Part 18

The secretary and the other Orientals stood gazing at it without moving so much as a finger. They said nothing, but one heard their breath come quick. A kind of whistling sigh escaped the dapper secretary, and his eyes glittered like two buttons of jet. He was striving to maintain a composure which had been racked to the foundations. His blood was of a finer strain than that of the underlings who stood near him, and he held his ground while they began to edge away in retreat. Presently one of them broke into a run. The others took to their heels in a panic route and scampered toward the house, their baggy breeches fluttering, queues whipping the wind, felt shoes fairly twinkling. From one of them came back a shrill, wailing, “Ai oh.”

They raced past His Excellency Hao Su Ting, who stood aghast at the gross disregard of etiquette and vainly commanded them to halt. Nor did the mad pace slacken until the last of them had dived to cover. O’Shea forgot his business and grinned with honest enjoyment, but the face of the secretary, now haggard and parchment-like, recalled him to the task in hand. This lone Chinese who had withstood the desire to run away was moving nearer to examine the branded back of the red-haired sailor.

“Ye have all the marks of a man that is sick to the soul with fear,” grimly observed O’Shea, “but you are too brave to give up to it, and I admire ye for it. Tell me, have you ever seen a man scarred like that before?”

The secretary spoke with a visible effort, and his voice had the rasping edge of intense excitement.

“Yes, I have seen that character, symbol, whatever you will call it--in my own country. It is most shocking, amazing, to behold it in this way, inflicted upon an American.”

“Do you need to look at it any longer? Can ye remember it? Will I show it to His Excellency?” demanded O’Shea.

“I cannot forget it,” slowly replied the other. “No, it is not necessary to show it to the ambassador. I assure you it is not necessary. I shall inform him that I have seen it. He will know what it is. I wish very much that it may not be seen by his illustrious self.”

The words and manner of the secretary conveyed the weightiest earnestness. He was in an agony of dread lest Hao Su Ting should return and view the spectacle of the branded man. O’Shea pitied his distress and was shrewd enough to perceive that nothing would be gained by opposing him. Maguire was restless, and Johnny Kent had trouble in sticking fast to him.

“Walk him along toward the railroad station,” said O’Shea to his comrade. “He will give you no bother once he makes his offing and goes clear of this Chinese colony. Here’s the gun, if ye need to persuade him a bit. Wait for me there, Johnny. This young man from Cathay will have a talk with me.”

“It looks as if you had sort of started things, Cap’n Mike. Aye, aye, I’ll take Bill in tow and run to moorings with him till you throw up signal rockets.”

With this reply, which betokened excellent discipline, the engineer grasped the sailor-man by the arm, and marched him into the road. O’Shea and the secretary were about to resume their conversation when the latter’s attention was caught by the beckoning gesture of the Chinese ambassador, who seemed impatient.

“His Excellency wishes to ask me why there was so much unseemly excitement by his servants,” said the young man. “I would prefer first to talk with you, but his command must be obeyed. Your name? Thank you. I shall have the pleasure of acquainting Captain O’Shea with the ambassador of China to the United States.”

“’Tis no pleasure for any one concerned, to judge by the symptoms,” replied the shipmaster.

“I agree with you, my dear sir. But it is something to have spared His Excellency the sight of the disfigurement which is written on the back of your most unfortunate friend.”

“Maybe the ambassador could see it from where he stood,” suggested O’Shea.

“No. His eyes are not of the best without spectacles. He is not a young man and his health is inferior. To shock him by the sight of something dreadful to see might have unhappy consequences.”

“But what is the answer? Why was every man of you bowled off his feet?” exclaimed O’Shea. “’Tis not the way of your people to be afraid of scars and wounds. Ye deal out some pretty tough punishments to your criminals.”

“It is advisable that you should pay your respects to His Excellency,” evasively returned the Chinese.

The ambassador regarded Captain O’Shea with an unfriendly stare until the secretary, with many low bows, held rapid converse with the personage in his own language. The elderly statesman and diplomat grunted incredulously, shook his head in vehement contradiction, and O’Shea conjectured that he was roundly scolding the young man for bringing him such an impossible yarn. At length he yielded with a frown of annoyance and briefly addressed the shipmaster.

