. The vessel is leakin’ much worse than when I first reported it.”
“Um-m, I was hoping we could lay her on a beach after we have finished our business up the river and calk her plates,” replied the master of theWhangHo. “Is she making water faster than you can handle it, Mr. Kittridge?”
“She acts to me as if a plate dropped clean out of her a few minutes ago, sir. The pumps may help, but I have a notion that the whole rotten, blankety river is runnin’ into her.”
Captain O’Shea jumped below and was promptly convinced that the gloomy diagnosis of the chief engineer had a large basis of fact. The water was fairly rushing into the holds and gurgling over the ballast. Likely enough, the battering passage in from sea had sheared and wrenched away enough rusty rivets to weaken the junction of two or more plates, and they had been unable any longer to withstand the pressure. It really made no difference whether or not this theory was the correct one. The fact was that the venerableWhang Hohad suddenly decided to lay her bones in the mud with six fathoms of water above her keel. Mr. Kittridge pensively caressed his gray whiskers and remarked with a sigh:
“I mentioned the pumps from force of habit. It’s really ridiculous to stay below any longer, Captain. We gave the bloody old tub more than she could stand, and she’s peacefully chucked it up. She’s sinkin’ very quiet and decent, I’ll say that for her.”
“’Tis time we said good-by to her,” quoth O’Shea. “Draw your fires, if you can, Mr. Kittridge, and I will get the boats ready.”
“I do seem to find trouble wherever I go,” sadly murmured the chief engineer.
The men on deck took the news with no greatshow of excitement. This was the kind of voyage which one could not reasonably expect to be commonplace. To have to escape from a sinking steamer was an episode, not a disaster. In few words, Captain O’Shea assured them that he had no intention of letting this uncomfortable little happening interfere with the business for which he had employed them. The insurance underwriters would be out of pocket, but who cared a rap for them, anyhow? Thereupon he issued orders, swiftly, intelligently, with masterful vehemence. The two boats which appeared most serviceable were swung outboard and held ready to launch. They would hold a dozen men each without crowding. Water-kegs were filled, the galley and store-room ransacked for tins of meat and biscuit, bags of potatoes and rice. The fire-arms and cutlasses were served out and the cases of ammunition divided between the two boats. Meanwhile theWhang Hocontinued to sink with a certain dignity and decorum. One could find nothing dramatic in this shipwreck. Every one moved with haste, but there was no outcry.
Only one mischance marred the exodus from theWhang Ho. All hands were absorbed, and quite naturally, in delaying their departure as little as possible. Delay meant something worse than wet feet. In fact, the main deck was almost level with the water when the boats were ready to shove clear. For once theWhang Hohad moved rapidly, although in a lamentable direction. With so much to do in so short a time, it was not extraordinary that thevigilant espionage which surrounded Charley Tong Sin should be relaxed, not to say forgotten, for a moment. Even Captain O’Shea neglected to keep an eye on him, the business of abandoning ship on a dark night at excessively short notice being calculated to tax the resources of the most capable commander.
The comprador took advantage of these distractions to erase himself from the scene. The boats were held against the side of the steamer, while the captain took tally of the men in them, scrambling from one boat to the other with a globe lantern swinging in his fist. Charley Tong Sin was indubitably missing. O’Shea leaped on board the moribundWhang Ho, which was now sobbing and gurgling tremendously, and made a flying search of the cabins and state-rooms. It was obvious that this elusive young Chinese had not vanished below decks, where by now nothing but a fish could exist. And unless Captain Michael O’Shea wished to join the fishes, it was time for him to go.
Chagrined and anxious, he returned to his boat, and the men frantically plied oars. A moment or two later theWhang Howent under with very little fuss, meeting her end with the calm of a Chinese philosopher. The boats rocked in the waves that rolled away from the place where she had been, and the rays of the lanterns revealed many large and greasy bubbles.
Captain O’Shea wasted no time in sentimental regrets. TheWhang Howas a dead issue. Whatvitally concerned him was the whereabouts of that valuable passenger, Charley Tong Sin. It was absurd to suppose that he had fallen overboard and given up the ghost. A rascal of his kidney had as many lives as a cat. It was much more plausible to surmise that he had unostentatiously laid hold of a life-belt, slipped over the stern, and made for the nearest shore. The boats moved to and fro, looking for him, but the darkness, misty and opaque, made it hopeless to discover the head of a swimmer who by this time might have left the water and concealed himself in the marsh.
“I misdoubt that me policy was sound,” said Captain O’Shea to Mr. Kittridge. “Maybe I ought to have shot him, anyhow.”
“It would ha’ been a good job,” grunted the chief engineer. “And now he’ll streak it for this village of Wang-Li-Fu and give an alarm.”
“Precisely that. But unless he can pick up a sampan or a fishing-boat he will make slow headway flounderin’ through the swamps and swimming the creeks. ’Tis up to us to beat him to it.”
Mr. Parkinson, who was in command of the other boat, was ordered to steer alongside for consultation. It was promptly agreed that the party should first find the mouth of the River of Ten Thousand Evil Smells and then move up-stream without delay. It would be slow and blundering navigation, but if three or four miles could be traversed before daylight they might tie up to the bank and reconnoitre within striking distance of their goal.
“I do not know what kind of a mess we will hop into,” O’Shea told them before the boats separated. “We may have to fight our way, thanks to that slippery divil of a comprador, and I am not asking ye to go anywhere that I will not go meself. Some of you are not trained to use weapons, but if ye will cut loose and blaze away and not think too much about your own skins, we can make it uncomfortable for a slather of Chinese. There is plenty of ammunition, so don’t scrimp yourselves.”
