Peter the Brazen: A Mystery Story of Modern China
Peter detected a tiny glass vial spilling out its dark, volatile fluid
upon the dust. He picked it up, but it was snatched from his hand.
The dull pig-eyes of Chang stared very close to his, with the
stupefaction of sleep still extending the irises into round dark pools.
The vial was in his hand, and he was sampling its odor, waving it
slowly back and forth under his wide nostrils. He shouted, and
turbaned men filed into the tent, and carried the gray figure away.
The hand of Chang rested upon Peter's shoulder, and in a voice that
throbbed with the sonorousness of a Buddha temple-gong he said:
"You have rendered me a service for which I can never sufficiently
repay you--for I value my life highly! In the morning your mind will
have forgotten what has taken place. Try to sleep now. You will
obey--promptly!"
The candle sputtered and jumped, as if it were striving mightily to
lengthen its golden life if only for another minute; and went out.
From Chow Yang to Lun-Ling-Ting all the land could not provide costlier
raiment than Peter found at his bedside when the long, high-keyed cries
of the mule men opened his eyes upon another morning.
When camp was broken up, long before the sun became hot, he was given a
small but able mule; and he rode down the valley toward India at
Chang's side. They moved at the head of a long, slow train, for here
bandits were not feared, despite the loneliness of the land through
which they were traveling. Farms became more scattered, more widely
separated by patches of broken, barren rock; and, finally, all traces
of the microscopic cultivation which gave Szechwan Province its lean
fruitfulness were left behind them.
The mandarin rode for many miles in silence, occasionally changing
reins, looking steadily and gloomily ahead of him, with his attention
riveted, it seemed, upon the sharp and ceaseless clatter of his mule's
hoofs and the twisting rock road.
Peter's mind was fixed upon the problem which crept hourly nearer. His
head was cast between his shoulders as if the weight of a sorrowful
world rested upon that narrow, well-proportioned skull, with its
covering of shining light hair.
He loved his task as a man might love a selfish and thoughtless woman,
who demanded and craftily accepted all that he could give, to the last
ounce of his gold and the final drop of his blood. It was a thankless
task, yet it had grace.
It was well past mid-morning before Chang spoke the first word.
"A grateful dream came into my sleep last night. For years I have
fought in the darkness with a man who has the heart of Satan himself.
He has robbed me. Time after time he has sent into my camp his spies.
Some were more adroit than others. But none so adroit as the coolie
from Len Yang."
Peter repressed his surprise, and merely winked his eyes thoughtfully a
number of times. Chang went on:
"In this dream last night a young man was given into my keeping whose
spirit and manliness have not yet been soiled. His gratitude was
immediate. In return for the acts which grew out of that gratitude, I
am prepared to give him anything that is mine, or in my power, whether
he desires wealth, or position, or my friendship."
"The young man," said Peter gravely, "desires neither wealth nor
position. If he has been of service to the man who befriended him,
that is enough."
"Should he desire a favor of any kind----"
"Then help him to reach his enemy, who is your enemy, who is the Gray
Dragon of Len Yang!"
"In jest----"
"In all seriousness!" said Peter.
"It is death to enter Len Yang!"
"My mind is made up, mandarin!"
They had entered a narrow ravine, and on both sides of the slender
trail rose up sharp elbows of hard rock. Peter's head was inclined a
little to the right in an attitude he unconsciously assumed when
listening for important words of man or wireless machine.
"It is the folly of adventurous youth," rang out the melodious and
sincere voice of the mandarin. "It is a quest for a grail which will
end in a pool of your own blood! Come into India with me!"
"But I decided--long ago--mandarin!"
"Your life is your life," said the mandarin sadly. "The City of Stolen
Lives is beyond the mountain. _Ch'ing_!"
CHAPTER XVII
A road as white and straight as a silver bar led directly between the
black, jutting shoulders of the hills to the gates of Len Yang.
Peter, with his heart beating a wild symphony of anticipation and fear,
drew rein.
The small mule panted from the long desperate climb, his plump sides
filling and caving as he drank in the sharp evening air.
Close behind the city's faded green walls towered the mountain ranges
of Tibet, cold, gloomy, and vague in the purple mystery of their
uncertain distances. They were like chained giants, brooding over the
wrongs committed in the City of Stolen Lives, sullen in their mighty
helplessness.
In the rays of the swollen sun the close-packed hovels enclosed within
the moss-covered walls seemed to rest upon a blurring background of
vermilion earth.
As Peter clicked his tongue and urged the tired little animal down the
slope, he recalled the fragment of the description that had been given
him of this place. Hideous people, with staring eyes, dripping the
blood-red slime of the cinnabar-mines--leprosy, filth, vermin--
His palace! It stood out above the carmine ruck like a cube of purest
ivory in a bleeding wound. Its marble outrivaled the whiteness of the
Taj Mahal. It was a thing of snow-white beauty, like a dove poising
for flight above a gory battlefield. And it was crowned by a dome of
lapis lazuli, bluer than the South Pacific under a melting sun! But
its base, Peter knew, was stained red, a blood-red which had seeped up
and up from the carmine clay.