“I speak not much English. Come into my house, please.”

He preceded them into a large library with many long windows screened by bamboo shades. Passing through this, he entered a smaller room more convenient for privacy. The threshold was a boundary between the Occident and the Orient. The library looked, for the most part, as though it belonged in a handsome summer-place of the New England coast, but this smaller room was as foreign as the ambassador himself. The air was heavy with the smell of sandal-wood. The massive table and chairs were of teak and ebony cunningly carved. The walls were hung with embroideries of crimson and gold, on which grotesque dragons writhed in intricate convolutions. The pieces of porcelain, jade, and cloisonné were not many, but they had been fashioned by the artists of dead dynasties and were almost beyond price. Upon a long panel of silk was displayed a row of Chinese characters cut from black velvet and sewn to the fabric. They were merely the symbols of good fortune commonly to be found in such an environment as this, a sort of equivalent of the old-fashioned motto, “God Bless Our Home,” but to Captain Michael O’Shea they carried an uncomfortable suggestion of the handiwork done upon the back of Bill Maguire.

His Excellency Hao Su Ting seated himself beside the table, deliberately put on his round spectacles with heavy tortoise-shell rims, and tucked his hands inside his flowing sleeves. The deferential secretary stood waiting for him to speak. O’Shea fidgeted and yearned to break the silence. The air had turned chill with an east wind that blew strong and damp from the sea. Nevertheless the ambassador found it necessary to take a handkerchief from his sleeve and wipe the little beads of perspiration from his bald brow. O’Shea made note of it, and wondered what powerful emotion moved behind the round spectacles and calm, benignant countenance of the diplomat.

At length he spoke to the secretary in Chinese and indicated O’Shea with a slow wave of the hand. The young man translated with some unreadiness as though endeavoring to bring the words within the bounds of courtesy.

“His Excellency says that it is impossible, that you are mistaken. He is not convinced.”

“He calls me a liar?” and O’Shea’s sense of humor was stirred. With his easy, boyish laugh he added: “’Tis your own reputation for veracity that needs overhaulin’, me lad. Your own two eyes have seen the thing. I had the proof, but ye would not let me take the two-legged document by the collar and fetch him to the house.”

The ambassador turned to the table at his elbow. Upon it was an ink box and a soft brush used for writing his own language. From a drawer he withdrew a sheet of rice-paper. Shoving these toward O’Shea, he said something and the secretary explained:

“He wishes you to write what it is like, the thing that I also have seen. Please be good enough to oblige.”

The brand was etched in O’Shea’s memory. Without hesitation he picked up the brush and blazoned the character in broad, firm strokes. For perhaps a minute His Excellency gazed at it. Then he caught up the sheet of rice-paper and tore it into small fragments.

“He is now convinced that you and I speak truth,” the secretary murmured in O’Shea’s ear.

“Well and good. He looks as if it made him unwell. Now can we get down to business and tackle the mystery of it? It is Chinese writing. What does it mean? That is me errand.”

His Excellency Hao Su Ting no longer resembled a round-faced Buddha seated in reposeful meditation upon a throne of teak-wood. The words came from him in a torrential flow, and the harsh, sing-song intonations were terribly in earnest. It was a harangue that warned, expostulated, lamented with all the fervor of an issue that concerned life and death. It startled O’Shea to behold a man of his unemotional race, and one so hedged about with the dignity of rank, in this stormy tide of feeling. It ceased abruptly. The old man sank into his chair and closed his eyes. The secretary rang a gong for a servant and ordered tea. Presently the ambassador signified that he wished to retire to a couch, and others of his staff attended him into the library and thence to an upper floor of the house.

The secretary returned to join O’Shea and began to explain in his measured, monotonous way:

“I will now inform you as much as it is permitted to know. It disappoints you, I am aware, that his Excellency is unable to translate the writing character which has made so much disturbance. Nor can I translate it, either into Chinese or English words. My language is what you call arbitrary, built up of symbols, not letters. This particular character has been invented to signify some secret purpose. It has the root-sign for _man_, and also the two curved lines which mean a _sending_, a _message_. The rest of it is hidden from us. His Excellency is a scholar of the highest grade among the literati of China. This character, as a whole, he has never been able to find in the classics or the dictionaries.”