The boats slid slowly into the entrance of the wide, sluggish stream. The lanterns were extinguished. The only sound was the cadenced thump of the thole-pins. If any of the men felt the prickly chill of cowardice, they kept it to themselves. Now and then the keels furrowed the mud, and when the boats stranded hard and fast, the crews waded overboard and shoved them ahead. Thus the little flotilla progressed until dawn flushed the eastern sky and the vapors, streaming upward from the marshes, curled and drifted like filmy clouds. Higher ground and the green, checkered squares of tilled fields were discernible a short distance beyond.
The boats turned into the mouth of a tiny creek where the tall rushes curtained them from observation. This was a favorable halting place, and a cold breakfast was hastily eaten. O’Shea had a poor opinion of fighting on an empty stomach. He addressed himself with marked deference to a very neatly dressed man with iron-gray hair who had said little during the voyage. His face was haggardand his eyes were tired with weariness of living.
“You have seen service, sir, and ye have led drilled men,” said O’Shea. “The cards are dealt, but from now on you can play them better than I. I will be obliged to ye for advice.”
The cashiered officer looked grateful. This kind of recognition had power to move him. With a diffident manner, as if his professional opinion had long since ceased to interest any one, he replied:
“Most Chinese villages are walled. There will be at least one gate facing the river and two or three on the inland side. It is often awkward to make a landing under fire from boats. I suggest we divide our force. If you approve, Captain, I will take ten of the most active men and disembark here. We can fetch a wide circuit of the town, and it will not be difficult to make our way across the rice fields and ditches. You can put the rest of them in one boat and row up in front of the town, waiting in the stream until we are in a position to make a rush. Then we will drive home a simultaneous attack in front and rear.”
“Napoleon could not beat it,” heartily exclaimed O’Shea. “And if ye shoot fast enough and kick up a terrible racket, they will think ye are an army. What will the signal be?”
“Three rifle shots.”
“Ay, ay, Mr. Bannister. ’Tis the sensible plan that ye take command of the army while I hoist therear-admiral’s pennant over the navy. We have no reserves, but many a famous victory would have been missing from history if the lads that won them had waited for the reserves to come up.”
The chosen ten forsook the boats and tramped off behind their soldierly leader. A few minutes later the expedition of Captain O’Shea got under way, his boat hugging the muddy shore and dodging behind its ragged indentations. It was not long before a wide curve of the river disclosed to view the tiled roofs, the crumbling brick wall, and the towered gate-ways of a village. In front of it were several rickety wharfs, or stagings, built of bamboo poles lashed together. At the outer end of one of these lay a two-masted junk, her hawse-holes painted to resemble two huge eyes. The tide had begun to ebb, and the junk was already heeled so that her deck sloped toward the river. This craft appeared to be deserted. No pigtailed heads bobbed behind the immensely heavy bulwarks. If the army officer had been a Napoleon, Captain O’Shea showed himself a Nelson.
“Pull like blazes for the junk yonder,” he shouted to his men. “We will pile aboard her and take cover.”
The junk was directly in front of the gate-way in the village wall, and perhaps a hundred yards distant from it. The intervening space was beach, a miry roadway, and a disorderly row of shanties made of drift-wood, with a few boats hauled out for repairs. The heavy timbers of the junk made her a nauticalfortress, and the high sides would be difficult of direct assault.
The men swung lustily at the oars, and the boat shot out into the open river. O’Shea steered wide of the village until he could turn and make directly for the junk. It was an admirable bit of strategy, but wholly wasted on this sleepy, shabby Chinese village. There was never a sign of a hostile demonstration. As an anticlimax the thing was absurd. A crowd of men, women, and children streamed out through the gate in the wall and stared with much excited chatter at the foreign invaders. Apparently their behavior meant no more than a harmless curiosity. Several garrulous old gentlemen squatted upon fragments of timber and pulled at their bamboo pipes while they discussed the singular visitation with the oracular demeanor of so many owls.
The bold O’Shea grinned sheepishly. His sensations were those of a man who beheld a heroic enterprise suddenly turned into low comedy. He glanced at the amused faces of his followers and said:
“’Tis not what ye might call a desperate resistance. Let us promenade ashore and look the town over.”
They quitted their fortress and moved along the narrow, swaying staging of bamboo, their rifles ready for use in the event of an ambuscade. The Chinese crowd promptly retreated in noisy confusion. O’Shea ordered a halt. After some delay, three signal shots came down the wind from Major Bannister’s force. He was about to attack the village from the landwardside. Now the shopkeepers and coolies scuttled madly away from O’Shea’s party to seek shelter within the walls and discover what all this extraordinary excitement could mean.
Behind them tramped the naval brigade into streets from which the inhabitants were vanishing as rapidly as possible. Somewhere near the centre of the town O’Shea and Major Bannister joined forces. This pair of valiant leaders eyed each other with mutually puzzled chagrin.
“We just walked in without the slightest trouble,” confessed the army man. “What do you make of it?”
“I had the same experience,” observed O’Shea. “And I do not know what to make of it at all. ’Twas me firm conviction that we were prancin’ into a hornet’s nest. The information all pointed that way. I would call it a funny kind of a surprise party.”
“The villagers have no intention of making it unpleasant for us. They have been giving my men eggs and melons and chickens, to keep us good-natured, I presume.”
“Well, we will find quarters and fetch our grub from the junk, and I will buy the drinks, if ye can locate them, for the joke seems to be on me.”
