whole purpose in going with Groot was to obviate carefully the fact that I had any suspicions. To this end, I had Groot engage a runner to speed out to the temple ahead of us and announce our coming. If Baron Rosoff and his friends got the idea that I was there on a friendly visit, they would avoid any desperate work. If you jump out on a wild animal unexpectedly, he is sure to show fight; but if you approach openly, he’ll avoid you.
As for Mary Fisher, I set her down as an earnest young female of the early Victorian type, bound on the uplift of the heathen.
We passed the city gate, where a squad of our Nanking boys were keeping an eye on traffic, and headed for the open country. Our chairmen swung along at a fair clip. On all sides of us was the vastly rich plain, crossed by the marvelous system of canals, which had been constructed twenty-two hundred years ago—a canal system which had created the richest plain in China out of a desert.
The temple to which we were bound was an old and honored shrine, but I knew that it had a bad name. Many of these outlying temples are shelters for vicious and outlawed priests, and the Heart-resting-place had figured in one or two local reports in connection with piracy and salt-smuggling. It lay on the Min River, and I had no doubt would prove a place of exquisite beauty.
My chair took the lead, and I trusted that Alan Groot would take the opportunity to commune with silence and get back to earth. He had a good brain somewhere, once he could get it off the subject of Han dynasties and such things. I could not shirk the fact that we were up against a bad crowd, capable of swift and nasty action. Further, I had certain instructions vividly in mind.
“Use every caution,” they ran. “Remember that if the politicians can provoke any acts of open war between north and south China, their game is won. If none occur, we may succeed in getting unity between the two parliaments—a united China! Use every caution. Avert any hostilities at all every costs.”
Particularly important here in Cheng-tu, where, if Japan had any excuse for intervention, she could plant her troops in the very entrails of China. This, naturally, complicated the situation for me. If I could get Mary Fisher inside the walls of Cheng-tu, I would be satisfied.
Suddenly, as we rounded an abrupt curve in the road, my chair halted. I looked out, then was into the road at a leap. Coming toward us at a walk, staggering across the road like a drunken thing, was a shaggy little Mongolian pony, streaming blood; and in the saddle, a man lolled forward with death in his face.
I recognized the man instantly, despite the paint and stain that disguised him as a coolie. It was John Li, one of our best men—a Johns Hopkins graduate—who had gone to Peking with our representatives there.
“Wait here!” Flinging this order at the chairmen, I ran forward.
The pony gave a little whinny and dropped in his tracks; he had been shot twice through the body, but had run on. There were no pursuers. The road was empty, I caught John Li as the pony came down, and his hand clutched weakly at me.
“Breck!” He gasped out the word. “Tried to make the city—failed—they got me.”
“Who?” I demanded. His head jerked up again.
“Came from Peking with Rosoff—renegade Russian—Germanophile. In pay of Nippon, I discovered—he was taking charge—operations this province—must have suspected me—found myself poisoned and ran for it. Oh God! it burns—”
He moaned a little, then jerked again and caught my hand.
“Breck—white woman at the temple—I—I—”
He went limp—dead.
As I set down the body and rose, Alan Groot came running up. I could not answer his questions, for tears and fury choked my throat. This poor lump of clay before me had died for his country—not for party or politics or the damnable partisan curse of a land grown away from patriotism. Murdered by a dirty dog of a renegade!
Yet Rosoff and his friends must not suspect that I had received any warning.
“Who is he?” demanded Groot for the tenth time. “Did bandits attack him?”
I nodded, content to leave it that way. But Groot suspected something, I think.
Behind us, on the road, were plodding along some countrymen. They soon caught up, and I hired one of them to put John Li’s body on his mule and take it to the city. It was all I could do for him who had been an honorable gentleman and my friend.
All? No. Baron Rosoff still lived!
We went on again. A quick search had shown me that John Li carried no papers. The only thing I retrieved from his body was a thin, oval plate of copper an inch in length, carried by a string about his neck. Upon it were inscribed the two ideographs: t’ou shi. Shi meant stone. What this t’ou stone was, remained an enigma.
What this disk meant, I had no idea; but obviously John Li had carried it for some highly important reason, after abandoning everything else. I put it into my pocket, and for the moment forgot the object.
Our road ran on, between canals and rivers, and gradually the hot anger lessened under the cooling touch of reason within me. The importance of John Li’s message made itself felt more clearly. It would not do to lose my head and go after Baron Rosoff in pure brute fury for revenge. No! If that man were in charge of operations here, his information would be of untold value to our party. We must steal his brains—and kill him afterward. Then, John Li would not have died in vain!
And above all, no open hostilities. It was a game in the dark, silent and deadly, with no quarter to the vanquished.
Rice fields fled past, and bridges, and men going home for the night. Sunset was at hand, and the red disk perching on the western mountain rim of the plain flooded everything with crimson radiance, like some slavering tongue licking at the world. A jabber from my bearers came to me, and I leaned forward with interest. Hsi-hsin-ho they said, was just ahead.
Now I saw the place of Heart-resting, as it had been named in olden days. It rose before me in the gold-red glow of sunset—a sweet enough place on a little eminence beside the river, with boats and garden pavilions below it. Like most temples hereabouts it was walled, a circle of stone around the base of the hill. Above this wall rose gardens, and the temple buildings, their tiled roofs heavy with grass and brush.
Groot’s chair came alongside mine.
“It is early Sung architecture,” he declared. “A beautiful specimen, Breck!”
My eyes fled upward. Incongruous thing amid this ancient beauty and quiet repose, a bare pole stuck out against the blood-red sky—a bare black pole that might have been a flagstaff but was not.
If I had known of this, I would have brought a few soldiers along at the risk of a row. For we did not relish any unlicensed wireless stations.
“Ah!” exclaimed Groot’s voice. “Here’s Mary down to meet us!”
Our chairs halted before the massive tiled gateway in the wall, and I forgot about the wireless and everything else, for I found myself shaking hands with Mary Fisher.
Behind her, to meet us, came a man who could be no other than Baron Rosoff.
CHAPTER III
Mary Speaks Up
The
