The adventures of Captain O'Shea

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

There was one chance in a million that O’Shea should have halted to wait in this precise spot where his eyes might see the thing. He dragged himself to his feet and scanned the melancholy landscape. There were no villages in sight; only the marsh and fields and a vast mound of débris to mark the place where once had stood a city. Even the walls surrounding it had been levelled. It was scarcely more than a wide-spread excrescence of broken brick and tiling partly overgrown with vegetation. The landscape could have held no more desolate reminder of the wreckage left in the wake of the Tai Ping rebels.

It was plausible to surmise that this was the real Wang-Li-Fu, the city which O’Shea had set out to find. The squalid village much lower down the river might have been founded by refugees who gave the same name to their new abode. And the villagers had been too ignorant to explain the blunder. To them there was only one Wang-Li-Fu. How Charley Tong Sin must have laughed at leaving O’Shea and his men to waste themselves in a chase that led nowhere.

It was a pallid, unshaven, tottering ghost of Captain Michael O’Shea that mustered strength to walk very slowly in the direction of the ruined city. Once he paused and became irresolute, but a little way beyond he found the imprint of a narrow shoe of European workmanship on the soft bank of a ditch. His stumbling steps led him, as by an unerring divination, toward the highest part of the great mound of débris where tall trees grew from the crumbling masonry. His painful advance became less difficult when he found a path from which the obstructions had been removed.

Presently he stood looking across a cleared space in the midst of the ruins, invisible from river or highway. In it were several small buildings and one much larger. The timbers set into its walls were carved and gilded, the curving roof of dull red tile. There was no living thing in sight. This isolated community was so situated that it was wholly concealed from strangers, and the natives of the region were apt to shun the blasted city as haunted by demons. No watchers were posted to guard against intrusion.

O’Shea crossed the open space and made for the large building, which had the aspect of a temple. Unhesitatingly he approached the massive wooden doors and found them ajar. He walked like a man in a trance, muttering to himself. Passing within, he entered a sort of anteroom partitioned by means of screens wonderfully embroidered. The stone pavement rang to the tread of his heels. The place echoed with emptiness. He pressed on and came into a room of greater extent. Its corners were lost in shadow. Rows of pillars supported the dusky rafters upon which gilded dragons seemed to writhe. The windows were small and set close to the roof and the light of early morning had not dispelled the gloom.

In the centre of the floor was an altar. Behind it towered an image of Buddha, and yet it was unlike the images of the bland and contemplative Buddha commonly to be found in the temples of the East. It was a monstrous thing. Only an artist with an inspiration from the devil could have so handled tools as to make those wooden features seem to lust after all abominable wickedness. The color of this seated statue was crimson. Amid the shadows it glowed like fire or blood. On the breast, above the folded arms, stood out in broad, black strokes a Chinese symbol or character which O’Shea recognized with a sensation of creeping repugnance.

“The Painted Joss!” he gasped.

His attention was so strongly caught and held by this malevolent image that for the moment he had eyes for nothing else. Presently, however, he became aware that another figure confronted him, a living presence. It was a man sitting in a massive chair of teak-wood, by the side of the Buddha. The bulk of him was enormous. He was both fat and mighty of frame, and not even the towering amplitude of the image could dwarf his proportions and belittle the impression he conveyed. His face was broad and heavy-jowled, the mouth sensual and cruel. With folded arms he sat and gazed at the foreign intruder. This unflinching, scornful immobility had a certain distinction. He believed that he must instantly die at the hands of this European with the white, savage face and the blazing eyes who covered him with a revolver. It was futile to cry out and summon help. As is customary with Chinese in positions of authority, this high-priest of iniquity had gone to the temple to have audience with his servitors very early in the morning. They had not yet joined him and O’Shea was quick to read his own advantage.

It was right and just that he should slay this huge man in the crimson robe who ruled the temple of the Painted Joss. He had come ten thousand miles to be judge and executioner. He was ready to kill and be killed in his turn. But the revolver was strangely heavy and it wavered so that he was unable to hold it at arm’s length. A haze bothered his vision and he could not brush it from his eyes. Something was the matter with his knees. They were giving way. With an incoherent exclamation, O’Shea fell unconscious upon the stone flagging and the revolver clattered from his limp hand. He had paid the price of exertion beyond his strength.

When his senses returned there was in his mind only the dimmest recollection of how he came to be in this dreadful place. The vagaries of fever no longer possessed him. Clear-headed but wretchedly weak and nerveless, he gazed about him and discovered that he was alone in the unholy temple. The shadows were not so heavy on the pillars, the gilded rafters, and the marble altar. The crimson image of the seated Buddha loomed flamboyant and portentous and the Chinese symbol painted on its breast was boldly outlined.