THE puzzling, intermittent flashes came again, distinctly, as Neill McNeill, with his back to the sun that was just lifting above the horizon that rimmed the golden-brown desert, gazed with a troubled forehead at the spot where the phenomenon had appeared. He did not like it, he told himself, even while he strove to find some natural explanation for the dazzling streaks that came, irregularly enough, yet with a precision that hinted at some systematic method of production, flickering like miniature lightning from the low western hills whence their little caravan had recently emerged.
It might be caused, he thought, by the level rays of the rising sun shot back from the shoulder of a ledge heavily flaked with mica, shifting from the various facets with the changing angle of the golden beams, but he had not noticed any indications of mica in those sandstone hills and he was apt to notice such things. It was his business as a professional traveler and adventurer to do so.
Another series of the flashes started and flickered out, and McNeill shook his head slightly.
"I'm hanged if I like it," he said just above his breath. "Looks as if some one were signaling in Morse, though if it were Morse I could read it; it may be a Chinese code at that. If so, who are they talking to? There's something fishy about this hurried return trip. The old boy was in too much of a hurry to get back to Peking and—I wonder!"
His gaze wandered over the sleeping camp. Two mangy camels, sulky even in their sleep, lay with their heads stretched out on snaky necks. A dozen pack and saddle horses, dwarfed and shaggy, stood dejectedly about at the end of their pickets.
By the side of his own dog-tent was the humped canvas where Howard Remsden snored on one side of a primitive screen while, on the other, his stepdaughter, Helen, slumbered far more gracefully and easily. Spoked out around the ashes of last night's lire sprawled half a dozen Mongols. As McNeill looked keenly at these, counting them, first one and then another writhed and twisted in the sleep that was already beginning to be disturbed by the sun. There had been a long trek the night before, and man and beast had been exhausted before the dry camp had been pitched.
Suddenly McNeill gave vent to a short exclamation and swiftly, silently passed over the sand, soft and fine as ashes, closer to the fire and the sprawling Mongols. His lips parted in a smile as he peered closely at the nearest figure—lifeless, a huddle of clothes and dirty sheepskin.
"Neat trick that," he told himself. "Slipped out of his duds. Now then——"
His practised eyes easily picked up the trail of sandal-prints that led from the group, over low waves of sand that so blended in the strong, level light as to give a false suggestion of flatness.
His hand dropped to an automatic, holstered at his right hip, as he swiftly crouched to a kneeling position, one hand supporting him, the other on the grip of his gun, while he stretched his neck and looked over the crest of a shady billow.
His dark blue eyes matched the hue of the steel of the pistol, gleaming, through narrowed lids at the almost naked figure that squatted on the farther slope facing the spot where the flashes had shown in the hills. A brown, long-lingered hand clutched a disc of polished silver tilted so as to catch the sun-rays flaring off at premeditated intervals, a long or short glare of intense light as the curving hand rocked back and forth on the supple, sinewy wrist.
One flash caught McNeill fairly in the eyes and made them water. He noiselessly shifted his angle and then inched back, rose upright, strode past the Mongols and dived into his dog-tent from which he almost immediately emerged and started to shout at the sleeping men in their own dialect, with a vigor that soon brought some semblance of concerted action from them. A fire was started and preparations made for the morning meal.
The man who had been manipulating the silver mirror appeared, yawning as he came over the low dunes. He was of the northern clans, a giant in stature, as tall as McNeill, even broader-shouldered and with arms that swung his hands close to the knee-caps. A long knife, unsheathed, flashed red on his thigh. He hailed McNeill with a morning greeting, and the latter responded with jaws that shut grimly after the salutation.
"It's the first time I ever saw them mirror-talk in China," Neill was thinking, "but there's no reason why they shouldn't. Lots of things I haven't seen and never will. And those priests——?
"We'll start in fifteen minutes. Ling," he said to the tall headman. "We'll drink tea and eat after we get on the march."
Ling's mask of old ivory did not change, but his voice was gently deprecatory. "The master and his daughter are not yet arisen!" he said. "The beasts are tired."
"That is my affair!" snapped McNeill. "I am your master in this business and you have your orders. See that you obey!"
He could sense that the rest of the Mongols had suddenly stiffened in their attitudes, temporarily frozen, keen to some tenseness in the situation and the whip-like crack of McNeill's voice. From Ling's agate eyes showed a momentary gleam that might have been the light of any of a dozen emotions, none of them friendly. The gleam died before the steady light in the coldly blue orbs of McNeill. Ling turned away with the ghost of a shifting grin on his yellow face. To his shrill syllables two of the men shuffled off toward the camels and three others after the horses.
A flap in the humpback tent of native design was thrown back, and a girl came out, slim in her brown holland riding togs, putteed, helmeted with a pith topee, her skin slightly tanned, her eyes even bluer than McNeill's and her hair yellow as ripe corn. She was barely up to McNeill's shoulder, but there was no suggestion of delicacy about her slender figure or the free vigor with which she walked towards him.
"I suppose there is no water to spare for anything but tea," she said. "Not for myself, though I am gritty and grimy to the last degree, but father is fussing about shaving."
McNeill ran his fingers over the stiff red stubble of his own lean jaws and grinned.
"Not a chance of it before nightfall," he answered. "I wish you'd ask him to hurry. We've got to be moving. Have to eat in the saddle this morning."
She looked at him inquiringly but turned and went back to the tent while McNeill gazed after her admiringly. Then he wheeled. Ling had come up behind him noiselessly.
"Well?" asked McNeill.
"One of the camels is very sick—too sick to travel."
"Slit its throat and leave all its load. We can get along without tents for the next three nights."
Ling looked at him evilly.
"Four of the horses are badly galled," he said. "Three more are sick. We have come too far, too fast. We must rest."
