The Mandarin’s face was a study. Between fear of consequence, the sure reprisal which would come to him from the Government if his visitors were harmed, and the fear of the greater and more immediate danger from a cause unknown to the visitors, but very accurately guessed, he was in a very painful quandary.
“If the honourable strangers will accept the hospitality of my miserable pigsty,” he said sullenly, “for a few days, at least, I will ensure them safety from the disorderly characters who populate my unsavoury town.”
He reached out for the cup, and the two men followed suit, for they were dismissed.
They made their way to the house to whither Talham had already directed his muleteers. The two men rode back through the bazaar by themselves. There was nothing in the attitude of the people to suggest that they had organised opposition to fear. The scowls and half-muttered implications which greeted them was the usual lot of the Western traveller in that part of the world.
Talham’s keen eyes surveyed the crowd as the horses made their way slowly through the street leading to the western end of the city. He was looking for a familiar face, and presently he found it. Over the heads of the throng he saw a man standing quietly with his back to the entrance of a fruit shop.
Talham tilted his chin ever so slightly, and the man, though seemingly unobservant of his action, repeated the motion.
So far so good. Some of his men were in the city. He had never depended upon the escort. He knew that they would fly at the first hint of danger.
But they were armed with modern weapons, and since it was necessary for his purpose that the various members of his old regiment should be effectively equipped, what easier way of bringing arms into this territory than in the hands of Imperial troops?
He had this in his mind when they reached the little caravanserai which was to be the headquarters of the expedition.
It was a one-roofed dwelling set in the middle of a yard and surrounded by a high wall. The building proper was divided into two parts, the smaller of which Talham directed to be cleaned out (for it was indescribably filthy) and prepared for the lodging of himself and his friend.
He handed the other to the captain of the escort.
It seemed to Tillizinni hardly large enough to accommodate forty men, but then Tillizinni was not so well acquainted with the habits and customs of the Chinese soldiery as was his companion.
“It would take a hundred and forty,” was the cool reply when Tillizinni cast doubt upon its capacity.
They made the little room--it was no more than a stable from their point of view--as comfortable as possible, spreading a carpet unpacked from one of the mules and fixing up a little much-needed ventilation.
The walls were thick, and an inspection of the outer wall which surrounded the courtyard was satisfactory. The place could withhold a siege given a few improvements, and these improvements Talham set himself out to make without further delay.
He sent into the town for workmen, and as soon as day broke he had them knocking out bricks from the wall at regular intervals.
Some news of this must have come to the Mandarin, for he sent a hurried message demanding Talham’s presence.
The tall man rode out along to the Yamen and saw his unwilling host.
“News has come to me,” said the Mandarin without preliminary, “that your honourable self and your honourable friend are engaged in making alterations to the outer wall of the King-Li. Now, such conduct,” he wagged his finger at Talham, “is against my faith. I cannot save-face if it is known that my protection is so unworthy to the honourable foreigners that he must fortify himself against the citizens of this town.”
“Lao-ae,” said Talham earnestly, and he employed his full knowledge of Mandarin Chinese to further his eloquence, “though I am but as the mud under the wheels of your cart, though I am not fitted even to prostrate myself in your presence, yet the Daughter of Heaven thinks so well of me that it would not please me if I caused the great and beautiful lady sorrow by my death. Moreover,” he added, “my love and esteem for you, who are known from one end of the Empire to the other as a just and wise ruler, and one marked out for special promotion to the Governorship of Shu Shung----”
A little gleam came into the Mandarin’s eye at this broad hint, though he might have known that Talham could lie as well as any other man.
“Yet,” the big man went on, “because I have this affection for you, I am terrified lest trouble come upon your nobility through some mischance to my miserable carcase.”
The Mandarin was silent.
The reference to a governorship, the dreams of his life, set him thinking. Presently he said mildly:
“I have talked with your Excellency, and my duty is finished--puh p’a! You have nothing to fear.”
With that he allowed Talham to return to his work of putting the inn into a condition of defence.
Talham had posted two sentries at the gate, and people were only allowed in two at a time.
That there should be a big crowd before the foreigner’s quarters--a crowd of curious, peering, tip-toeing, interested Celestials, goes without saying, for the Chinese are tremendously curious.
Every now and again the officer of the guard would come to Talham, busy with Tillizinni, working out calculations as to distances and depths, with the information that a stranger wished to see him. Talham would walk patiently to the gate, exchange a few words with the man who desired an audience, and, at a nod, the stranger would be allowed to pass.
By the evening of the first day there were occupying the little compound some forty soldiers and some forty-five nondescript Chinamen who had turned up from nowhere in particular, and Talham’s estimate as to the sleeping capacity of the improvised barrack-room proved to be no exaggeration.