They found the village tavern, consisting of several detached buildings set in a large court-yard. The agitated landlord kow-towed himself almost black in the face, and in trembling accents expressed his desire to bestow all his goods upon the warlikeforeigners if only his miserable life might be spared. He summarily ejected a few native guests of low degree, who fled without delaying to argue the matter. The invaders set the tavern coolies to sweeping and scrubbing the filthy buildings and took charge of the kitchen with its row of earthen fire-pots. There was no lack of room for men to sleep three and four in a row upon thek’angs, or brick platforms used for the purpose, and the ragged quilts were hung outside to air. In short, the tavern was transformed into a camp which had no serious discomforts.
Having taken care of his men, Captain O’Shea found leisure to ponder over the situation, a process which left him with a headache. He rambled unmolested from one end of the village to the other, searching for clues that might link themselves with the Painted Joss and the tragedy of Bill Maguire. There were two small, dilapidated temples, one of them inhabited by a few Buddhist priests in yellow robes. O’Shea was permitted to enter them and explore to his heart’s content. They were nothing more than village shrines, however, in which the perfunctory rites were held and offerings made—such places as might have been seen in a thousand Chinese towns. Nor did the village itself, excepting for an air of general decay, differ from the hamlets of a dozen provinces.
“I have a harrowing suspicion that Charley Tong Sin made a monkey of me,” ruefully sighed O’Shea, “or maybe I have been all wrong from the start. The Chinese proposition has too many twists in it for a white man to fathom.”
As a person of considerable confidence in his ability to master difficulties, his self-esteem had been dealt a hard blow. His imagination had pictured a large, stirring climax of his pilgrimage, and here he was all adrift in a wretched little village of no consequence whatever, the last place in the world to find the headquarters of a secret organization so mysteriously powerful as to cast its sinister shadow throughout China, and even across the seas. And yet the evidence had been by no means vague and misleading. Beginning with the fragmentary revelations of the demented sailor, coming next to the disclosures of poor McDougal’s diary, he had been led straight to the town of Wang-Li-Fu, on the River of Ten Thousand Evil Smells. He had felt that the hand of destiny was guiding him.
Returning to the tavern yard O’Shea found his men cheerfully making friends of the villagers and accepting the situation with the ready adaptability of true soldiers of fortune. They looked to the leader for orders, but he had none to give them. He had been placed in the ridiculous position of providing wages and rations for a perfectly superfluous expeditionary force.
“Just what did you expect to turn up in this pigsty of a settlement?” gloomily inquired Mr. Kittridge, who seemed disappointed that he had not broken a few heads. “Whatever it was, it fell flat.”
“It did that,” frankly admitted O’Shea. “’Tis a painful subject, Mr. Kittridge, and we will not discuss it now. But I am not done with the riddle of Wang-Li-Fu.”
Three days passed, and singly and in squads the invaders ransacked the village and its suburbs, poking into shops, alleys, dwellings, and court-yards and taking stock of the inmates thereof. That the people were very poor and very industrious was all that one could say of them. And they were no more to be suspected of plotting deeds of violence than so many rabbits. Doggedly persistent, unwilling to confess himself beaten, O’Shea shifted his quest to the open country for miles outside of Wang-Li-Fu. It was a region of green fields gridironed with ditches and rutted paths, and dotted with toilers in blue cotton blouses and straw hats, who tilled their crops from dawn to dark.
It was obviously useless to extend the investigation any considerable distance away from this region. If the secret was not to be unearthed in the vicinity of Wang-Li-Fu, then his conclusions had been all wrong. The villagers assured him that this was, in truth, none other than Wang-Li-Fu, and the baffled, perplexed O’Shea could not let go of the opinion that the goal was somewhere near at hand. Otherwise, why all the elaborate stratagems in Shanghai to thwart his voyage to the River of Ten Thousand Evil Smells?
He had imagined himself attacking a stronghold of some sort, a headquarters of desperate criminals who must be wiped out. But if that slippery comprador Charley Tong Sin had carried a warning to the men of the Painted Joss, he must have fled elsewhere than to this commonplace, harmless village.At any rate, it seemed absurd to tarry much longer in Wang-Li-Fu with a force of armed retainers.
At the end of a fortnight, O’Shea was of the opinion that his loyal legion had better seek to mend its fortunes in some other quarter. He was ashamed to look them in the face. The fiasco cut him to the quick. He had been as mad as poor Bill Maguire. In future he would stick to his trade as a shipmaster.
Meanwhile, the malarial poison of the marshes found its way into his blood. He failed to realize that he was ill, and paid no attention to the little flashes of fever that came by night and the creeping, chilly feeling that troubled him in the morning.
There came a day when he was unable to rise from the brick sleeping-platform. The fever increased, suddenly, violently. It caught him unprepared. His plan of retreat had not been announced, and now he was incapable of leadership. His mind alternated between delirium and stupor. When he talked it was of many inconsequential things. One might have said that the evil spirit of the Painted Joss had laid its spell of misfortune upon him. In the court-yard of the tavern his lieutenants held a conference.
“Can anybody make head or tail of this infernal situation?” gloomily inquired Mr. Kittridge. “What in hades are we going to do about it?”
“Try to pull Captain O’Shea through this fever before we think of anything else,” stoutly affirmed Mr. Parkinson. “We jammed into this crazy voyage with our eyes shut. With all of us it was anythingto get clear of Shanghai. And it’s useless business to sit and growl about it as hard luck. What do you say, Major Bannister?”