"You know we are short of water," said McNeill. "Why do you disobey my orders?"
"It is not possible to obey them, O, my overlord," answered Ling, his face deferential, eyelids down, his soft voice impudent.
Back of him the Mongols had gathered in a half-ring, looking covertly out of almond eyes that glittered like those of snakes.
McNeill's left arm shot out, caught the waist-cloth of Ling and drew the giant toward him. Ling's right hand shot down to the haft of his knife, but, swifter still, McNeill had drawn his automatic and jabbed its blunt muzzle hard into the stomach of the Mongol.
"You dog," he said, "drop that knife! Drop it or——"
Ling's unwrinkled lids were wide now. In his stare came the red light that shoots from the black opal and tells of hate and murder. But the knife dropped to the sand and McNeill put his foot upon it. Then he swiftly searched Ling for more weapons, found another knife and a cheap revolver with three cartridges in the cylinder. The shells he tossed far away with a jerk, flinging the pistol after them.
"Miss Remsden!" he called.
The girl came running out of the tent. Behind her followed a stout man with a fussy, important face that was scorched rather than tanned, whose clothes fitted him badly and became him worse; a bow-legged, bow-stomached person who most evidently essayed to be a personage and who strutted like a gosling. His pale gray eyes were inclined to pop and now they strained at the action going forward.
"What's this McNeill, what's this?" he demanded in a pompous voice. McNeill paid no attention to him, speaking to the girl.
"My rifle—in my tent! And then get yours!"
She got the first and sped back for the second. McNeill stepped back from Ling who had stood immovable since the dropping of the knife. The muzzle of the rifle swung in an arc of command about the semicircle of Mongols.
"First to move, moves once only," warned McNeill. "Now then, Mr. Remsden, please go over them carefully and remove all their weapons. Miss Helen will help you cover them one by one as you go about it."
Remsden's red face had gone patchy and his hands shook but the nervousness of the man was evidently purely physical. He was not a coward and he nerved himself up to his task, backed by the girl. At McNeill's directions he tossed the miscellaneous assortment of weapons into a heap. The latter ordered Ling to make them into a bundle, using a sheepskin and tying the package firmly with strips of leather.
"I'll carry this," said McNeill, "till we come to the first hole, dirt or water. Now then break camp, leave the tents and heavy baggage. Saddle up! Jump!"
They jumped and McNeill, rifle at carry, walked to his own tent and picked up his field-glasses as the Mongols, spurred into feverish activity, stripped down the canvas. McNeill focussed his lenses and looked anxiously toward the western hills. After a little hesitation Remsden came over to him.
"What have you found out, Neill?" he asked. "What was it? A mutiny?"
McNeill turned on him.
"I'll answer you that question," he said, "when you tell me what you were up to at the temple. I suspected something when you wanted to come away in such a tearing hurry."
Remsden blinked at him from between his sandy eyelashes.
"Why there was nothing to stay for any longer," he said. "We had seen the ritual. I had got all I wanted."
"I don't doubt it," said McNeill. "The point is, what did you get?"
Remsden blustered.
"I employed you as guide and interpreter, Mr. McNeill, not to poke into my private affairs."
"As things have turned out they are my private affairs," said McNeill coldly, "if my life is my private affair, which I think it is. To say nothing of your stepdaughter's life, I don't know just how highly you value your own."
He broke off to hasten the final preparations for departure. The girl was already mounted. Remsden got patchy again and then his face flamed angrily.
"You have given me no explanation," he barked. "I repeat that whatever I do on this trip for which I hired you, has nothing to do with the contract. What has happened?"
"I caught Ling heliographing to a party in the hills," said McNeill briefly. "I think he was answering orders to delay us. I took up a collection of their cutlery to prevent a throat-cutting. I don't know yet whether I have succeeded. Look at that dust cloud there where the sun catches it. That's a party after us and they will come swiftly. I'll bet a thousand dollars they are priests of the Hoang Lung."
He caught the shifting of Remsden's eyes and nodded.
"I thought so," he added. "I don't know what you've been up to, but it's three days to Peking, seventy-two hours, and just about a seventy-two to one shot that we don't get there. Better get on your horse, Mr. Remsden. Ling, that's the pass you talked about last night, isn't it? How far is it?"
He pointed to two dark purple juts low on the eastern rim of the plain. Ling's eyes glinted.
"Twelve hours," he said. "If the horses and camels hold out."
"They'll have to. But we won't go that way Ling. We'll strike south until we strike the Chang-Li River. We'll keep in the gullies out of sight. I'm going to ride in the rear, Ling, and if I think, or if I should just happen to think, that you are trying to signal back any change of our plans, I'll shoot the lot of you. I'll defile your bodies and leave them to the vultures. I'll cut off your queues and burn them to ashes. Get my meaning? You do? Then start!"
Ling snarled like a trapped wolf, openly, forgetting to mask his feelings. McNeill grinned back at him. The girl rode over to the latter's side and he changed the grin to a smile as he surveyed her fearless eyes and her trim seat on the pony.
"We are in some danger, Mr. McNeill?" she asked. He looked at her and frankly nodded.
"And then some," he added, a bit grimly. "Thank God I'm not afraid to tell you. But we are going to get out of it all right."
"I'm sure of that," she replied quietly and rode ahead to join her stepfather.
McNeill's smile came back as he surveyed her. As the little caravan descended into a shallow ravine with rocks protruding here and there through the sand like dry bones, he began to whistle softly. A scrap was forward, and McNeill loved a fight. It was only when he thought of the girl that the muscles in his jaws tightened and the whistle was interrupted.
Back in the western hills the dust cloud moved swiftly down and out into the plain, steel points and blades twinkling here and there as the sun pierced the veil of floating soil.