Never-Fail Blake Part 9

"That means there 's nothing in it for me," she complained with pouting-lipped moroseness. Her venality, he began to see, was merely the instinctive acquisitiveness of the savage, the greed of the petted child.

"No more than there is for me," Blake acknowledged. She turned and caught up a heavily flowered mandarin coat of plaited cream and gold.

She was thrusting one arm into it when a figure drifted into the room from the matting-hung doorway on Blake's left. As she saw this figure she suddenly flung off the coat and stooped to the tea tray in the middle of the floor.

Blake saw that the newcomer was a Chinaman. This newcomer, he also saw, ignored him as though he were a door post, confronting the woman and a.s.sailing her with a quick volley of words, of incomprehensible words in the native tongue. She answered with the same clutter and clack of unknown syllables, growing more and more excited as the dialogue continued. Her thin face darkened and changed, her white arms gyrated, the fires of anger burned in the baby-like eyes. She seemed expostulating, arguing, denouncing, and each wordy sally was met by an equally wordy sally from the Chinaman. She challenged and rebuked with her pa.s.sionately pointed finger; she threatened with angry eyes; she stormed after the newcomer as he pa.s.sed like a shadow out of the room; she met him with a renewed storm when he returned a moment later.

The Chinaman now stood watching her, impa.s.sive and immobile, as though he had taken his stand and intended to stick to it. Blake studied him with calm and patient eyes. That huge-limbed detective in his day had "pounded" too many Christy Street c.h.i.n.ks to be in any way intimidated by a queue and a yellow face. He was not disturbed. He was merely puzzled.

Then the woman turned to the mandarin coat, and caught it up, shook it out, and for one brief moment stood thoughtfully regarding it. Then she suddenly turned about on the Chinaman.

Blake, as he stood watching that renewed angry onslaught, paid little attention to the actual words that she was calling out. But as he stood there he began to realize that she was not speaking in Chinese, but in English.

"Do you hear me, white man? Do you hear me?" she cried out, over and over again. Yet the words seemed foolish, for all the time as she uttered them, she was facing the placid-eyed Chinaman and gesticulating in his face.

"Don't you see," Blake at last heard her crying, "he doesn't know what I'm saying! He doesn't understand a word of Englis.h.!.+" And then, and then only, it dawned on Blake that every word the woman was uttering was intended for his own ears. She was warning him, and all the while pretending that her words were the impetuous words of anger.

"Watch this man!" he heard her cry. "Don't let him know you 're listening. But remember what I say, remember it. And G.o.d help you if you haven't got a gun."

Blake could see her, as in a dream, a.s.sailing the Chinaman with her gestures, advancing on him, threatening him, expostulating with him, but all in pantomime. There was something absurd about it, as absurd as a moving-picture film which carries the wrong text.

"He 'll pretend to take you to the man you want," the woman was panting. "That's what he will say. But it's a lie. He 'll take you out to a sampan, to put you aboard Binhart's boat. But the three of them will cut your throat, cut your throat, and then drop you overboard. He 's to get so much in gold. Get out of here with him.

Let him think you 're going. But drop away, somewhere, before you get to the beach. And watch them all the way."

Blake stared at the immobile Chinaman, as though to make sure that the other man had not understood. He was still staring at that impa.s.sive yellow face, he was still absorbing the shock of his news, when the outer door opened and a second Chinaman stepped into the room. The newcomer cluttered a quick sentence or two to his countryman, and was still talking when a third figure sidled in.

Those spoken words, whatever they were, seemed to have little effect on any one in the room except the woman. She suddenly sprang about and exploded into an angry shower of denials.

"It's a lie!" she cried in English, storming about the impa.s.sive trio.

"You never heard me peach! You never heard me say a word! It's a lie!"

Blake strode to the middle of the room, towering above the other figures, dwarfing them by his great bulk, as a.s.sured of his mastery as he would have been in a Chatham Square gang fight.

"What's the row here?" he thundered, knowing from the past that power promptly won its own respect. "What 're you talking about, you two?"

He turned from one intruder to another. "And you? And you? What do you want, anyway?"

The three contending figures, however, ignored him as though he were a tobacconist's dummy. They went on with their exotic cackle, as though he was no longer in their midst. They did not so much as turn an eye in his direction. And still Blake felt reasonably sure of his position.

It was not until the woman squeaked, like a frightened mouse, and ran whimpering into the corner of the room, that he realized what was happening. He was not familiar with the wrist movement by which the smallest bodied of the three men was producing a knife from his sleeve.

The woman, however, had understood from the first.

"White man, look out!" she half sobbed from her corner. "Oh, white man!" she repeated in a shriller note as the Chinaman, bending low, scuttled across the room to the corner where she cowered.

Blake saw the knife by this time. It was thin and long, for all the world like an icicle, a shaft of cutting steel ground incredibly thin, so thin, in fact, that at first sight it looked more like a point for stabbing than a blade for cutting.

The mere glitter of that knife electrified the staring white man into sudden action. He swung about and tried to catch at the arm that held the steel icicle. He was too late for that, but his fingers closed on the braided queue. By means of this queue he brought the Chinaman up short, swinging him sharply about so that he collided flat faced with the room wall.

Then, for the first time, Blake grew into a comprehension of what surrounded him. He wheeled about, stooped and caught up the papier-mache tea-tray from the floor and once more stood with his back to the wall. He stood there, on guard, for a second figure with a second steel icicle was sidling up to him. He swung viciously out and brought the tea-tray down on the hand that held this knife, crippling the fingers and sending the steel spinning across the room. Then with his free hand he tugged the revolver from his coat pocket, holding it by the barrel and bringing the metal b.u.t.t down on the queue-wound head of the third man, who had no knife, but was struggling with the woman for the metal icicle she had caught up from the floor.

