Part 34 (1/2)
His outflung gesture indicated the whole of Asia.
The girl pursed her lips and a hard twinkle, like that of a frosty arc-light upon diamonds, came into her eyes. ”Yes, Mr. Moore,” she said vigorously, ”I will. But you must promise--promise faithfully--to ask no questions. Will you do that?”
Peter nodded with a willingness that was far from a.s.sumed.
Romola Borria placed the tips of her slender, white fingers together and looked down at them pensively. ”Well,” she said, looking up and raising her voice slightly, ”you escaped from the liner _Vandalia_ in the middle of the Whang-poo River, at night, in a deep fog, in a sampan, with a young woman named Eileen Lorimer in your arms. This occurred after you had delivered her from the hands of certain men, whom I prefer to call, perhaps mysteriously, by the plain word _them_.
”You sent this young lady home on the _Manchuria_, or the _Mongolia_, I forget just which. That night on the bund near the French legation, you met, quite by accident, another young lady who found your companions.h.i.+p quite desirable. Her name was Miss Amy Vost, a bright little thing.”
”You don't happen to know,” put in Peter ironically, ”what Miss Lorimer had for breakfast this morning, by any chance?”
”At last accounts she was studying for a doctor's degree in the university at San Friole, Mr. Moore.”
”Indeed!” It was on the tip of Peter's tongue to tell this astounding Romola Borria that she was nothing short of a mind-reader. Instead, he nodded his head for her to continue.
”As I was saying, you met Miss Vost, quite by accident, and danced with her at a fancy dress ball at the Astor House. You wore the costume of a j.a.panese merchant, I believe, thinking, a little fatuously, if you will permit me, that those garments were a disguise. A little later in the bar at the Palace Hotel, after you left Miss Vost, you met a sea captain, ex-first mate of the Toyo Kisen Kaisha steamer, the _Sunyado Maru_. He was an old friend.
”With Captain MacLaurin and Miss Vost you made a trip on the Yangtze-Kiang in a little river steamer, the _Hankow_, which foundered in the rapids just below Ching-Fu. This occurred after you had stabbed and killed one of their most trusted spies.
”When the _Hankow_ sank, you followed what now appears to be your professional habit of a trustworthy gallant, by taking a lady in distress into your arms, and swam the whirlpools to the little village across the river from Ching-Fu. Then Miss Vost was met by her father, an incurable missionary from Wenchow, and by devious routes, well known to _them_, you joined a caravan, owned by a garrulous old thief who calls himself a mandarin, the Mandarin Chang, who told you many lies, to amuse himself--
”Of course they were lies, Mr. Moore. Chang is one of _his_ most trusted henchmen. He even permitted you to kill one of his coolies.
The coolie would have died anyway; he was beginning to learn too much.
But it tickled Chang, and _him_, to let you have this chance, to see how far you would go. And Chang had orders to help you reach Len Yang.
It gave you confidence in yourself, did it not?”
”I don't believe a word,” declared Peter in a daze. He refused to believe that Chang, kindly old Chang, was in league with that man, too.
”Then you entered Len Yang, the City of Stolen Lives, and _he_ watched you, and when you heard a difficult wireless message on the instruments at the mine, _he_ gave you a present of money--five hundred taels, wasn't it?--hoping, perhaps, that you would 'give up your foolishness,'
as he expressed it, and settle down to take the place of the opium-befuddled wireless man you fooled so cleverly. _He_ valued you, Mr. Moore, you see, and he was not in the least afraid of you!
”A dozen times, yes, a hundred times, he could have killed you. But he preferred to sit back and stroke those long, yellow, mandarin mustaches of his, and watch you, as a cat watches a foolish mouse. I can see him laughing now. Yes! I have seen him, and I have heard him laugh. It is a hideous, cackling laugh. Quite unearthly! How he did laugh at you when you rescued Miss Vost, dear little clinging Miss Vost, from the jaws of his white palace!
”But he let you go; and he and his thousand sharpshooters who lined the great, green walls, when you and Captain MacLaurin and Miss Vost galloped bravely out, with one poor little mule! A thousand rifles, I say, were leveled upon you in that bright moonlight, Mr. Moore. But _he_ said--_no_!”
Peter looked up at the stolid rigging of the _Persian Gulf_, at the sunlight dancing brightly on the blue waves, which foamed at their crests like fresh, boiling milk; at the pa.s.sengers sleeping or reading in their deck chairs; and he refused to believe that this was not a dream. But the level voice of Romola Borria purred on:
”Then you joined a caravan for India, and, for a little while, they thought your trail was lost. But you reappeared in Mandalay, attired as a street fakir; and you limped all the way to Rangoon. Why did you limp, Mr. Moore?”
”A mule stamped on my foot, coming through the Merchants' Pa.s.s into Bengal.”
”It healed rapidly, no doubt, for you were very active from that time on. You took pa.s.sage to Penang, to Singapore, doubling back to Penang, and again to Singapore, and caught a blue-funnel steamer for Batavia.”
”But, Miss Borria,” writhed Peter, ”why, with all this knowledge, hasn't he done away with me? You know. _He_ knows. You've had your chance. You could have killed me in your stateroom last night.
Please----” And Peter cast the golden robe of the adventurer temporarily from him, becoming for the moment nothing more than a terribly earnest, terribly concerned young man.