More puzzled than ever, O’Shea broke in to demand:

“But if nobody knows what it means, why does the sight of it start a full-sized panic?”

“Many men in China have been found dead, and upon their backs had been hacked with a sword this strange character. It was thus that the own brother of His Excellency was discovered, in the court-yard of his house.”

“I begin to see daylight,” said O’Shea.

“Ah, there is only the blackest darkness,” gravely replied the secretary. “The branded men have not been coolies, but officials, merchants, people of station. No precautions avail. It smites them like the lightning from the sky. The fear of it walks everywhere. And now it has crossed the sea like an evil shadow.”

“That is not quite right,” was the matter-of-fact comment. “Poor Bill Maguire got it in China and brought it with him. ’Tis not likely to trouble you.”

“Never have we heard of a man who lived and walked with this mark upon his back, Captain O’Shea. All those to whom this fate has happened were infallibly dead. When they beheld it this afternoon, some of our people believed they gazed upon a red-haired ghost. I am an educated man, a graduate of Oxford University, but I tell you my blood turned to water and my heart was squeezed tight.”

“My friend Maguire is hard to kill,” said O’Shea. “I tried it meself. So he was put on the list by this damnable whatever-it-is, and the autograph was carved on him, and he was left for dead! Can ye tell me any more?”

“It is not in my power to enlighten you. I have known of men who found this character painted on the posts of their gate-ways. They surrounded themselves with soldiers and hired guards. They moved not from within their own walls. And they could not save themselves. They died as I have described it to you.”

“I have listened to pleasanter yarns. I am greatly obliged to ye,” and O’Shea was ready to take his departure. “I am afraid I will know no more unless Bill Maguire uncorks himself and confides the story of his life.”

“When the time comes it will interest me greatly to be informed of it,” said the secretary, offering his hand.

“Pass me kind regards to His Excellency and give him my regrets that I jolted his nervous system. He is a fine old gentleman.”

The shipmaster hastened on foot to the railroad station, where Johnny Kent was patiently and peacefully awaiting orders. The red-haired sailor was sitting on a baggage truck and munching peanuts. At sight of O’Shea he grinned in recognition and waved a greeting hand. The engineer was eager for tidings, but a train was almost due and he was briefly assured:

“’Tis a bugaboo tale, Johnny, and we will digest it at our leisure. And how has Bill behaved himself?”

“As good as gold, Cap’n Mike. But there’s something goin’ on inside him. His eye looks brighter and he has mumbled to himself several times. I dunno whether he’s primin’ himself for another explosion or kind of rememberin’ himself in spots. Anyhow, he has symptoms.”

“We will steer him home as soon as we can, Johnny. He has enjoyed an exciting afternoon.”

The locomotive whistled and a few minutes later they filed into the smoking-car. O’Shea fished out a black cigar and his comrade rammed a charge of cut plug into his old clay pipe. No sooner had they lighted matches than their irresponsible protégé reached over and snatched them away. Instead of trying to set fire to the car or to the abundant whiskers of the old gentleman across the aisle he flung the matches on the floor and stamped them with his heel. His guardians regarded him with puzzled surprise, and were not quick enough to restrain him before he surged among the passengers and plucked from their faces every lighted cigar, cigarette, and pipe. These he rudely made way with by grinding them under his feet or tossing them through the windows.

The persons thus outraged were for assaulting him until they perceived the width of his shoulders, the depth of his chest, and the color of his hair. The shipmaster and the engineer tackled him like a brace of foot-ball players, yanked him back to his seat, and calmed the ruffled travellers with explanations and offers to pay damages. The blue eye of Bill Maguire was alertly roving to detect the first sign of smoke, and during the remainder of his journey no one dared to burn the hazy incense of tobacco.

“You’re a great man for theories, Cap’n Mike,” quoth the bewildered engineer. “Can you figger what’s happened to Bill?”

“I am on a lee shore this time, Johnny. I would call him a firebug no longer. He has turned himself into a fire department.”

