The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge by Robert J. Pearsall Page B

cut in the side of the bank.
    Still, while from up-stream and down-stream came the chanting of other trackers, a weird, age-old song of labor, a sort of unifying chorus, half dirge and half paean—of men who had been born on the river, and who lived of the river and would die on the river—these men of ours worked in a silence that set them apart, that advertised the unwillingness with which they served us.
    And still from every passing junk came that answering silence, that slant-eyed, curious stare, unfriendly inquisitive, portentous of trouble.
    It’s hardly to be wondered at that, by the time we came upon that for which we were looking, a depressing sense of unreality had begun to afflict me. Belief in the stories of Hazard and Mu Ting had been easy while I listened to them, but now they seemed far-fetched and extravagant as a dream.
    Equally so seemed the reasoning by which Hazard and I had builded upon those stories, locating to our imaginations the long-lost jewels of the long-dead empress. And in this trip itself there seemed a touch of the grotesque—two white men who were strangers to each other and a woman of an alien race, encompassed by danger, drawn by unfriendly hands into the maw of the unknown.
    “Here it is,” said Hazard.
    With something of astonishment, I looked upon the fulfillment of our imaginings. The opening in the bank was on our side of the river; it was about fifteen feet wide at water level, and in the center was a little more than man-high. Hazard stopped the junk when we were directly in front of that opening. Looking back through it, into the depths of the cave, we could see nothing but blackness, shot through by ripples of light reflected from the surface of the water.
    “Now,” I said half-scoffingly, “to get to the bottom of that water—”
    Hazard picked a bamboo splinter from the bottom of the junk. He tossed it into the water and watched it drift into the cave with unanxious and unsurprized eyes.
    “We’ll simply build a dike or dam across the mouth of the cave,” he completed my sentence for me, “and wait. It’s as I expected—the cave will drain itself.”
    III
    BRIBED by the promise of more silver than they had ever before possessed, half an hour later the crew of our junk had procured shovels from neighboring farms and were engaged in pitching earth from the bank above into the stream. Their faces were yellow masks, but there was sullenness in their every movement. Plainly they worked against their wills, and plainly they resented our power to force their wills by purchase.
    Whether they divined the meaning of their work, that the completed dam would shut out the river and thus permit the water in the cave to pass out through the subterranean drain indicated by the ingoing current, we could not tell.
    But they were a small part of the danger that would presently confront us. Shortly after they had begun the work, during the progress of which Hazard, Mu Ting and I stayed on the junk, we were startled by a rattling like a succession of pistol shots. Looking out into the stream, we saw that a passing junk had dropped its bamboo-cleated sails, loosed its anchor and swung idly by in the current.
    Then the one that had followed us close all morning, taking its trackers on board, pushed out into the middle of the river and joined its fellow. Thereafter not one junk passed that point; from up-river and down-river they gathered like a collection of evil birds. Then they waited. They did nothing but wait. There was something cynical in that silent waiting, something implacable and monstrous.
    “We’ll have witnesses to our triumph—or our obsequies,” I observed, after about a dozen river boats had thus arrived and stopped.
    “Obviously,” he replied rather cheerfully.
    He was engaged at that moment in carefully trimming with his pocket-knife the ragged ends of a piece of bamboo, about four feet long, which he’d picked up somewhere.
    “Li Fu Ching’s behind this,” I