Dragon's blood Part 27

He beckoned Heywood, and together they scowled at the intricate and meaningless symbols.

"All alike," complained the younger man. "Maddening." Then his face lighted. "No, see here--lower left hand."

The last stroke of the brush, down in the corner, formed a loose "O. W."

"From Wutzler. Must mean something."

For all that, the painted lines remained a stubborn puzzle.

"Something, yes. But what?" The padre pulled out a cigar, and smoking at top speed, s.p.a.ced off each character with his thumb. "They are all alike, and yet"--He clutched his white hair with big knuckles, and tugged; replaced his mushroom helmet; held the paper at a new focus.

"Ah!" he said doubtfully; and at last, "Yes." For some time he read to himself, nodding. "A Triad cipher."

"Well?" resumed Heywood, patiently.

The reader pointed with his cigar.

"Take only the left half of that word, and what have you?"

"'Lightning,'" read Heywood.

"The right half?"

"'Boat.'"

"Take," the padre ordered, "this one; left half?"

"'Lightning,'" repeated his pupil. "The right half--might be 'rice-scoop,' But that's nonsense."

"No," said the padre. "You have the secret. It's good Triad writing.

Subtract this twisted character 'Lightning' from each, and we've made the crooked straight. The writer was afraid of being caught. Here's the sense of his message, I take it." And he read off, slowly:--

"A Hakka boat on opposite sh.o.r.e; a green flag and a rice-scoop hoisted at her mast; light a fire on the water-gate steps, and she will come quickly, day or night.--O.W."

Heywood took the news coldly. He shook his head, and stood thinking.

"That won't help," he said curtly. "Never in the world."

With the aid of a convert, he unbarred the ponderous gate, and ventured out on the highest slab of the landing-steps. Across the river, to be sure, there lay--between a local junk and a stray _papico_ from the north--the high-nosed Hakka boat, her deck roofed with tawny basket-work, and at her masthead a wooden rice-measure dangling below a green rag. Aft, by the great steering-paddle, perched a man, motionless, yet seeming to watch. Heywood turned, however, and pointed downstream to where, at the bend of the river, a little spit of mud ran out from the marsh. On the spit, from among tussocks, a man in a round hat sprang up like a thin black toadstool. He waved an arm, and gave a shrill cry, summoning help from further inland. Other hats presently came bobbing toward him, low down among the marsh. Puffs of white spurted out from the mud. And as Heywood dodged back through the gate, and Nesbit's rifle answered from his little fort on the pony-shed, the distant crack of the muskets joined with a spattering of ooze and a chipping of stone on the river-stairs.

"Covered, you see," said Heywood, replacing the bar. "Last resort, perhaps, that way. Still, we may as well keep a bundle of firewood ready here."

The shots from the marsh, though trivial and scattering, were like a signal; for all about the nunnery, from a ring of hiding-places, the noise of last night broke out afresh. The sun lowered through a brown, burnt haze, the night sped up from the ocean, covering the sky with sudden darkness, in which stars appeared, many and cool, above the torrid earth and the insensate turmoil. So, without change but from pause to outbreak, outbreak to pause, nights and days went by in the siege.

Nothing happened. One morning, indeed, the fragments of another blunt arrow came to light, broken underfoot and trampled into the dust. The paper scroll, in tatters, held only a few marks legible through dirt and heel-prints: "Listen--work fast--many bags--watch closely." And still nothing happened to explain the warning.

That night Heywood even made a sortie, and stealing from the main gate with four coolies, removed to the river certain relics that lay close under the wall, and would soon become intolerable. He had returned safely, with an ancient musket, a bag of bullets, a petroleum squirt, and a small bundle of pole-axes, and was making his tour of the defenses, when he stumbled over Rudolph, who knelt on the ground under what in old days had been the chapel, and near what now was Kempner's grave.

He was not kneeling in devotion, for he took Heywood by the arm, and made him stoop.

"I was coming," he said, "to find you. The first night, I saw coolies working in the clay-pit. Bend, a moment over. Put now the ear close."

Heywood laid his cheek in the dust.

"They're keeping such a racket outside," he muttered; and then, half to himself: "It certainly is. Rudie, it's--it's as if poor Kempner were--waking up." He listened again. "You're right. They are digging."

