A RIDE—CHINESE STYLE
“Stay quiet—don’t move, and keep smiling,” was Captain Hugh North’s warning when Ruby sharply drew her breath and started up.
The intruder, he saw, was shaggy and wild-looking, clad in a ragged gray-cotton soldier’s blouse of the sort worn by coolies lucky enough to escape from some tuchun’s army. On either side of the first intruder two more hollow-eyed individuals had appeared, who, though they wore ragged clothes of quilted cotton, bore all the distinguishing marks of ex-soldiers. These also had leveled heavy Lugers as though they were very familiar with their use.
Though badly shaken, North gained “face” by managing a cool smile when the muscular leader, after gesturing threateningly for silence, leaped down into the garden. His companions promptly swarmed over the glass-crowned wall top with the protection of a leather bag such as thieves often employ.
Well-screened from the house by the pergola’s fragrant jasmine blossoms, the trio advanced over the lawn, the pistols in their grimy hands gleaming a deadly blue-black.
Hunting frantically for some ruse, North felt his last hope dissipated when two more Chinese clad in the livery of house servants appeared and silently lowered a ladder over the wall.
The big fellow in the soldier’s coat, his yellowish eyes roving suspiciously back and forth, drew nearer with one knotty finger held to his lips. Though North’s every instinct urged him to put up a wild, frantic struggle, cold logic told him it would mean death to move a muscle. He continued to look on as if the affair were nothing but a rather crude game.
Silent as evil-smelling shades, the man’s first two followers gained the pergola and there covered the two whites, while their leader advanced to a corner of the hedge and from that point of vantage studied the house with minute care.
North stole a glance at Ruby who, obviously terror-stricken and trembling violently, had sunk back on the couch, the only color in her face being her carefully tinted lips.
“Yao shen—mo? What do you want?” the American risked a soft query, but, “Pa ya, yang kuei-tze!” was all the answer he got.
What did this mean? North wondered furiously. Who was behind this move? Had Steel double-crossed him? Or had Smith, scenting treachery, decided on an efficient removal from the scene of both traitor and corrupter?
Silently, their bloodshot eyes alert, all three invaders now closed in.
“No noise. You go ’long ladder top side,” directed the leader, who polluted the garden freshness with the rank exhalations of garlic.
North’s rising hope that his shoulder holster might go unnoticed was eclipsed when, just before he quit the pergola, a powerful coolie lacking two front teeth ran hands over his person. Emitting a grunt he snatched out North’s cherished .32 and thrust it into a rope belt above the skin of his gaunt and very dirty belly.
Ruby at first seemed unable to stand, so great was her fear, but a man in a ragged black coat snatched at her wrist and hauled her to her feet. Losing her head, she tried to cry out, but the coolie, who wore a queue coiled about his conical skull, instantly clapped one hand over her mouth and with the other snatched out a dagger which he pressed threateningly against the agitated curve of her breast.
“Plenty quiet,” was the soldier-leader’s warning hiss, “or make dead. Savvy?”
Though inwardly raging at this disastrous blow and preparing to risk his life in an attempt to call Chao Ku, North obediently but slowly mounted the ladder, hoping against hope that one of the house servants might see and give alarm.
But to his deep dismay North presently realized this hope was vain; the point where the ladder had been planted must have been carefully selected, for the foliage of a plum tree eclipsed it from sight of the house and North presently found himself standing in an unkempt garden behind the house to the right of Ruby Braunfeld’s.
Sick with apprehension, the captive Intelligence Captain watched the appearance of Ruby who, white faced, clambered so awkwardly to the wall top that it seemed she must lose her balance. How ridiculously out of place her ostrich-plumed mules looked when, wide-eyed with terror, she hesitated before attempting the eight-foot drop to the ground.
“Fly, then!” The Chinese behind Ruby gave her a brutal shove so that she lost her balance and tumbled over, fortunately landing on a pile of decayed mulch which so broke her fall that her only harm was fright and loss of breath.
Twice North had drawn his breath to cry out, but each time his guards had pressed their pistol muzzles deeper between his ribs.
Making no single waste motion, the kidnapers drew the ladder back over the wall and removed the leather sack. This accomplished, the one in the soldier’s blouse pointed towards the house to which this garden belonged.
Once he had passed into a musty kitchen North was seized and his hands were bound behind him with cruel tightness. Feugh! Involuntarily his nostrils wrinkled at the stench of these greasy, half-naked rascals working over him.
Ruby, it appeared, had fainted after her fall, for two of the shaggy band had carried her like a gorgeous life-size doll into the house, quite unconscious that the loosened splendor of her hair and her blue pajamas formed a dramatic contrast to their soiled rags.
“Look here,” North began in that unimpressed tone which alone can inculcate respect in ignorant Chinese, “me no savvy what want. No have got money.”
“Pa ya!” The leader dealt his prisoner a cuff that neatly tripped him and sent him sprawling onto the dirty floor. Damn! So they were going to lash his ankles, too. Blacker still grew the outlook when a gag of dingy cotton cloth was thrust between his teeth.
Helpless as a mummy, he lay quite still, watching his captors paw and gloat over the unconscious woman. Many were the smiles and the loose-lipped grins of the starvelings as they worked to secure the coaster’s delicate limbs.
“Must keep my head,” North counseled himself after he had all but strangled in an attempt to rid himself of the gag which bruised his lips like a crushing hand. “Chao Ku will get suspicious if I don’t appear before long—Steel, too, if he hasn’t double-crossed me.”
It was infuriating to lie helpless on the hard floor, his cheek pressed into a pile of gritty dirt, when, close by, five good men were eager to help him. His meditations came to an abrupt end when the four coolies tramped in carrying two of those sedan chairs of a sort used in China when Marco Polo first marveled at the splendors of Cathay.
North’s faint hopes grew even paler when he reasoned that he and the other prisoner were soon to be carried to some destination doubtless very far from Caucasian eyes. Back into his retentive memory crept tales of certain horrors known to have occurred amid the stewing slums of Chapei and the Native City.
What was that story of the Belgian whose eyelids had been stitched together before he had been sent naked to reel about a room studded, floor and walls, with razor-edged blades? To the last detail he could recall his sight of the Swede who had died because, disemboweled, his ventral cavity had been filled with red-hot sand. Sweat coursed in acid torrents into his eyes as he recollected the contorted features of—Enough!
He must think no more of such things.
It required all his will power to maintain that calm which alone could preserve some semblance of “face” when coolies, redolent of garlic, bundled him into one of the strongly built sedan chairs. It was, he saw, fitted with strong blinds which effectively excluded all view of the outer world.
Taken for a ride in a Chinese tumbril! Idiotically he commenced to laugh, even when the shutters and doors of the dull-green painted conveyance were locked down. He saw himself to all intents and purposes as helpless as one of those pigs that were every day carried into the city, imprisoned in a sort of basket and hanging feet uppermost from a pole. The pig had one on him, he mused; he couldn’t even squeal!