CHAPTER XXIV
In the Clutch of the Tongs
THE next day there was still no word of Basil, and at the Steamship Company’s hong the tangle was steadily tightening.
Holman sat glowering at a telegram he was reading for the third or fourth time, but looked up impatiently as a Chinese clerk came in and stood waiting to speak.
“What now?”
“Coolie men talkee muchee. No plenty money, no can do plenty work.”
“Fetch the compradore here,” Holman snapped, thrusting the telegram into his waistcoat.
“Can do,” the clerk said, and went out.
Tom Carruthers stood by the window, doing nothing in particular, but watching with a rueful, puzzled face the seething, jabbering coolies outside. He swung round as the clerk went. “I say, Holman, what is all this? A third demand to-day for more wages!”
Holman pushed a ledger aside abruptly. “That’s what I am trying to find out, young man,” he said—“just exactly what it all means.”
The compradore came in a moment—a middle-aged Chinese, as capable looking in his way as Holman was in his. He stood waiting stolidly for the manager to speak, but Holman delayed a little, measuring the Mongol with his shrewd blue eyes before he said: “Look here, compradore, what the devil is the matter with your coolies now? Why have they struck work again, and why the blue blazes have you let them, when you know how late we’re with the loading of the Fee Chow already, that she’ll miss the tide if there’s more delay, and that she must not miss the tide? Eh?”
“Coolie men talkee muchee”—the compradore said it sadly. “They talkee stlikee.”
“Strike!” Tom Carruthers cried. “Strike! That’s the limit! A strike halfway through loading. You damn well tell them——”
But Holman interrupted sharply, “Hush, Mr. Carruthers, please. Leave this to me. Now, compradore, what’s the grievance? Come, out with it, chop, chop!”
“Coolie man likee work,” the compradore replied gently, “no likee money. No plenty money, no can catchee plenty Chow-chow. They talkee me they wantee more money.”
“All right, then——” Holman began crisply.
“What?” Carruthers broke in excitedly. Holman paid no attention to that, but continued to the Chinese, “Tell them double pay if she’s loaded up to time.”
“Can do,” the other answered, and went slowly out.
“Well, I’m blowed!” Tom gasped.
Holman went wearily to the window, and stood watching moodily the human yellow kaleidoscope. The compradore was among them now, and gradually the trouble cooled and slacked, and the men began to slouch off to work, but reluctantly, the manager thought. Things looked ugly to him—very ugly.
“I say, Holman,” Carruthers persisted impatiently, “isn’t that playing rather into those chaps’ hands?”
Holman was furious—he had been furious for days now—and he welcomed some human thing upon which he dared to vent his rage. He was “about fed up” with the frets and troubles of the last week. He fixed Tom Carruthers with a vindictive eye. “See here, Mr. Carruthers,” he spat out, “if I have any further interference I’ll resign instantly—understand? I managed this branch for years, until the governor took a notion to come out. Well—he’s a genius at business, and I’m proud to take my orders from him. But somehow, the very devil’s in it these last two weeks, and we’re up against a bigger proposition than you—or the governor either—have any idea of. I’m doing my best to cope with it, and, by heaven——”
“Sorry to upset you, old chap,” the other interrupted regretfully, “but, believe me, this succession of disasters has just about whacked me.”
“Oh! all right,” the older man said, relieved by his own explosion, and easily mollified after having let slip the snappy little dogs of his badly over-tried temper, “I haven’t the heart to show this to Mr. Gregory,” he said, taking the wire from his pocket into which he had thrust it, “damned if I have.” He spread the flimsy paper out on the desk, and sent Tom a glance that was an invitation. He wanted sympathy, even that of the “somebody’s son sent out to learn the business,” as he contemptuously said of Carruthers when he did not call him “a flannelled fool.” The latter gibe was not quite fair. Tom usually wore ducks, as Holman himself did—you had to in Hong Kong—and though the younger man did squander (if it were squandering) a good deal of time with Hilda Gregory, he only gave a reasonable, wholesome amount to rackets, cricket, and Happy Valley racecourse.
“On top of all else,” Holman continued, “look here!”
Tom came and stood at Holman’s chair, and read over his shoulder. “Good God, Holman!” he cried, “the Feima sent to the bottom!”
“The biggest and finest ship in our fleet,” the other said bitterly. “Mutiny of the coolies—they scuttle the ship and bolt with the boats two days out!”
“This will about kill him!”
Holman nodded. “And look here”—he struck the ledger near him with an angry fist—“I say, do you know anything about safes?”
“Not much.”
“Well, ours is the finest made. And the one make that is ‘safe.’ There probably aren’t a dozen artists that could pick it—all told, Sing Sing, Portland, Joliet—that could pick it in a week. Well, look here; this ledger was taken from the safe—I suppose one night a week or more ago—the page referring to the dock negotiation torn out—and so prettily you can’t see that it was ever in, except for the missing number—and the ledger returned to its place and the safe relocked without so much as a scratch being left to show how it was done.”