He had made one wise provision, and that was that the arms of the escort, including even the sword and revolver of the officer commanding when he was not on duty, should be stacked in a smaller room. In addition, he had all the ammunition which he had brought with him similarly stored. It cramped the small apartment considerably and filled up every available piece of space, but Talham was insistent upon this, though the officer demurred.
In the morning, when the new guard mounted, they took over the rifles of the men who had been on duty on the previous day.
On the third day Talham went out to make an inspection of the problematic Mount Li. He left before daybreak and only halted at the city gates because they were not open at that hour.
He did not return until near sunset, and when he did he was immensely hungry, not having, as he said, eaten since he set forth, save a couple of dubious eggs which he secured at a village en route.
“I am satisfied we are on the right track,” he said, “and I am more satisfied because a farmer in the neighbourhood tells me that some men have been over from Tai-San quite recently exploring the mountain.
“It isn’t a mountain really,” he went on. “As a matter of fact I have a theory that previous to the Emperor’s death, it had no existence at all.”
He described the place.
It lay in the neck or dip of two hills, and, apparently, had been filled up so that the top of the hill should offer an unbroken sky-line to the traveller in the valley beneath.
“There is no doubt at all in my mind,” said Talham emphatically, “that this is the tomb. We have now to find the guarded entrance. You can see the slope of the hills before they were earthed up quite distinctly, and I think I have found the ruins of an old temple half buried near the crest of one of these.”
He read again the Second Emperor’s description.
“That’s it,” he said. “He caused trees and grass to be planted so that it might appear a part of the mountain.”
“But why should he have been brought so far away from the capital?” asked Tillizinni.
“That is a question which we have never satisfactorily settled. You might as well ask,” said the other, “why the Ming Emperors wanted huge stone elephants to indicate the way to their tombs. There is no reason for anything in China, except that if you see a thing for which there is absolutely no excuse, you may be satisfied that that is the excuse!”
“You are almost lucid,” said Tillizinni with a smile.
He himself was enjoying the trip immensely; he found the relaxation which he needed so badly. There was no telephone; nobody brought him tangles of mystery to unravel. He was living amidst actualities, amongst primitive forces, in a land where murder was a commonplace everyday incident, and where the murderers seldom troubled to hide their tracks. He recognised that there was considerable danger to himself and to his companion if the real object of the visit was ever discovered.
Soo would be very active just now; his spies would long since have carried news of the arrival of the “foreign devils.”
It needed no spy, as it happened, for the Mandarin himself, with a keen desire to “save-face” all round, had sent a private courier with many apologies to his powerful rival, and Soo’s agents were active.
The first indication of trouble that Talham had seen, took the shape of a jagged stone which was thrown at him as he passed through the bazaar on an afternoon on his return from one of his expeditions.
That evening he found the soldiers sullen, and he was interviewed by the officer of the guard.
“My insignificant men,” said the officer, “have petitioned me, asking that your Noble Beneficence will restore to them their arms, because they feel afraid and ashamed also, since the common people of the bazaar laugh at them.”
“You may tell your men to go to the devil,” said Talham without finesse.
But an hour later the officer had returned, this time with a fresh grievance.
“My men,” he said boldly, “do not like these strangers sleeping in the same room with them, for they come from another province, and are members of another society.”
“Captain,” said Talham patiently, “if you come to me again with such stories, I will have you beaten on the feet.”
Later, he was to receive private advice from one of these same strangers, that the men had had a meeting and were discussing the advisability of leaving the compound in a body.
This threat took definite shape the next morning, when the officer came yet again in some fear to announce the intention of his men.
“These pigs,” he said humbly, “will leave your Excellency unless their arms are returned.”
“Tell them they may leave,” said Talham cheerfully, “and they will get no arms from me.”
The situation outside the gates was even more serious. A rumour had broken through the bazaar that the foreigners had come to mark out the land for a railway.
The people in this province were fanatics on the question of “fire-horses,” and every hour the feeling grew against the intruders.
Talham suspected the Mandarin of fostering this feeling. Twice when he had called at the Yamen His Excellency had been indisposed and only his “men-shang” was visible. On the occasion of the second visit (he had called in on his way back from one of his trips of exploration) a hostile crowd surrounded his horse, and somebody from the outskirts of the crowd had thrown a stone which narrowly missed his face.
Instantly the big man turned his horse, scattering the people left and right. He had seen the face of the thrower, and reaching down he caught him by the collar of his jacket and galloped with him at full speed through the streets, his prisoner alternately running and stumbling in the powerful grip of his captor.
Talham reached the compound and the gates closed behind him; then he turned his attention to his captive.
“Seize that man,” he said in Chinese, and the guard obeyed the order reluctantly.
