The adventures of Captain O'Shea

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

This trifling mishap, gave O’Shea a desperate opportunity. With a flash of his normal agility he leaped across the intervening space. The comprador strove frantically to free the weapon, but only entangled it the more. The episode was closed before the crimson-robed personage could play a part. O’Shea’s shoulder rammed Charley Tong Sin and sent him sprawling, and the revolver was instantly wrested from his grasp.

“The doors are locked,” panted O’Shea, “and before your men break in, I will send the both of ye to hell. Sit where you are, ye terrible Chung. You overplayed your game, Charley.”

The comprador seemed to shrink within his clothes. His mouth hung open and his face was ashen. He was eager to clutch at any straw which might give him the chance of life. Shrinking from the scowling presence in the chair, he began to talk a sing-song babble of words that tumbled over each other.

“I will help you get away alive if you do not kill me. Captain O’Shea, I will explain about Jim Eldridge; I will not lie to you. All the secrets I will tell you. There was a steamer, the Tai Yan, and she came over the bar from the sea in a big storm, at the time of a flood. It was do this or go to the bottom because the engines had broke. A boat with sailors rowed up the river. They were foolish men who believed the stories that gold and silver treasure was hidden in the ruins of this old Wang-Li-Fu. And they found this temple, and they knew too much.

“All but two of the men were able to run quick to the river, but Eldridge and one named McDougal ran into this place, trying to hide. They ran into the temple before they were captured. There was a little building, but now it is ashes and much sticks of burnt wood. In that building those two men were locked to be killed next day. The red-headed man was a demon, I tell you. Walls could not hold him. In the night he set fire to the building, and it was a great blaze. But he was caught and punished.”

“Ye left him for dead, and he came to,” growled O’Shea. “And so McDougal got away!”

“I can tell you more secrets,” wailed Charley Tong Sin, but his services as an informer were suddenly cut short. The huge man in the chair had raised his voice in a tremendous call for help to his followers without. Otherwise he had sat composed, glaring at O’Shea. It was his hand that slew Charley Tong Sin as a traitor. He was on his feet, the heavy chair raised aloft. He swung it with amazing ease. It was no longer a massive article of furniture, but a missile in the hands of a man of gigantic strength. His movements were not clumsy.

The chair flew through the air. O’Shea dodged, but Charley Tong Sin flung up his arms, taken unawares. The impact would have brained an ox. The whirling mass of teak smote the terrified comprador on the head and chest and he crumpled to the pavement. He was as dead as though he had been caught beneath the hammer of a pile-driver. The tableau was an extraordinary one. O’Shea stood staring at the broken body of the young Chinese. The man in the crimson robe stirred not from his tracks. Implacable, unafraid, he had executed the last sentence of The Sect of the Fatal Obligation.

The people outside were clamoring at the doors, and O’Shea heard the thud and crash of some kind of an improvised battering-ram. He sighed and found the thought of death at their hands very bitter. But he would not go alone. He faced the great and terrible Chung and slowly raised the revolver.

The arch-assassin bade him wait with a gesture so imperious, so mandatory, that O’Shea hesitated. The bearing of the man held some large significance. His dark, evil countenance expressed rather sadness than wrath. He slid a hand into the folds of his robe and raised the hand to his mouth. Whatever it was that he swallowed wrought its work with swift and deadly virulence. Swaying like a tree about to fall, he strode to the marble altar and fell across it with his head buried in his arms. In this posture he died, in front of the image of the glowing Buddha, whose graven lineaments seemed to express the unholy ambitions and emotions of his own soul.