The army man smiled at sight of their discouraged countenances and quietly answered:
“What else can we chaps expect but hard luck? Really, I should be surprised to find anything else. I can tell you one thing, gentlemen. I have campaigned in the tropics, and I know something about this swamp fever. We had best get out of here and take Captain O’Shea with us. If we don’t, he will die as sure as sunrise, and the rest of us will be down with it before long. It caught him first because he was fagged with worry.”
“We agree with you there,” said Mr. Parkinson. “But we seem to have overlooked a line of retreat. That was the Irish of it, I suppose. If we go down river in our two boats we’ll have to work ’em out to sea over those nasty shoals and then run the chance of being picked up adrift. We might get away with it, but it would kill a man as sick as O’Shea.”
“Why not go up-river?” suggested Major Bannister. “By means of a few words of Chinese and a great many gestures I have extracted from the village head-men the information that there is a European mission station about a hundred and fifty miles northwest of here. We can make part of the journey by boat and then hike overland. With a litter and coolies to carry it, we may be able to take Captain O’Shea through alive. It’s better than letting him die in this pest-hole.”
“That’s the most sensible speech I’ve heard since we signed on,” grunted Mr. Kittridge. “And you can pull out of this rotten Wang-Li-Fu not a minute too soon to please me.”
The village head-men were summoned, and these venerable worthies declared themselves anxious to aid the sick leader of the foreign soldiers. He had played with their children, paid the shopkeepers their prices without dispute, and sat with the old men in the tea-houses. Nor had his armed force committed any abuses, although they held the village at their mercy. It was wisdom to try to carry Captain O’Shea to his own people. The village would gladly furnish a guide and plenty of coolies, a covered litter, and a small house-boat in which the sick man could be made comfortable.
The evacuation of Wang-Li-Fu was a dismal business. The adventurers were oppressed by a sense of failure and discouragement. Their enterprise had fizzled out like a dampened match. This final act was inglorious. Their plight was worse than when they had been stranded as beach-combers in Shanghai. They carried Captain O’Shea to a sampan, or flat-bottomed boat, with a tiny cabin of bamboo and matting, which could be towed against the sluggish current of the river. The men disposed themselves in the two boats saved from theWhang Hosteamer, and a squad of half-naked coolies strung themselves along a towing-rope to help track the sampan up-stream.
The sick man lay stretched upon his quilts and showed little interest in the slow progress of the flotilla.Between spells of heavy drowsiness he watched the slimy shore and fringing marsh slide past. Through the first day the wind was cool and the air bright, and the boats trailed up-river until after nightfall before they were pulled into the bank to moor. As the part of caution, no fires were made and conversation was hushed. The foreigners had an uncomfortable suspicion that this might be hostile territory, although they had discovered nothing to warrant the conjecture. But O’Shea had been babbling about the Painted Joss while flighty with fever, and Charley Tong Sin was still unaccounted for.
Between midnight and morning the sick man came out of his uneasy dreams. As it seemed to him, he was clear-headed, his senses alert, his judgment normal. Just why he should be cooped up in this native boat was a bit difficult to comprehend, but why try to understand it? There was only one problem of real importance. And now was the time to solve it. O’Shea laughed to think what a stupid, blundering fool he had been to recruit an armed expedition and come clattering into this corner of China with so much fuss and noise.
If a man wanted to find the Painted Joss, all he had to do was listen to the friendly, familiar voices that whispered in his ears. O’Shea could hear them now. He accepted them as a matter of course. His eyes were very bright as he pulled on his shoes and fumbled for the revolver in its holster under the pillow. Curiously enough, he was no longer consciousof great physical weakness. It was tremendously urgent that he should go to find the Painted Joss without a moment’s delay. His men would not understand if he should tell them about the friendly voices that were offering to show him the way. They might try to restrain him. He must leave the boat quietly, unobserved.
Crawling from beneath the matting curtain, he gained the river bank. His knees were exceedingly shaky and his hands trembled uncertainly, but he was confident that he had found the trail of the Painted Joss and that his vigor would soon return. Charley Tong Sin outwit him? Nonsense! O’Shea would have been startled beyond measure to know that he was wandering off in delirium. He would have taken a shot at any one rash enough to tell him so.
Undetected he moved along the shore, silent as a red Indian, and was presently lost in the darkness. It was muddy walking, and he turned into the tall marsh grass, where a carpet of dead vegetation made firmer footing. Frequently he was compelled to halt and regain his labored breath, but his purpose was unwavering. The voices drove him on. He had no sense of fear. After some time his erratic progress led him back to the river. There he stumbled over a log and sat down to wait for daybreak, which had begun to flush the sky.
His head throbbed as though hammers were pounding it and waves of blurring dizziness troubled him. What was more disquieting, the guiding voices hadceased to talk to him. He felt crushing disappointment and sadness. His eyes filled with tears.
Dawn found him seated dejectedly with his back propped against the log, his head drooping, while he stared at the muddy river. Here he would wait on the chance that his friends might find him. As the day brightened, his aimless vision was caught by something which powerfully awakened his weary, befogged perceptions. It acted as a stimulant of tremendous force. Sitting bolt upright he gazed at a footprint, cleanly outlined, which had become sun-dried and hardened in a stratum of clay.
It had been made by a leather sole and heel. The outline was pointed and narrow. Into O’Shea’s quickened memory there flashed the picture of Charley Tong Sin stretched upon the cabin floor of theWhang Hosteamer, his patent-leather shoes waving gently as he went to sleep under the soporific influence of a knock-out blow. He felt absolutely certain that this particular print had been left by the fashionable footgear of the vanished comprador. The voices had guided him aright. It was here that Charley Tong Sin had come ashore after making his way up the River of Ten Thousand Evil Smells in some kind of a native boat.