“That’s precisely it,” excitedly cried the other. “And here’s how I explain it. He’s had some mighty violent experiences during the last twenty-four hours, what with your tryin’ to knock his head off and runnin’ him afoul of those Chinamen which is his pet aversion. His intellect has jarred a mite loose from its dead centre, but one cog slipped into reverse gear. In place of settin’ fires, he wants to put ’em out. His machinery ain’t adjusted right, but it’s movin’. Instead of starting ahead on this conflagration theory of his, he goes full speed astern.”

“You are a knowing old barnacle,” admiringly exclaimed O’Shea. “This ought to make Bill an easier problem to handle. The strain of keeping up with him begins to tell on me.”

“Pshaw, Cap’n Mike, I’ll set him to work on the farm if this latest spell sticks to him.”

They drove home from the village in the twilight. The Perkins boy had tarried to do the chores and kindle a fire for supper. He fled without his hat when the big, silent, red-haired stranger marched into the kitchen, halted to look at the blazing grate, and promptly caught up a pail of water from the sink and flooded the stove. Johnny Kent entered a moment later and gazed aghast at the dripping, sizzling embers. Then his common-sense got the better of his annoyance and he shouted to O’Shea:

“Bill’s gear is still reversed. Coax him out on the porch and hold him there while I get supper. He just put the stove awash.”

O’Shea laughed and took charge of the derelict, while Johnny locked the kitchen doors and windows and rekindled the fire. Freed from the fear that the cottage and barn might go up in smoke, the comrades enjoyed a quiet evening. Maguire was disposed of in the attic bedroom and insisted on going to bed in the dark.

“He will not wander away,” said O’Shea. “His wits are in a sad mess, but he knows he has found a friendly anchorage.”

They felt the need of sleep, and Johnny Kent was yawning before he had heard the end of the interview with His Excellency Hao Su Ting. It entertained him, but the edge of his interest was blunted. The hapless sailor in the attic had been struck down and mutilated by some secret organization of Chinese assassins, and there was no finding out the meaning of the brand upon his back. It was their trademark. This was explanation enough. It satisfied the engineer’s curiosity. He had no great amount of imagination, and although he was ready to share his last dollar with the helpless Maguire, he felt no further call to pursue the mystery of his wrongs.

Captain O’Shea was very differently affected. He had not forsaken the quest of adventure. His soul was not content with cabbages and cows. The world beyond the horizon was always calling in his ears. As children are fond of fairy-stories, so his fancy was lured by the bizarre, the unexpected, the unknown. Your true adventurer is, after all, only a boy who has never grown up. His desires are wholly unreasonable and he sets a scandalous example. If you had asked him the question, this rattle-headed shipmaster would have frankly answered that nothing could give him more enjoyment than to sail for China and try to discover how and why the brand had been put on Maguire. Besides, he had an Irishman’s habit of taking over another man’s quarrel.

“Poor Bill cannot square it himself,” reflected O’Shea. “’Tis the duty of some one to undertake it for him. It makes an honest man’s blood boil to think of the black wickedness that was done to him. As long as the heathen are contented to murder one another ’tis no business of mine. But an American sailorman--and maybe he is not the only one.”

When he went downstairs in the morning, Johnny Kent was in the barricaded kitchen and Maguire paced the porch with the air of a man physically refreshed. He paid no heed to O’Shea, who was amazed to discover that he was talking to himself. The sounds he made were no longer inarticulate, but words and fragments of sentences curiously jumbled. In the stress of great excitement he had previously spoken with brief coherence, only to lapse into dumbness. Now, however, with no sudden stimulus to flash a ray of light into his darkened mind, he was beginning to find himself, to grope for expression like a child painfully and clumsily learning to read. To the listening O’Shea it sounded like heaping phrases together in a basket and fishing them out at random.

The sailor’s voice had lost much of its harshness. Its tones were rather deep and pleasant. Swinging his long arms as he walked, he kept repeating such disjointed ideas as these:

“_Heave her short--eleven dollars Mex--no, Paddy Blake--a big wax doll--all clear forward, sir--stinking river--roll the dice--the painted joss--a year from home--way enough--Wang Li Fu--die like rats--sampan, ahoy--no more drinks--good-by, Mary dear--in the paint locker--the head-devil--fish and potatoes._”

It made O’Shea feel dizzy to listen to this interminable nonsense, but he followed it most attentively, and stole behind a lilac-bush lest Maguire should spy him and be diverted from his mad soliloquy. For some time there was no catching hold of a clew, but at length the shrewd shipmaster began to sift out certain phrases which were emphasized by reiteration. They were, in a way, the _motif_ of the jargon, hinting of impressions most clearly stamped on the man’s mind.