The two friends sat up, and eyed each other in the starlight.

CHAPTER XIX

BROTHER MOLES

This new danger, working below in the solid earth, had thrown Rudolph into a state of sullen resignation. What was the use now, he thought indignantly, of all their watching and fighting? The ground, at any moment, might heave, break, and spring up underfoot. He waited for his friend to speak out, and put the same thought roundly into words.

Instead, to his surprise, he heard something quite contrary.

"Now we know!" said Heywood, in lively satisfaction. "Now we know what the beasts have up their sleeve. That's a comfort. Rather!"

He sat thinking, a white figure in the starlight, cross-legged like a Buddha.

"That's why they've all been lying doggo," he continued. "And then their bad marksmanship, with all this sniping--they don't care, you see, whether they pot us or not. They'd rather make one clean sweep, and 'blow us at the moon.' Eh? Cheer up, Rudie: so long as they're digging, they're not blowing. Are they?"

While he spoke, the din outside the walls wavered and sank, at last giving place to a shrill, tiny interlude of insect voices. In this diluted silence came now and then a tinkle of gla.s.s from the dark hospital room where Miss Drake was groping among her vials.

Heywood listened.

"If it weren't for that," he said quietly, "I shouldn't much care.

Except for the women, this would really be great larks." Then, as a shadow flitted past the orange grove, he roused himself to hail: "Ah Pat! Go catchee four piecee coolie-man!"

"Can do." The shadow pa.s.sed, and after a time returned with four other shadows. They stood waiting, till Heywood raised his head from the dust.

"Those noises have stopped, down there," he said to Rudolph; and rising, gave his orders briefly. The coolies were to dig, strike into the sappers' tunnel, and report at once: "Chop-chop.--Meantime, Rudie, let's take a holiday. We can smoke in the courtyard."

A solitary candle burned in the far corner of the inclosure, and cast faint streamers of reflection along the wet flags, which, sluiced with water from the well, exhaled a slight but grateful coolness. Heywood stooped above the quivering flame, lighted a cigar, and sinking loosely into a chair, blew the smoke upward in slow content.

"Luxury!" he yawned. "Nothing to do, nothing to fret about, till the compradore reports. Wonderful--too good to be true."

For a long time, lying side by side, they might have been asleep.

Through the dim light on the white walls dipped and swerved the drunken shadow of a bat, who now whirled as a flake of blackness across the stars, now swooped and set the humbler flame reeling. The flutter of his leathern wings, and the plash of water in the dark, where a coolie still drenched the flags, marked the sleepy, soothing measures in a nocturne, broken at strangely regular intervals by a shot, and the crack of a bullet somewhere above in the deserted chambers.

"Queer," mused Heywood, drowsily studying his watch. "The beggar puts one shot every five minutes through the same window.--I wonder what he's thinking about? Lying out there, firing at the Red-Bristled Ghosts. Odd!

Wonder what they're all"--He put back his cigar, mumbling. "Handful of poor blackguards, all upset in their minds, and sweating round. And all the rest tranquil as ever, eh?--the whole country jogging on the same old way, or asleep and dreaming dreams, perhaps, same kind of dreams they had in Marco Polo's day."

The end of his cigar burned red again; and again, except for that, he might have been asleep. Rudolph made no answer, but lay thinking. This brief moment of rest in the cool, dim courtyard--merely to lie there and wait--seemed precious above all other gain or knowledge. Some quiet influence, a subtle and profound conviction, slowly was at work in him.

It was patience, wonder, steady confidence,--all three, and more. He had felt it but this once, obscurely; might die without knowing it in clearer fashion; and yet could never lose it, or forget, or come to any later harm. With it the stars, above the dim vagaries of the bat, were brightly interwoven. For the present he had only to lie ready, and wait, a single comrade in a happy army.

Through a dark little door came Miss Drake, all in white, and moving quietly, like a symbolic figure of evening, or the genius of the place.

Her hair shone duskily as she bent beside the candle, and with steady fingers tilted a vial, from which amber drops fell slowly into a gla.s.s.

With dark eyes watching closely, she had the air of a young, beneficent Medea, intent on some white magic.