There was one chance in a million that O’Shea should have halted to wait in this precise spot where his eyes might see the thing. He dragged himself to his feet and scanned the melancholy landscape. There were no villages in sight; only the marsh and fields and a vast mound of débris to mark the placewhere once had stood a city. Even the walls surrounding it had been levelled. It was scarcely more than a wide-spread excrescence of broken brick and tiling partly overgrown with vegetation. The landscape could have held no more desolate reminder of the wreckage left in the wake of the Tai Ping rebels.
It was plausible to surmise that this was the real Wang-Li-Fu, the city which O’Shea had set out to find. The squalid village much lower down the river might have been founded by refugees who gave the same name to their new abode. And the villagers had been too ignorant to explain the blunder. To them there was only one Wang-Li-Fu. How Charley Tong Sin must have laughed at leaving O’Shea and his men to waste themselves in a chase that led nowhere.
It was a pallid, unshaven, tottering ghost of Captain Michael O’Shea that mustered strength to walk very slowly in the direction of the ruined city. Once he paused and became irresolute, but a little way beyond he found the imprint of a narrow shoe of European workmanship on the soft bank of a ditch. His stumbling steps led him, as by an unerring divination, toward the highest part of the great mound of débris where tall trees grew from the crumbling masonry. His painful advance became less difficult when he found a path from which the obstructions had been removed.
Presently he stood looking across a cleared space in the midst of the ruins, invisible from river or highway. In it were several small buildings and onemuch larger. The timbers set into its walls were carved and gilded, the curving roof of dull red tile. There was no living thing in sight. This isolated community was so situated that it was wholly concealed from strangers, and the natives of the region were apt to shun the blasted city as haunted by demons. No watchers were posted to guard against intrusion.
O’Shea crossed the open space and made for the large building, which had the aspect of a temple. Unhesitatingly he approached the massive wooden doors and found them ajar. He walked like a man in a trance, muttering to himself. Passing within, he entered a sort of anteroom partitioned by means of screens wonderfully embroidered. The stone pavement rang to the tread of his heels. The place echoed with emptiness. He pressed on and came into a room of greater extent. Its corners were lost in shadow. Rows of pillars supported the dusky rafters upon which gilded dragons seemed to writhe. The windows were small and set close to the roof and the light of early morning had not dispelled the gloom.
In the centre of the floor was an altar. Behind it towered an image of Buddha, and yet it was unlike the images of the bland and contemplative Buddha commonly to be found in the temples of the East. It was a monstrous thing. Only an artist with an inspiration from the devil could have so handled tools as to make those wooden features seem to lust after all abominable wickedness. The color of thisseated statue was crimson. Amid the shadows it glowed like fire or blood. On the breast, above the folded arms, stood out in broad, black strokes a Chinese symbol or character which O’Shea recognized with a sensation of creeping repugnance.
“The Painted Joss!” he gasped.
His attention was so strongly caught and held by this malevolent image that for the moment he had eyes for nothing else. Presently, however, he became aware that another figure confronted him, a living presence. It was a man sitting in a massive chair of teak-wood, by the side of the Buddha. The bulk of him was enormous. He was both fat and mighty of frame, and not even the towering amplitude of the image could dwarf his proportions and belittle the impression he conveyed. His face was broad and heavy-jowled, the mouth sensual and cruel. With folded arms he sat and gazed at the foreign intruder. This unflinching, scornful immobility had a certain distinction. He believed that he must instantly die at the hands of this European with the white, savage face and the blazing eyes who covered him with a revolver. It was futile to cry out and summon help. As is customary with Chinese in positions of authority, this high-priest of iniquity had gone to the temple to have audience with his servitors very early in the morning. They had not yet joined him and O’Shea was quick to read his own advantage.
It was right and just that he should slay this huge man in the crimson robe who ruled the temple ofthe Painted Joss. He had come ten thousand miles to be judge and executioner. He was ready to kill and be killed in his turn. But the revolver was strangely heavy and it wavered so that he was unable to hold it at arm’s length. A haze bothered his vision and he could not brush it from his eyes. Something was the matter with his knees. They were giving way. With an incoherent exclamation, O’Shea fell unconscious upon the stone flagging and the revolver clattered from his limp hand. He had paid the price of exertion beyond his strength.
When his senses returned there was in his mind only the dimmest recollection of how he came to be in this dreadful place. The vagaries of fever no longer possessed him. Clear-headed but wretchedly weak and nerveless, he gazed about him and discovered that he was alone in the unholy temple. The shadows were not so heavy on the pillars, the gilded rafters, and the marble altar. The crimson image of the seated Buddha loomed flamboyant and portentous and the Chinese symbol painted on its breast was boldly outlined.
There was no way of escape. The building was a most effectual prison. His revolver had been taken from him. He could not even fight and die like a man. The fact was that this desperate extremity lacked the proper sense of reality. It was so contrary to reason and he had such shadowy, confused ideas of what had preceded, that this was more like nightmare or delirium. And it seemed impossible that he should not presently find himself awake.
What most tenaciously persisted in his memory was the image of the huge man in the teak-wood chair. He was a vision which could not be denied. Such a one as he had power to sway the wills of others to his desires, to create and direct great enterprises and send his influence afar, but never for good. If he ordered murder done in distant places his secret edicts would be obeyed, nor would his agent dare to thwart him. If there was such an organization as O’Shea had assumed, then he had stood face to face with the dominant personality, the compelling force from which radiated infernal activities.