He mentioned again and again “_the painted joss_,” and occasionally coupled it with reference to “_the stinking river_.” Stress seemed to be laid also on the proper name _Wang Li Fu_. Many of the other fragments O’Shea discarded as worthless. Some of them related to routine duties on shipboard. He hazarded a guess that the sailor was a married man. At any rate, he had left a “Mary dear,” and it was a plausible conjecture that he had promised to bring home “a big wax doll.”

When Maguire became silent O’Shea made for the kitchen and hammered on the door.

“Is that you, Cap’n Mike?” responded the perturbed accents of Johnny Kent. “If it’s Bill, he can stay out till breakfast’s cooked. I don’t want my stove drownded again.”

Reassured, he cautiously admitted the shipmaster who pounded him on the back and shouted:

“Bill has been leakin’ language from every pore. ’Tis all snarled up most comical, but I seem to get hold of a loose end now and then.”

“Hooray, Cap’n Mike! It’s just as I said. When you hit him over the ear it sort of jarred his brain loose. It ain’t fetched clear yet, but he’s begun to make steam in his crazy fashion. What does he say?”

“Wait till I tow him in to breakfast and maybe he will start up again.”

But Maguire ate in silence and O’Shea could not persuade him to pick up the rambling monologue. Johnny Kent therefore escorted the sailor to the garden, gave him a hoe, and thriftily set him to work. He fell to with the greatest good-will and showed an aptitude which betokened an earlier acquaintance with this form of husbandry.

After a discussion of some length the engineer exclaimed:

“You’re a bright man, Cap’n Mike, but you haven’t knocked around the Chinese ports as much as I have. Bill mentioned one or two things that I can elucidate. Paddy Blake, eh? So he knows Paddy Blake. The blackguard runs a sailors’ rum-shop in Shanghai. It’s just off the Bund, as you turn up the street that’s next to the French Concession. I’ve rolled the dice for drinks there myself and blown my wages and mixed up in some free-for-all fights that would have done your heart good.”

“’Tis a glimpse into the fog, Johnny. Maybe this rapscallion of a Paddy Blake would know poor old Bill if he had a description of him. We can guess at some of the rest of it. Bill went up a Chinese river somewhere and got in black trouble ashore. It had to do with a temple and a joss.”

“One of them big carved wooden idols, Cap’n Mike, painted all red and yellow and white.”

“And it looks to me as if he stumbled into a headquarters of this bunch of thugs that has been dealing out sudden death to prominent Chinese citizens, Johnny. Anyhow, he ran afoul of some kind of a ‘head-devil,’ as he calls it, and was left for dead.”

“Then it’s possible that Bill knows the secret of this organization of cock-eyed murderers,” excitedly cried the engineer.

“The same notion is in me own mind,” replied O’Shea.

A dusty man just then rode a bicycle into the door-yard and dismounted to give the shipmaster a yellow envelope.

“I guess you’re Captain Michael O’Shea,” said he. “The station agent got this telegram for you and asked me to stop and deliver it, seein’ as I was passin’ this way. How are you, Mr. Kent? Seen anything of that pesky firebug? I see you’ve got a new hired man in the garden.”

“I’m thankful to say the firebug is letting me alone,” gravely answered the engineer.

“I cal’late he heard the selectmen had offered a reward for him and he lit out of this neighborhood.”

The messenger departed, and Captain O’Shea, glancing at the telegram, crumpled it in his fist and vouchsafed with a laugh:

“’Tis from the man in New York, the agent in charge of that voyage to the Persian Gulf. For political reasons the job is postponed a matter of six months or so, and maybe it will be declared off altogether. The charter is cancelled and my contract along with it.”

“I suppose you’re disappointed,” sympathetically began Johnny Kent.