Peter the Brazen: A Mystery Story of Modern China
the back of his brain foolish words were urging him: "You must get to
Ching-Fu. You must go on to Len Yang. Hurry! Hurry!"
He had no money. A box filled with perforated Szechwan coins now lay
at the bottom of the river in what was left of the _Hankow_.
Nevertheless, he hailed a sampan as though his pockets were weighted
down with lumps of purest silver.
The boat leaked in dozens of places. The paddle, scarred and battered,
clung to the stern by means of a rotting leather thong. As Peter
looked and hesitated, a long, imperative cry issued from behind him.
Possibly Miss Vost wanted him to return.
The coolie stipulated his price, and Peter stepped aboard without a
murmur, without looking around, either. The crossing was precarious.
They skirted the edge of more than one whirl; they were caught and
tossed about in waves as large as houses. Peter kept his eye on the
rotting thong, and marveled because it actually held.
Deposited on the edge of Ching-Fu's bund, he confessed his poverty, and
offered his shirt in payment. The shirt was of fine golden silk, woven
in the Chinan-Fu mills. For more than a year it had worn like iron,
and it had more than an even chance of continuing to do so.
Peter stripped off the shirt before a mob of squealing children, and
the coolie scrutinized it. He accepted it, and blessed Peter, and
Peter's virtuous mother, and called upon his green-eyed gods to make
the days of Peter long and filled with the rice of the land.
CHAPTER XVI
With the coming of noon Peter sat down under a stunted cembra pine tree
and contemplated the distant rocky blue ridge with a wistful and
discouraged air. He removed from his trouser-pocket two yellow loquats
and devoured them.
He was dreadfully hungry. His stomach fathered a dull, persistent
ache, which forced upon his attention the pains in his muscles and
bones. It was their way of complaining against the abuse he had heaped
upon them during the past twenty-four hours.
He was beginning to feel weak and dispirited. His was a constitution
that arose to emergencies in quick, battling trim; but when the
emergency was past, his vitality seemed to be drained.
He looked down the muddy brown road as he finished the second loquat
(which he had stolen from a roadside farm in passing) and estimated
that Ching-Fu was all of ten miles behind him. Walking through the
pasty blue mud in his bare feet, with the rain streaming through his
hair and down his beard and shoulders, had been tedious, trying.
Several times he had stopped, with his feet sinking in the clay, and
cursed the Yangtze with bitterness.
What had become of Bobbie MacLaurin? Had that noble soul been snatched
down by the River of Golden Sands?
He cursed the river anew, for Bobbie was a man after God's own heart.
Never had there lived such a generous, such a fine and brave comrade.
More than once the mule-kick which lurked behind those big, kind, red
fists had saved Peter from worse than black eyes.
He would never forget that night on the pier at Salina Cruz, when the
greaser had flashed out a knife, bent on carving a hole in Peter's
heart--and Bobbie had come up from behind and knocked the raving
Mexican a dozen feet off the pier into the limpid Pacific!
Those days were ended now. The adventures, the excitement, the
sorrows, and the fiery gladness were all well beyond recall.
Peter leaned back against the thorny trunk of the cembra pine, and
sniffed the odors of drenched earth, listened to the drip and patter of
the cold, gray rain, and gazed pessimistically at the blue crest of
rock which lifted its granite shoulders high into the mist miles away.
He stretched himself, groaned, and staggered on through the mire.
The valley was filled with the blue shades of dusk when he espied some
distance beyond him what was evidently a camp, a caravan at rest. The
setting sun managed at last to burrow its way through a rift of purple
before sinking down behind the granite range, to leave China to the
mercies of its long night.
These departing rays, striking through the purple crevice, and setting
its edges smolderingly aflame with red and gold, became a narrow,
dwindling spotlight, which brought out in black relief the figures of
men and mules, of drooping tents and curling wisps of cookfire smoke.
The sun was swallowed up, and the camp vanished.
Peter plunged on, with one leg dragging more reluctantly than the
other. But he had sensed the odor of cooking food in the quiet air.
A sentry whose head was adorned by a dark-red turban presented the
point of his rifle as Peter approached. He shouted, was joined by
others, both Chinese and Bengalis, and Peter, not adverse even to being
in the hands of enemies as long as food was imminent, was inducted into
the presence of a kingly personage, who sat upon a carved teak stool.
This creature, by all appearances a mandarin, of middle age, was garbed
in a stiff, dark satin gown, heavy with gold and jewels which flashed
brightly in the light of a camp-fire. His severe, dark face was long,
and stamped with intelligence of a high order. He wore a mustache
which drooped down to form a hair wisp on either side of his small,
firm mouth.
As Peter was whisked into his presence he placed his elbow with a slow,
deliberate motion upon his knee, and rested his rounded chin in his
palm, bestowing upon the mud-spattered newcomer a look that searched
into Peter's soul.
A single enormous diamond blazed upon the knuckle of his forefinger.
He put a question in a tongue that Peter did not understand. It was a
deep, resonant voice, with the mellow, rounded tones of certain
temple-bells, such a sound as is diffused long after the harsh stroke
of the wooden boom has subsided. Vibrant with authority, it was such a
voice as men obey, however much they may hate its owner. He repeated
the question in Mandarin, and again Peter indicated that that was not
his speech.