“I saw him, whether I am meself or somebody else,” the prisoner muttered with a groan. “And he will come back and the brand will be chopped into me, same as was done to poor Bill Maguire. ’Tis a tough finish, if all this is really true. My God, I wish I knew what had happened to me. Yesterday I was going up-river with me men, andnow——”
He struggled to his feet. A supreme effort of will conquered physical weakness. A man condemned to die is capable of forgetting bodily ills. Just then a young man appeared from the direction of the door-way. He wore native garments, but O’Shea recognized him. It was Charley Tong Sin, whose smile was unpleasant. In his hand was O’Shea’s revolver, which he was careful to hold ready for use. The jaunty, affable manner of the comprador had returned. He appeared very well satisfied with himself as he exclaimed, by way of greeting.
“It is an unexpected pleasure, you bet, Captain O’Shea. I have waited till you were gone from Wang-Li-Fu. It was reported that you were very sick and went up the river yesterday with your men. You decided to come and see us, to visit the Painted Joss? You wished to make some trouble?”
“’Tis the last day I will make trouble for any one, by the looks of things,” replied O’Shea. “You win, Charley.”
“You are a smart man,” grinned the other. “But you had too much curiosity. I am a good fellow. I will tell you what you want to know. You will not give it away. They are getting ready to cut your visit pretty short.”
There was the chatter of voices somewhere outside and the brazen mutter of a gong. O’Shea kept silence. He was not as resigned to his fate as Charley Tong Sin inferred. He was watching every motion of the gloating young man and his eyes measured the distance between them.
“You will feel better if you know,” tauntingly cried the Chinese. “You have seen the Painted Joss. You have seen a man sitting beside it, the great and terrible Chung himself, the ruler of the Pih-lien-Kiao, theSect of the Fatal Obligation.”
“Much obliged, Charley,” grimly interrupted O’Shea. “Tell me some more. I am sorry I could not have words with the terrible Chung. And the brand that ye chop into people, your trademark?”
“It is the mark that meansThe Dreadful Messengerof Chung. It is a favor to tell you, Captain O’Shea. No other foreigner, no Chinese except the servants of Chung, have heard it spoken. But you will not speak it anywhere.”
“There’s more that I want to know,” said O’Shea, “though precious little good the information will do me.”
“Ha! Why did you not have so much sense before and mind your own business?”
It was absurd to carry on such a dialogue as this, as O’Shea perceived, but Charley Tong Sin was enjoying this session with the rash shipmaster who had formerly held the upper hand. Before the victim could be subjected to further taunts he heard the massive doors opened and other sounds to indicate that bars were sliding into place to fasten them on the inside. The huge man in the crimson robe, the great and terrible Chung, lumbered into view and seated himself in the chair of teak-wood. Charley Tong Sin humbly bowed several times. The personage beckoned the twain nearer and spoke briefly. He desired to conduct a cross-examination of his own with the comprador as interpreter.
“He wishes to know why you have come to this place?” was the first question addressed to O’Shea.
“Because ye butchered a friend of mine, a red-headed sailor by the name of Jim Eldridge,” was the unflinching reply. “He told me about your dirty devilment as well as he could, and I saw what ye did to him.”
The huge man showed signs of consternation whenthis was conveyed to him. He uttered a bellowing interrogation.
“He is not alive? You have talked with his ghost?” shrilly demanded Charley Tong Sin.
“’Twas him that sent me here,” declared O’Shea. “Ye can impart it to the big ugly mug yonder that I have had visits from the ghost of the red-headed sailor that he killed and branded.”
With an excited, heedless gesture, Charley Tong Sin raised the revolver. He had been long accustomed to wearing European clothes, and the flowing sleeves of his Chinese outer garment impeded his motions. A fold of the silk fabric fell over the butt of the weapon, and he tried to brush it aside with his left hand. This other sleeve was caught and held for a moment by the sharp firing-pin of the cocked hammer.
This trifling mishap, gave O’Shea a desperate opportunity. With a flash of his normal agility he leaped across the intervening space. The comprador strove frantically to free the weapon, but only entangled it the more. The episode was closed before the crimson-robed personage could play a part. O’Shea’s shoulder rammed Charley Tong Sin and sent him sprawling, and the revolver was instantly wrested from his grasp.
“The doors are locked,” panted O’Shea, “and before your men break in, I will send the both of ye to hell. Sit where you are, ye terrible Chung. You overplayed your game, Charley.”
The comprador seemed to shrink within hisclothes. His mouth hung open and his face was ashen. He was eager to clutch at any straw which might give him the chance of life. Shrinking from the scowling presence in the chair, he began to talk a sing-song babble of words that tumbled over each other.
“I will help you get away alive if you do not kill me. Captain O’Shea, I will explain about Jim Eldridge; I will not lie to you. All the secrets I will tell you. There was a steamer, theTai Yan, and she came over the bar from the sea in a big storm, at the time of a flood. It was do this or go to the bottom because the engines had broke. A boat with sailors rowed up the river. They were foolish men who believed the stories that gold and silver treasure was hidden in the ruins of this old Wang-Li-Fu. And they found this temple, and they knew too much.
“All but two of the men were able to run quick to the river, but Eldridge and one named McDougal ran into this place, trying to hide. They ran into the temple before they were captured. There was a little building, but now it is ashes and much sticks of burnt wood. In that building those two men were locked to be killed next day. The red-headed man was a demon, I tell you. Walls could not hold him. In the night he set fire to the building, and it was a great blaze. But he was caught and punished.”
