CHAPTER XVI
GRAY CARRIES ON
As his friend had predicted, Gray was able to watch his compass by moonlight, within an hour. It was a clear night. The stars were out in force with a trace of the white wisp clouds that hang above a dry, elevated plateau.
Sir Lionel was out of the game, and with him the Kirghiz hunters. Gray was alone for the first time since his visit to Van Schaick the evening that he had contracted to find the Wusun. He smiled grimly as he thought how matters had changed.
Here he was at the gate of the Wusun, the captive race. But Sir Lionel had found them hardly what Gray expected. A leper's colony is not a pleasant thing to visit. And this one was unusually well guarded. Behind these guards, in the ruins of Sungan, was Mary Hastings.
This thought had gnawed at the American's heart for the past twelve hours. The girl he loved—he could no more conceal that fact from himself than he could lose sight of the Gobi—was among the lepers. Was she alive? He did not know. The guards of Sungan did not seem overmerciful. But why should they kill her?
No, he reasoned, she was alive. She must be alive. And she was waiting for help to come. She might have discovered that her uncle had escaped in the fight before the ruins. And she knew that Gray was coming to Sungan in their tracks.
What Gray was going to do after he found the girl, he did not know. He had long ago discovered that a multitude of difficulties confuse and baffle a man. He had trained himself to tackle only one thing at a time; not only that, but to think of only one thing. If he found Mary, there would be time to consider what would come next.
The thought of the girl urged him on, so that it was hard to keep an even pace. But he was aware of the uselessness of blind haste. He struck a steady gait which he could keep up for hours, a swift walk that left the dunes behind rapidly.
These dunes, he noticed, were not as high as at first. The desert was becoming more level, the soil harder. At some points the clay surface appeared between the sand ridges.
Gray did not try to eat. Nor did he drink, knowing the folly of that at the beginning of a march. In time he would do both, not now.
The man's powerful frame enabled him to keep up the pace he had set without fatigue or loss of breath. This was the secret of Gray's success as an explorer—his careful husbanding of his great vitality, and his refusal to worry over problems that lay in the future.
When the vision of Mary flashed on him as he watched the summits of the dunes, silvered by the cold moonlight, he put it aside resolutely. The last sight of the girl—the slender figure perched jauntily on the camel as she rode away after their quarrel—tormented him from time to time. In spite of himself an elfin chord of memory visioned the friendly gray eyes, and the delicate face of Mary Hastings.
Gray set himself to considering his situation, realizing that he had desperate need of all his wits if he was to face Sungan and its people.
First there was the puzzle of the camel tracks that had frightened Mirai Khan. These tracks had been left by the party that had attacked Sir Lionel and himself. They had been sighted the day before.
It was possible that the first prints they had seen were those of one of their enemies, and that this man had carried the news of their coming to his companions. It would have been easy for the men of the camel feet—as Gray thought of them—to trail his party without being seen among the dunes. Or else, they might have been following Sir Lionel.
Gray decided that this was what had happened. The men of the camel feet had been tracking the Englishman.
This deduction led to another. The Hastings party had been attacked. Failing to turn them back, their assailants might have sent word of their approach to Sungan.
"Let's see what I know," mused Gray methodically. "Camel feet armed with guns beaten off by Hastings' caravan—send news to Sungan. Ambuscade prepared at Sungan ruins for Sir Lionel. He walks into it. After attack by lepers, camel feet take up pursuit of him, tracking him back to well, where they engage us."
Then the camel feet constituted a kind of outer guard of Sungan. They were poor fighters and seemed to have no heart for their work. The men who had wiped out the caravan were another kind. Sir Lionel had distinctly said they were not armed. They were lepers.
There was then an outer and an inner guard of Sungan. The outer—composed of an indifferent soldiery—had been seen by the missionary Brent. The captive these guards had been pursuing had undoubtedly been a leper, escaped from the colony.
Had Brent been done to death by the Chinese who knew what he had seen? If so, then Mary
Gray groaned at the thought and the muscles of his jaw tightened.
