"BEYOND THE MOON"
At noon the next day Trent drove to the station where Tambusami, having attended to his luggage, was waiting. The Englishman looked for Kerth among the travelers on the platform, but saw no one who even resembled him. However, he reflected as the train pulled out, Kerth might have changed his identity and passed within a foot of him without his knowledge!
When Pegu lay behind, he shifted his attention from the "Rangoon Gazette" to the endless panorama of paddy fields and scrub jungle. Yet he could not altogether divert himself. Invariably the landscape faded, to be replaced by the recollection of some recent scene: the court of the joss-house; the ride along Strand Road with Euan Kerth. But more frequently his mind was possessed with an image of starry luster and russet hair. The memory of Dana Charteris occurred suddenly, unexpectedly, in the very midst of other thoughts. She seemed a central force about which musings, retrospections and quandaries revolved. He found himself separating from their short association certain incidents and looking back upon them as through stained glass. He pictured her under the black and gilt scroll in the Chinese quarter; in the dusk of the Bengali theater; in the bow of the Manchester, beneath the sprinkled flame of tropic stars. These portraits arranged themselves in a mosaic—an exquisite inlay of romance. Romance. He clung to the word. "The doctrine of Romance and Adventure—" She had said that "... in mellower years, to close your eyes and dream of wandering in the 'Caves of Kor' or the time you spent on a pirate island." She had the spirit of youth eternal—youth with its orient mirages. He was having the Great Adventure now. Soon it would be over. And then? Back to the old routine—medicines and sun-scorched villages. (The thought was new, strange. Had he ever been a doctor? It seemed so long ago!) But in the years to come, at night, over his pipe, he could dream of it all. The memory of things—that was life's recompense for taking them away.
Shortly after seven o'clock he arrived in Mandalay. As he left his carriage, he saw a familiar figure—Kerth, scar, drooping eyelid and all; saw him again, an hour and a half later, when he boarded the Myitkyina train.
A perceptible coolness invaded the carriage that night, and when Trent awakened in the morning he looked out upon jade-green hills. The scenery, as well as the people who stood on the railway platforms, had changed. Great fern trees and immense clumps of bamboo grew on the hillsides.
Evening was pouring its dusky glamour over the world, and the far, misty ranges of the China frontier had purpled when Trent left the train at Myitkyina, the terminus of the Burma Railway. He caught a glimpse of Kerth hurrying away in the twilight as he despatched Tambusami to the P. W. D. Inspection Bungalow to see if quarters were available there; and, after numerous inquiries, took himself into the bazaar, to the shop of Da-yak, the Tibetan.
The latter proved to be a languid person with a blue lungyi twisted about his hips. He inspected Trent with narrow, inky-black eyes, and led him into a back-room that stank of the hundred nameless odors of the bazaar. There he glanced lazily, indifferently, at the coral symbol that the Englishman showed him.
"We expected you yesterday, Tajen," he announced indolently, in atrocious English; and Trent wondered who the "we" included. "I am instructed to tell you to go to the Inspection Bungalow and wait. I will call for you later in the evening; in an hour, perhaps."
Which concluded the interview.
Trent decided immediately that Da-yak, the Tibetan, was of no consequence, merely a mouthpiece.
He returned to the station, where he had arranged to meet Tambusami. There he waited for at least fifteen minutes. The native was in a high state of excitement when he finally arrived.
"Guru Singh is here, O Presence!" he reported. "I saw him down by the river. He was in a boat, going upstream. I cried out to him and called him a liar and a thief, and he told me I was a bastard! The swine! He knew well I could not get my hands on him!"
"And you let him get away?" Trent demanded.
"What could I do, Presence? There was a Gurkha nearby, but I knew the Presence did not want the police to interfere with his business. Think you I would have let him go after he called me that, could I have prevented it?"
Trent wasn't so sure; but he only said:
"Very well. What about quarters?"
"All is arranged at the bungalow, Presence."
Thinking of what Tambusami had told him, Trent left the station, the native at his heels. He wondered. Did Guru Singh's presence mean that the woman of the cobra-bracelet was in Myitkyina?