“Ye left him for dead, and he came to,” growled O’Shea. “And so McDougal got away!”
“I can tell you more secrets,” wailed Charley Tong Sin, but his services as an informer were suddenly cut short. The huge man in the chair had raised his voice in a tremendous call for help to his followers without. Otherwise he had sat composed, glaring at O’Shea. It was his hand that slew Charley Tong Sin as a traitor. He was on his feet, the heavy chair raised aloft. He swung it with amazing ease. It was no longer a massive article of furniture, but a missile in the hands of a man of gigantic strength. His movements were not clumsy.
The chair flew through the air. O’Shea dodged, but Charley Tong Sin flung up his arms, taken unawares. The impact would have brained an ox. The whirling mass of teak smote the terrified comprador on the head and chest and he crumpled to the pavement. He was as dead as though he had been caught beneath the hammer of a pile-driver. The tableau was an extraordinary one. O’Shea stood staring at the broken body of the young Chinese. The man in the crimson robe stirred not from his tracks. Implacable, unafraid, he had executed the last sentence ofThe Sect of the Fatal Obligation.
The people outside were clamoring at the doors, and O’Shea heard the thud and crash of some kind of an improvised battering-ram. He sighed and found the thought of death at their hands very bitter. But he would not go alone. He faced the great and terrible Chung and slowly raised the revolver.
The arch-assassin bade him wait with a gestureso imperious, so mandatory, that O’Shea hesitated. The bearing of the man held some large significance. His dark, evil countenance expressed rather sadness than wrath. He slid a hand into the folds of his robe and raised the hand to his mouth. Whatever it was that he swallowed wrought its work with swift and deadly virulence. Swaying like a tree about to fall, he strode to the marble altar and fell across it with his head buried in his arms. In this posture he died, in front of the image of the glowing Buddha, whose graven lineaments seemed to express the unholy ambitions and emotions of his own soul.
O’Shea managed to walk to a corner of the temple and slumped down upon a marble bench where the Painted Joss cast its deepest shadow. His strength had ebbed again. Listlessly, almost inattentive, he heard the assault upon the doors renewed and the splintering of plank. When the Chinese mob came tumbling in he could try to shoot straight and hit a few of them, and then they would close in on him. It was the end of the game.
A few minutes and the servitors of Chung came jostling and shouting through the anteroom. Then they halted abruptly. Their noise was hushed. The light that fell from the windows near the roof showed them the lifeless figure in the crimson robe, doubled across the marble altar. In the foreground lay the battered body of Charley Tong Sin, but they had eyes only for the tragedy of the altar. They stood dumfounded, like men in the presence of something incredible.
At length the boldest shuffled forward. The others followed timidly. They appeared terrified in the extreme. It was as though they had believed their master to be invulnerable. And he was dead. Possibly they conjectured that he had been slain by an agency more than mortal. The group of Chinese clustered about the altar, whispering, regarding the body of Chung. Apparently they had not bethought themselves of the foreigner who was held a prisoner in the temple.
O’Shea rose in his shadowy corner and moved wearily past the Painted Joss. It was better to have the thing finished. He came upon the Chinese like an apparition. Their wits were so fuddled that the sight of him had the effect of another shock. If he had been powerful enough to slay the mighty Chung, then the demons were his allies. Perceiving their dazed condition, he forebore to shoot, and advanced abreast of the altar. The path to the door-way was clear, but he had not the strength to make a run for it. The hope of life, miraculously restored to him, was in the possibility that they might stand and gaze at him a little longer.
He had walked a half-dozen steps farther when one of the crowd yelled. The spell was broken. They raced after him like wolves. He turned and steadied himself and pulled trigger until the revolver was empty. The onset was checked and thrown into bloody confusion. O’Shea had summarily convinced them that whether or not the demons were in league with him, the devil was in this ready weapon of his.
They were no longer massed between him and the exit, and for the moment the advantage undeniably belonged to this mysterious, devastating foreigner.
He stumbled over the broken timbers of the doors and was in the blessed daylight, the temple behind him. He would be overtaken ere he could flee the ruined city, but he reloaded the revolver as he followed the path at a staggering trot. The mob poured out of the temple, yelping in high-keyed chorus. As a foot-racer the hapless Captain Michael O’Shea was in excessively poor condition. In fact, it promised to be the easiest kind of a matter to overtake him and leisurely pelt him to death with bricks as soon as he should have expended his ammunition.
He swerved from the rough path and crawled to the top of a low ridge of débris. Standing erect for a moment, he pitched forward and fell against a bit of wall. His figure had been outlined against the sky, and it was discerned in a fleeting glimpse by a scattered band of men in khaki and linen clothes who were tramping the marsh. They raised a shout and rushed toward the ruined city, converging until the force was mobilized within a short distance of the prostrate O’Shea.
The Chinese mob, pursuing full-tilt, found itself confronting a score and more of rifles which enthusiastically opened fire until the air hummed with bullets. There was a hasty, unanimous retreat of the followers of Chung to the temple and the adjacent buildings. Major Bannister halted to bend over O’Shea and say:
“We thought you were drowned or bogged in the marsh. What sort of a rumpus is this?”
“The Painted Joss,” murmured O’Shea. “I found it. Don’t bother with me. Go to it and clean out the place.”