A different voice, yet quite as impelling as the other, caused Peter to
look up sharply. The mandarin smiled wisely, but not unkindly.
"The darkness deceived me," he said in English of a strange cast. "I
mistook you for a beggar. You are far from the river, my friend. The
bones of your steamer lie fathoms deep by now. Why are you so far from
Ching-Fu? You were stunned, perhaps?"
"I am only hungry," said Peter boldly. "My way lies into India. There
I have friends."
The mandarin studied him dubiously, and clapped his hands, the great
diamond cutting an oval of many colors. Coolies were given up by the
night, and ran to obey his guttural, musical commands. They returned
with steaming bowls of rice and meat, and a narrow lacquer table.
"Come and sit beside me. Your feet must be sore--bleeding. You may
call me Chang. So I am known to my British friends on the frontier. I
have been ill, a mountain fever, perhaps. In Ching-Fu. I had expected
medicine on the river steamer."
He snapped his fingers, and whispered to a coolie whose face was gaunt
and stolid in the flickering red glow of the fire.
So while Peter consumed the rice and stew, his bruised feet were bathed
in warm water, rubbed with a soothing ointment, and wrapped in a downy
bandage.
A blue liquor served in cups of shell silver completed the meal. The
aromatic syrup, which exhaled a perfume that was indescribably
oriental, sent an exhilarating fire through his veins. It seemed to
clarify his thoughts and vision, to oil his aching joints, and remove
their pain.
From the corner of his eye he detected the silken folds of the
mandarin's lofty tent, in the murky interior of which a fat, yellow
candle sputtered and dripped. When his eyes came back to the table,
the bowls and cups had been removed, and in their place was a
chess-board inlaid with ivory and pearl.
Inspired by the cordial, and the queerness of this setting, Peter felt
that he was the central figure of a dream. The pungent odor of remote
incense, the distant tinkling of a bell, the stamping and pawing of the
mules and the brooding figure in silk and gold at his side, took him
back across the ages to the days and nights of Scheherezade.
And the mandarin appeared to be hungry for Peter's companionship. Over
the chess-board, between plays, they discoursed lengthily upon the
greatness of the vast empire, once she should awake; upon the menace of
the wily Japanese; upon the lands across the mountains and beyond the
seas, and their peoples, of which Chang had read much but had never
visited.
Wood was heaped upon the fire, which flared up and leaped after the
crowding shadows.
It was the life that Peter dearly loved.
The mandarin's eyes glowed, and rested upon him for longer spaces. His
words and sentences came fewer and more reluctant.
In one of these pauses he seized Peter's hand. And Peter was forthwith
given the meagre details of a story, neither the beginning nor the end
of which he would ever know. It was the cross-section of a tale of
intrigue, of cold-blooded killings that chased the thrills up and down
his spine; a tale of loot, of gems that had vanished, of ingots and
kernels of gold that had leaked from iron-bound chests.
The mandarin uttered his woe in a quivering voice, shifting from a
Bengal patois to Mandarin, and again to reckless English.
Peter was given to understand that in Chang's camp was a traitor, a man
who eluded him, whose identity was shielded, a snake that could not be
stamped out unless the lives of every one of his attendants were taken!
In a composed voice Chang, the mandarin, was saying:
"You have walked far. You are weary. Another couch is in my tent.
You shall sleep there."
The candle was guttering low in its bronze socket when Peter awoke. A
cool breeze stirred the tent flaps. A queer feeling oozed in his veins.
He lay still, breathing regularly, searching the corners with eyes that
were brighter than a rat's. The low sleep-mutterings of the mandarin
continued from the couch across from him.
Slowly the tent flaps were being drawn back. Peter strained his eyes
until they ached. He was impelled to shout, to awaken his companion.
Yet the visitor might be bent on legitimate business. He would wait.
In the final analysis it was Peter's profound acquaintance with the
ways of the East which sealed his lips. In the heart of China one does
not strike at shadows, or shriek at sight of them. Not always.
At his side between the covers lay a strong, naked dagger. Why the
mandarin had provided him with the weapon he did not know.
A gray shadow entered the tent and backed noiselessly against the front
pole. Indeed, not a sound was created by his entrance, not even the
rustling whisper of bare feet on dry grass. It seemed very ominous,
mysterious, and ghostly.
The gray shadow floated into the candle-light, which waved and quivered
a little as the still air was disturbed. Peter was conscious that he
was being acutely examined. Not a muscle of his face twitched. He
continued to breathe regularly, with the heaviness of a man steeped in
sleep. Tentatively he permitted his lids to raise.
The intruder's back was toward him. He was bending with slow stealth
over the mandarin's face. What was the fellow doing?
Peter caught the glint of metal, or glass. At the same time a
powerful, sickening odor spread through the tent.
Peter groped for the naked dagger, bounded up from the couch with a
nervous cry, and burled the steel up to its costly jeweled hilt in the
foremost shoulder.
Without a sound the man in gray turned part way round, and a shudder
ran through him, causing the folds of his garment to flap slightly. He
sank down with a sigh like wind stealing through a cavern, and his
fingers clawed feebly in the leaping shadow.