The adventures of Captain O'Shea

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

They found the village tavern, consisting of several detached buildings set in a large court-yard. The agitated landlord kow-towed himself almost black in the face, and in trembling accents expressed his desire to bestow all his goods upon the warlike foreigners if only his miserable life might be spared. He summarily ejected a few native guests of low degree, who fled without delaying to argue the matter. The invaders set the tavern coolies to sweeping and scrubbing the filthy buildings and took charge of the kitchen with its row of earthen fire-pots. There was no lack of room for men to sleep three and four in a row upon the k’angs, or brick platforms used for the purpose, and the ragged quilts were hung outside to air. In short, the tavern was transformed into a camp which had no serious discomforts.

Having taken care of his men, Captain O’Shea found leisure to ponder over the situation, a process which left him with a headache. He rambled unmolested from one end of the village to the other, searching for clues that might link themselves with the Painted Joss and the tragedy of Bill Maguire. There were two small, dilapidated temples, one of them inhabited by a few Buddhist priests in yellow robes. O’Shea was permitted to enter them and explore to his heart’s content. They were nothing more than village shrines, however, in which the perfunctory rites were held and offerings made—such places as might have been seen in a thousand Chinese towns. Nor did the village itself, excepting for an air of general decay, differ from the hamlets of a dozen provinces.

“I have a harrowing suspicion that Charley Tong Sin made a monkey of me,” ruefully sighed O’Shea, “or maybe I have been all wrong from the start. The Chinese proposition has too many twists in it for a white man to fathom.”

As a person of considerable confidence in his ability to master difficulties, his self-esteem had been dealt a hard blow. His imagination had pictured a large, stirring climax of his pilgrimage, and here he was all adrift in a wretched little village of no consequence whatever, the last place in the world to find the headquarters of a secret organization so mysteriously powerful as to cast its sinister shadow throughout China, and even across the seas. And yet the evidence had been by no means vague and misleading. Beginning with the fragmentary revelations of the demented sailor, coming next to the disclosures of poor McDougal’s diary, he had been led straight to the town of Wang-Li-Fu, on the River of Ten Thousand Evil Smells. He had felt that the hand of destiny was guiding him.

Returning to the tavern yard O’Shea found his men cheerfully making friends of the villagers and accepting the situation with the ready adaptability of true soldiers of fortune. They looked to the leader for orders, but he had none to give them. He had been placed in the ridiculous position of providing wages and rations for a perfectly superfluous expeditionary force.

“Just what did you expect to turn up in this pigsty of a settlement?” gloomily inquired Mr. Kittridge, who seemed disappointed that he had not broken a few heads. “Whatever it was, it fell flat.”

“It did that,” frankly admitted O’Shea. “’Tis a painful subject, Mr. Kittridge, and we will not discuss it now. But I am not done with the riddle of Wang-Li-Fu.”

Three days passed, and singly and in squads the invaders ransacked the village and its suburbs, poking into shops, alleys, dwellings, and court-yards and taking stock of the inmates thereof. That the people were very poor and very industrious was all that one could say of them. And they were no more to be suspected of plotting deeds of violence than so many rabbits. Doggedly persistent, unwilling to confess himself beaten, O’Shea shifted his quest to the open country for miles outside of Wang-Li-Fu. It was a region of green fields gridironed with ditches and rutted paths, and dotted with toilers in blue cotton blouses and straw hats, who tilled their crops from dawn to dark.

It was obviously useless to extend the investigation any considerable distance away from this region. If the secret was not to be unearthed in the vicinity of Wang-Li-Fu, then his conclusions had been all wrong. The villagers assured him that this was, in truth, none other than Wang-Li-Fu, and the baffled, perplexed O’Shea could not let go of the opinion that the goal was somewhere near at hand. Otherwise, why all the elaborate stratagems in Shanghai to thwart his voyage to the River of Ten Thousand Evil Smells?

He had imagined himself attacking a stronghold of some sort, a headquarters of desperate criminals who must be wiped out. But if that slippery comprador Charley Tong Sin had carried a warning to the men of the Painted Joss, he must have fled elsewhere than to this commonplace, harmless village. At any rate, it seemed absurd to tarry much longer in Wang-Li-Fu with a force of armed retainers.