The gate to the city was down, and by the grace of his blue-satin robe
Peter was permitted to enter.
And instantly he was obsessed with the flaming color of that man's
unappeased passion. Red--red! The hovels were spattered with the red
clay. The man, the skinny, wretched creature who begged for a moment
of his gracious mercy at the gate, dripped in ruby filth. The mule
sank and wallowed in vermilion mire.
Scrawny, undernourished children, naked, or in rags that afforded
little more protection than nakedness, thrust their starved,
red-smeared faces up at him, and gibed and howled.
And above all this arose the white majesty of his palace--the throne of
the Gray Dragon!
Peter urged the mule up the scarlet alley to a clearing in which he
found coolies by the thousands, trudging moodily from a central orifice
that continued to disgorge more and more of them. The dreadful,
reeking creatures blinked and gaped as if stupefied by the rosy light
of the dying day.
Some carried lanterns of modern pattern; others bore picks and shovels
and iron buckets, and they seemed to pass on interminably, to be
engulfed in the lanes which ran in all directions from the clearing.
It was as though the earth were vomiting up the vilest of its
creatures. And in the same light it was consuming others of equal
vileness. Down into the red maws of the shaft an endless chain of men
and women and children were descending.
Quite suddenly the light gave way, and Peter was aware that the night
of the mountains was creeping out over the city, blotting out its
disfigurements, replacing the hideous redness with a velvety black.
At the shaft's entrance a sharp spot of dazzling light sprang into
being. It was an electric arc light! Somehow this apparition struck
through the horror that saturated him, and he sighed as if his mind had
relinquished a clinging nightmare.
Professionally now he gave this section of Len Yang another scrutiny.
Thick cables sagged between stumpy poles like clusters of black snakes,
all converging at the mine's entrance. His acute ears were registering
a dull hum, indicating the imminence of high-geared machinery or of
dynamos.
At the further side of the red shaft, now crusted with the night's
shades, and garishly illuminated by the diamond whiteness of the frosty
arc, he made out a deep, wide ditch, where flowed slowly a ruddy
current, supplied from a short fat pipe.
Peter believed that electric pumps sucked out the red seepage waters
from the mine and lifted them to the bloody ditch.
On impulse he lifted his eyes to the darkening heavens, and he knew now
that the threads of this, his greatest adventure, were being drawn to a
meeting point; for he detected in the sun's last refracted rays the
bronze glint of aerial wires! What lay at the base of the antenna he
could guess accurately. He hastened to the base of the nearest aerial
mast--a pole reaching like a dark needle into the sky--and found there
a low, dark building of varnished pine with a small door of eroded,
green brass.
The rain-washed pine, the complete absence of windows, and the
austerity of the massive brass door contributed to a personality of
dignified and pessimistic aloofness. The building occupied a place to
itself, as if its reserve were not to be tampered with, as if its dark
and sullen mystery were not meant for the prying eyes of passing
strangers.
Peter knocked brazenly upon the door, and it clanked shallowly, giving
forth no inward echo. He waited expectantly.
It yawned open to the accompaniment of grumbled curses in a distinctly
tenor whine.
A man with a white, shocked face stared at him from the threshold. The
countenance was long, tapering, and it ended nowhere. Dull, mocking
eyes with a burned-out look in them stared unblinkingly into Peter's
face.
Peter could have shouted in recognition of the weak face, but he
compressed his lips and bowed respectfully instead.
"What the hell do you want?" growled the man on the threshold.
"May Buddha bring the thousandth blessing to the soul of your virtuous
mother," said Peter in solemn, benedictive tones. "It is my pleasure
to desire entrance."
"Speak English, eh?" shrilled the man. "Dammit! Then come in!" And
to this invitation he added blasphemy in Peter's own tongue that made
his heart turn sour. It was the useless, raving blasphemy of a
weakling. It was the man as Peter had known him of old. But a little
worse. He still wore what remained of his Marconi uniform, tattered,
grease-stained coat and trousers, with the ragged white and blue
emblems of the steamship line by which he had been employed before he
had disappeared. His bony hands trembled incessantly, and his face had
the chalky pastiness native to the opium eater.
Peter, reflecting upon the honor which that uniform had always meant
for him, felt like knocking this chattering, wild-eyed creature down
and trampling upon him. But he bowed respectfully. The door clanged
behind him, and his eye absorbed in an instant the details of the
ponderously high-powered electrical apparatus.
"Speak God's language, eh?" whined the man. "Sit down and don't stare
so. Sit down. Sit down."
"A mandarin never seats himself, O high one, until thrice invited."
"Thrice, four, five times, I tell you to sit down!" he babbled. "Men,
even rat-eaters like you, who speak my language, are too rare to let go
by. Mandarin?"
He stepped back and eyed his guest with stupid humor.
"I say, men who speak my language are rare. Nights I listen to fools
on this machine, and tell them what I please. What is the news from
outside? What is the news from home?"
"From where?"
"From America!" He stumbled over the words, and took in his breath
with a long, trembling hiss between his yellow teeth.
"It is many years since I visited that strange land, O great one! It
is many, many years, indeed, since I studied for the craft which you
now perform so honorably."
"You--what was that?"