“No wonder we were outbid for the site—somebody knew our price!”
“Knew our price!”—he closed the ledger with a bang, and slapped it. “Why, damn it, man, somebody’s got us tied in a knot, and it’s being drawn tighter every day—every hour.”
“It’s beyond me, Holman!”
Holman rose and laid his hands on Tom Carruthers’ shoulders. “Mr. Carruthers, you don’t for one moment believe this awful—simply awful—sequence of disasters to be due to accident, do you? Sunken ships, docks burnt to the water’s edge, strikes on shore, mutinies afloat, and—and above all—the disappearance of Mr. Basil?”
“I don’t know what to believe—I simply don’t. What does it all mean, Holman? I say it looks like some curse, don’t you know, come home to roost!”
“You are in the confidence, quite outside of business, of Mr. Gregory,” the manager said, sitting down again heavily—“of Mr. Gregory and his family. I want to ask you a straight question.”
“Yes?”
“Do you know of any one thing, however slight, that Mr. Gregory may have done to upset Wu Li Chang?”
“Wu Li Chang?”
“Yes, or ‘Mr. Wu,’ as he’s mostly called by the Europeans.”
“No,” Tom said decidedly, seating himself on the table—that was one of his ways that ruffled Holman—“no, absolutely no. Why, only the other day—Thursday, wasn’t it?—we visited at his place—it was there, you know, that the last was seen of Basil, except for his having been seen here, on the island, with two other Europeans later that same evening.”
Holman smiled sourly. “Who saw him?”
“Why, those Chinese johnnies who brought the information to Government House.”
Holman grunted. “Volunteered the information, didn’t they? Went direct to the Governor instead of lodging information with the police in the usual way?”
“Yes.”
“Basil Gregory was no more seen by those Chinamen than I possess the Koh-i-noor.”
“What?” Carruthers stood up in his surprise.
“Take it from me,” the other said emphatically, “in some manner Mr. Gregory has stung Wu Li Chang, and, by Jove, that wound will want some healing.”
Tom Carruthers was hopelessly puzzled. “Well,” he said slowly, “just who is this chap, Wu Li Chang? And what’s his strength?”
“I’ve been here for twenty years,” Holman told him, “and in all that time there’s been just one man I’ve made it a point to steer clear of, in business and out of it—a strong personality, possessed of unlimited wealth, mixed up in every big deal in Hong Kong, swaying a sinister power that we Europeans cannot understand. Mr. Wu is hardly the man to cross swords with. No European can afford to; and there’s only one of his own race who ever got the better of him, and that was only momentary, for he was never seen again.”
“You mean——”
“The inevitable where Wu is concerned!”
“But how on earth,” Carruthers said, “could Mr. Gregory have offended such a man?”
Holman gestured his inability to answer that, but persisted, “There’s no doubt about it. To you all Chinamen look alike, but they don’t to me. And I’ve seen men, whom I know to be in Wu’s employ, mixing with our coolies for days now. There are two of them down there now—to my knowledge—and probably more. And I know for a fact that several such shipped in the Feima; every man jack of ’em is a Highbinder—member of one or other of the rival tongs.”
“Tongs?” Tom queried. “That means secret societies, doesn’t it?”
“You bet your life it does: secret societies that are secret, guilds that are a monster-power—the greatest power in China, the only power that Tze-Shi is afraid of. There are two or three in every province—a heap more in some. And our friend Wu is Past Master of the whole bally lot of ’em. Most of the mandarins hate the tongs, and are in deadly fear of them. But Wu knows a game worth ten of that: he handles them—the ‘White Lily’ (about the dirtiest of them all), the Triad (that bunch made the T’aiping Rebellion), the Shangti Hui (the Association of the Almighty, if you please), and that prize band of villains, the Hunsing Tzu, and the devil knows how many more. I tell you, Mr. Carruthers, we’ve got to get to the bottom of this thing, and get there quick, or there won’t be a stick left in China belonging to the Company, or a vessel on the high seas flying its flag.”
“Well, old chap,” the junior said cheerfully, “Mr. Gregory is no schoolboy. He’ll give this cursed gentleman of tongs and mystery a run for his money—a damned fine run—I’ll have a bet with you, any odds you like—and we’ll have a damned lot of fun watching him do it. But, I say, we don’t know that you are barking up the right tree; but if you are—and admitting for argument’s sake that Mr. Gregory has offended this top-dog Chink or whatever he is—I say, why the deuce should Lord High Pigtail want to take it out of Basil?”
Holman—his mother had been a Scotchwoman—had a tingling suspicion why, but he shrugged his shoulders and evaded, saying didactically, “When you’ve been in China as long as I have, you’ll know as much about their ways and their motives as I do, and that’s—nothing!”