Then the five seemed to close in together, and the fight became general. It became a melee. With his swinging right arm Blake battered and pounded with his revolver b.u.t.t. With his left hand he made cutting strokes with the heavy papier-mache tea-tray, keeping their steel, by those fierce sweeps, away from his body. One Chinaman he sent sprawling, leaving him huddled and motionless against the orange-covered divan. The second, stunned by a blow of the tea-tray across the eyes, could offer no resistance when Blake's smas.h.i.+ng right dealt its blow, the metal gun b.u.t.t falling like a trip hammer on the shaved and polished skull.

As the white man swung about he saw the third Chinaman with his hand on the woman's throat, holding her flat against the wall, placing her there as a butcher might place a fowl on his block ready for the blow of his carver. Blake stared at the movement, panting for breath, overcome by that momentary indifference wherein a winded athlete permits without protest an adversary to gain his momentary advantage.

Then will triumphed over the weakness of the body. But before Blake could get to the woman's side he saw the Chinaman's loose-sleeved right hand slowly and deliberately ascend. As it reached the meridian of its circular upsweep he could see the woman rise on her toes, rise as though with some quick effort, yet some effort which Blake could not understand.

At the same moment that she did so a look of pained expostulation crept into the staring slant eyes on a level with her own. The yellow jaw gaped, filled with blood, and the poised knife fell at his side, sticking point down in the flooring. The azure and lemon-yellow that covered the woman's body flamed into sudden scarlet. It was only as the figure with the expostulating yellow face sank to the ground, crumpling up on itself as it fell, that Blake comprehended. That quick sweep of scarlet, effacing the azure and lemon, had come from the sudden deluge of blood that burst over the woman's body. She had made use of the upstroke, Mexican style. Her knife had cut the full length of the man's abdominal cavity, clean and straight to the breastbone.

He had been ripped up like a herring.

Blake panted and wheezed, not at the sight of the blood, but at the exertion to which his flabby muscles had been put. His body was moist with sweat. His asthmatic throat seemed stifling his lungs. A faint nausea crept through him, a dim ventral revolt at the thought that such things could take place so easily, and with so little warning.

His breast still heaved and panted and he was still fighting for breath when he saw the woman stoop and wipe the knife on one of the fallen Chinaman's sleeves.

"We 've got to get out of here!" she whimpered, as she caught up the mandarin coat and flung it over her shoulders, for in the struggle her body had been bared almost to the waist. Blake saw the crimson that dripped on her matting slippers and maculated the cream white of the mandarin coat.

"But where's Binhart?" he demanded, as he looked stolidly about for his black boulder.

"Never mind Binhart," she cried, touching the eviscerated body at her feet with one slipper toe, "or we 'll get what _he_ got!"

"I want that man Binhart!" persisted the detective.

"Not here! Not here!" she cried, folding the loose folds of the cloak closer about her body.

She ran to the matting curtain, looked out, and called back, "Quick!

Come quick!" Then she ran back, slipped the bolt in the outer door and rejoined the waiting detective.

"Oh, white man!" she gasped, as the matting fell between them and the room incarnadined by their struggle. Blake was not sure, but he thought he heard her giggle, hysterically, in the darkness. They were groping their way along a narrow pa.s.sage. They slipped through a second door, closed and locked it after them, and once more groped on through the darkness.

How many turns they took, Blake could not remember. She stopped and whispered to him to go softly, as they came to a stairway, as steep and dark as a cistern. Blake, at the top, could smell opium smoke, and once or twice he thought he heard voices. The woman stopped him, with outstretched arms, at the stair head, and together they stood and listened.

Blake, with nerves taut, waited for some sign from her to go on again.

He thought she was giving it, when he felt a hand caress his side. He felt it move upward, exploringly. At the same time that he heard her little groan of alarm he knew that the hand was not hers.

He could not tell what the darkness held, but his movement was almost instinctive. He swung out with his great arm, countered on the crouching form in front of him, caught at a writhing shoulder, and tightening his grip, sent the body catapulting down the stairway at his side. He could hear a revolver go off as the body went tumbling and rolling down--Blake knew that it was a gun not his own.

"Come on, white man!" the girl in front of him was crying, as she tugged at his coat. And they went on, now at a run, taking a turn to the right, making a second descent, and then another to the left. They came to still another door, which they locked behind them. Then they scrambled up a ladder, and he could hear her quick hands padding about in the dark. A moment later she had thrust up a hatch. He saw it led to the open air, for the stars were above them.

He felt grateful for that open air, for the coolness, for the sense of deliverance which came with even that comparative freedom.

"Don't stop!" she whispered. And he followed her across the slant of the uneven roof. He was weak for want of breath. The girl had to catch him and hold him for a moment.

"On the next roof you must take off your shoes," she warned him. "You can rest then. But hurry--hurry!"

He gulped down the fresh air as he tore at his shoe laces, thrusting each shoe in a side pocket as he started after her. For by this time she was scrambling across the broken sloping roofs, as quick and agile as a cat, dropping over ledges, climbing up barriers and across coping tiles. Where she was leading him he had no remotest idea. She reminded him of a cream-tinted monkey in the maddest of steeplechases.

He was glad when she came to a stop.

The town seemed to lay to their right. Before them were the scattered lights of the harbor and the mild crescent of the outer bay. They could see the white wheeling finger of some foreign gunboat as its searchlight played back and forth in the darkness.

She sighed with weariness and dropped cross-legged down on the coping tiles against which he leaned, regaining his breath. She squatted there, cooingly, like a child exhausted with its evening games.

"I 'm dished!" she murmured, as she sat there breathing audibly through the darkness. "I 'm dished for this coast!"