Talham dismounted and came to where the man stood.
“Why did you throw stones?” he asked.
“Because you are a ‘foreign devil’ and are going to bring the ‘fire-horses’ across the graves of our ancestors,” said the Chinaman.
“Who told you this?”
“Everybody knows it,” answered the prisoner, emboldened by the fact that he had escaped immediate punishment.
“You are not of this town. Where do you come from?”
The man hesitated.
“I come from Tang Ti,” he said suddenly.
“Oh, liar, and son of a liar!” said Talham. “You come from Tai-pau.”
The man shifted uneasily on his feet.
“Who sent you?” asked Talham. “Let me see his shoulder.”
Again the guard showed some reluctance to obey, and Talham himself stepped forward and tore the blouse of the man from his neck and scrutinised the yellow flesh for the sign of the tell-tale tattoo.
It was there.
“Go back to Lao-ae Soo T’si,” he said, “and tell him that I know who is at the bottom of all this hostility. I speak to you fairly,” he added, “because I see you are a student, and perhaps you are the son of great parents.”
The young man nodded.
“I am the son of a son of a Mandarin,” he said with pride.
Your Chinaman will never deny his parentage if it be sufficiently illustrious.
“Well, then, son of a son of a Mandarin, or son of a son of a gun, whichever you are,” said Talham, “go quickly from this place and take with you as many of your friends as you can find.”
With that he turned the man loose.
That night Talham’s escort deserted in a body, and the big man was jubilant.
“It couldn’t have happened better,” he said. “I was wondering how I could get rid of the beggars.”
Instantly he assembled his own men and armed them. He was satisfied of their loyalty, and distributed ammunition that same night. For some reason the hostility in the bazaar had ceased after that one act of stone-throwing. The escort disappeared from the town as if by magic.
It was not a healthy sign as Talham knew, because armed or disarmed, they were men who carried the Imperial badge upon their breast, and their hurried departure was ominous.
He rode out now to Mount Li with an escort of four of his own men. He thought he had detected the entrance to the tomb.
Half-way down the hill two straight ledges of the rock jutted out. They ran parallel to one another for about twenty yards, and then curved downward into the earth. From a distance they had every appearance of being placed there by nature, but something induced Talham to take a closer view. He made the ascent over the loose rubble and through the stunted bushes which covered the hillside.
He examined them carefully, and in the end he had no doubt whatever that they were placed there by the hand of man.
This would be the entrance, if entrance there were.
He had looked for an opening to the tomb at the foot of the hill. Apparently, it was half-way up that he must seek it.
“I am perfectly sure,” he told Tillizinni that night, “that if we can dig between those two pieces of sculpture, for pieces of sculpture they are, ingeniously carved to represent natural rock, and at the same time to afford some interested person a clue as to the whereabouts of the hill, we shall come upon the famous bronze door which hides the secret of the Emperor’s artificers.
“We shall have to do our digging by night,” he went on; “but I don’t anticipate digging very far. From what I have seen of the entrance to the tomb, it looks as though a few more showers of rain would wash the bronze door into view.”
Preparations were far advanced towards the final examination of the hill, and it was in the afternoon previous to the day on which the attempt was to be made, that a courier came hot-foot from the Yamen summoning Talham to the Mandarin’s presence.
He had not seen the great man for some days, and wondering what was new, and somewhat apprehensive, since it was quite on the cards that Pekin may have sent an Imperial edict prohibiting any further research, he hurried to the Yamen, and was instantly admitted to the presence of the Mandarin, who received him with great geniality.
“A courier has brought a letter for your honourable self from Pekin,” and he picked it up from a little ebony table.
The letter, whatever it was, was enclosed in a large envelope covered with Chinese characters.
Talham opened the outer envelope slowly, dreading the contents. They proved to be two letters, and the first of these was startling enough, for it was addressed to Miss Yvonne Yale, c/o the British Consul, Hoo Sin.
Talham stared. There was no British Consul in Hoo Sin.
With a start he recognised the handwriting as that of Mrs. Yale.
The second was addressed to himself, and was from the same lady. He tore it open quickly and read its contents with a sinking heart. It ran:
“Dear Captain Talham,--
“Yvonne left London yesterday for China to join you. She is travelling by the overland route.
“Naturally, I felt very chary of allowing her to go by herself, but your telegram was so emphatic that I could not deny the dear girl the pleasure which I know she will feel in meeting you.
“I am sure you will telegraph her arrival the moment she gets to Hoo Sin, and that the ladies who have so kindly offered her their hospitality will not be disappointed in my gem! I should be glad if you will thank them for me.”
“My God!” muttered Talham, for he had sent no cablegram to the girl or to her mother.