The adventurers, at last earning their wages, proceeded to make things most unpleasant for the household of Chung. The resistance was brief, and those who were not penned within the temple fled in panic and sought cover in the marsh. They were taken by surprise, for the community had found the visit of Captain O’Shea sufficient to engage its attention. To him returned Major Bannister, hot and dusty, his cheek bleeding from the cut of a Chinese sword, and smilingly announced:
“Bully good fun while it lasted. What shall I do with the devils we cornered? Take them out and shoot them?”
“No. The boss of the works is dead. And I have a notion thatThe Sect of the Fatal Obligationdied with him. Lug me to the temple, if ye please. I’m all in, but ’tis my wish to see the whole wicked business go up in smoke.”
Before the torch was applied, that experienced man of war, Major Bannister, suggested that he had never seen a more promising place in which to poke about for loot. The search amounted to nothing until it occurred to the major to pull the Painted Joss from off its pedestal. After much heaving and prying the great image fell crashing to the pavement of the temple. Investigation revealed that underneath it wereseveral compartments accessible by means of cunningly fitted panels. Many papers or documents were found, wrapped in silk, and it was assumed that these were the records of the black deeds of Chung and his organized murderers. They were thrown aside, to be bundled together and taken to the boats.
It was the astute Major Bannister who smashed the bottom of one of these compartments with a rifle-butt and rammed his hand through the splintered hole. His groping fingers came in contact with closely packed rows of metal bars. In this manner was discovered the wealth of the temple, the blood-money stored and treasured by the infamous Chung, the price of many assassinations.
The gold was in stamped ingots, the silver in the lumps or “shoes” of the clumsy Chinese currency, and there were baskets of English sovereigns, Mexican dollars, and a variety of the coinages which pass over the counters of the money-changers of the Orient. Murder as a business had paid well.The Sect of the Fatal Obligationwas a flourishing concern. The loot belonged to those who found it. They were troubled by no scruples respecting the heirs of the departed Chung, nor did they consider it their duty to surrender the spoils to the Chinese government.
That night a conflagration reddened the ruins of the dead city of Wang-Li-Fu. It was the pyre of the Painted Joss. And when the little flotilla again moved up-river early next morning, a cloud of smoke rose lazily in the still air. Captain Michael O’Shea was still alive, which was rather surprising,for he had passed through experiences extremely disturbing to a sick man. There was tonic, however, in the fact that he had redeemed his failure, the expedition was no longer a sorry jest, and the account of Bill Maguire had been squared.
He slept with tremendous earnestness through a night and a day, and when he awoke it was to roar for food and to display the peevish temper of a genuine convalescent. When off duty his comrades became absorbed in the odd occupation of arranging piles of gold bars, silver “shoes,” and minted coins on the deck of the little house-boat, like children playing with blocks. They smiled a great deal and talked to themselves. Captain O’Shea looked on with an air of fatherly interest. After all, this happy family of his had made a prosperous voyage of it. Dreams of rehabilitation cheered these broken wanderers. They would go home. No more for them the misery, the heartache, the humiliation of the tropical tramp. Their riches might slip through their fingers, but they would make the most of golden opportunity. Like poor McDougal, they had thrown all regrets away.
“’Tis share and share alike,” said O’Shea, “but there is a red-headed sailor-man at anchor on a farm in Maine and I think he has a wife somewheres. With your permission we will deal him a share of the plunder. ’Twas poor Bill Maguire that gave us the tip.”
Unmindful of labor and hardship, this contented company slowly journeyed to the head of navigation on the River of Ten Thousand Evil Smells and thentrudged overland while O’Shea rode in a covered chair and sang old sea-chanties in a mellow voice. When, at length, the English mission station was reached it was stretching the truth to call him an invalid. The senior missionary, a gentle, very wise old man who had lived for thirty years in the back country, heard the tale told by these tanned, ragged travellers and was horrified that such things should have existed. But he had news for them, and it was thus that he supplied a missing fragment of the puzzle of Bill Maguire:
“The man came here and we took care of him. But there was no finding out how he had been so frightfully hurt. He was dumb and stupid. Later I met a native boatman who had found him on the river-bank near Wang-Li-Fu. Evidently he had been thrown into the water as an easy way to get rid of the body. Reviving a little, he splashed his way ashore or the tide left him there. He stayed with us until he was fairly strong and one morning he was gone.”
“And did he set the house afire?” inquired O’Shea.
“Why, there were two accidental fires in the compound at that time, but we laid it to the carelessness of the kitchen coolies,” was the innocent reply.
“It was Bill Maguire, all right,” declared O’Shea. “Now, will ye be good enough to look over the Chinese documents we found hid away under the Painted Joss?”
The missionary pored over the papers for several hours. And his painstaking translation revealed allthat O’Shea cared to know concerning the operations ofThe Sect of the Fatal Obligation. It had worked in secret to remove enemies for a price. If a merchant wished a business rival obliterated, if an official found others in his way, if it was advantageous to create a vacancy in some other quarter, the murder guild directed by the departed Chung would transact the affair, smoothly, without bungling. And those who knew and would have disclosed the secret were frightened into silence by the sight of the brand that was calledThe Dreadful Messenger of Chung.
“It will interest you to learn, as an American, Captain O’Shea,” said the missionary, “that among these documents is a list of persons proscribed or sentenced to be slain. The most conspicuous name I find to be that of the Chinese ambassador to the United States, His Excellency Hao Su Ting. It is probable that this terrible fate would have awaited him upon his return to his own country.”
“They potted his brother,” exclaimed O’Shea. “And he was sick with fear of the thing, for I talked it over with him meself. Well, he can thank Bill Maguire for letting him die in his bed when his proper time comes.”