"I'm through the outer guards," he forced himself to reason. "But there's one thing that calls for an answer. Why do the Chinese force the lepers to drive off intruders? The poor devils are not good fighters. No better than the driven dogs Sir Lionel pictured them. They must have a hard master."
It was possible, of course, that the Chinese priests who were masters of Sungan had forced the lepers to attack the caravan as a last resource, after Sir Lionel's men had driven off the outer guards. In China human life has a low value, and that of a leper is a small matter. Such a proceeding would be in keeping with the cruelty of the priests—who saw their own power and the prestige of ancient Buddha waning with the inroads of civilization.
He was growing physically tired by now, to some extent. This growing weariness took toll of his thoughts, and brought the image of Mary before his memory.
He pictured her as he had first seen her—a slender figure in the bright tent, mistress of well-trained servants. Gray had loved her from the first. It seemed to him it had been a long time. As nearly as he had ever worshiped anything, he worshiped the girl.
There had been no other women in his life. He smiled ruefully, reflecting upon his blundering effort to help the girl. And she was now far removed from his help. It appalled him—how little he might be able to aid her.
With another man, this fear might have turned into reckless haste, or blind cursing against the fate that had befallen Mary Hastings. Gray pressed on silently, unhurried, the flame of his love burning fiercely.
In this manner he would go on until he had found her, or those who had taken her. There was no alternative. Mirai Khan would have said that Gray was a fatalist, but Mirai Khan did not know the soul of a white man.
"If only I am not too late," he thought. "I must not be too late. That could not happen."
Gray had no words to frame a prayer. But, lacking words, he nevertheless prayed silently as he walked.
The stars faded. The moon had disappeared over the plain in front of the American. The dunes turned from black to gray and to brown, as the sunrise climbed behind him.
Gray sat down on a hillock, and drew out his flour cakes. These—some of them—he chewed, washing them down with water from his canteen.
Had Sir Lionel lived to see that day? Gray thought not. Mirai Khan's prophecy had born fruit.
A few feet away an animal's skull—a gazelle, by the horns—peered from the sand. Gray watched it quietly until the sun gleamed on the whitened bone. Then he rose, stretching his tired limbs, and pressed on.
Late that afternoon he sighted the towers of Sungan slightly to the north of his course.
Working his way forward, Gray scanned the place through his glasses. He was on the summit of a ridge about a half mile from the nearest towers. The ruins lay in the center of a wide plain which seemed to be clay rather than sand.
At intervals over the plain sand drifts had formed. Gray wondered if it was from behind these that the lepers had advanced on the Hastings' caravan. In the center of the plain trees and stunted tamarisks grew, indicating the presence of water.
Throughout this scattered vegetation the ruins pushed through the sand. Sir Lionel had been correct in his guess that the desert sand had overwhelmed the city. Gray could see that only the tops of the tumble-down walls were visible—those and the towers which presumably had been part of the palaces and temples of ancient Sungan. Even the towers were in a ruined state.
They seemed to be formed of a dark red sandstone, which Gray knew was found in the foothills of the Thian Shan country, to the north. He judged that the structures were at least five or six centuries old. He saw some portions of walls which were surmounted by battlements. And the towers—through the glasses—showed narrow embrasures instead of modern windows.
The sight stirred his pulse. Before him was the ancient city of the Gobi that had been the abode of a powerful race before it was invaded by the advancing sands. Past these walls the caravan of Marco Polo had journeyed. The great Venetian had spoken of a city here, where no modern explorers had found one. He had called it Pe-im.
And in the ruins Mary Hastings might be still living, in desperate need of him.
What interested Gray chiefly were the people of the place. He was too far to make them out clearly, and only a few were visible. This puzzled him, for Sir Lionel had mentioned a "pack of lepers."
He was able to see that the people were of two kinds. One was robed in a light yellow or brown garment. Several of these men were standing or sitting on ridges outside the ruins. Gray guessed that they were sentinels.
Furthermore, h& believed them to be priests. The other kind wore darker dress and appeared from time to time among the ruins. They were—or seemed to be, at that distance—both men and women.
The thought of the girl urged Gray to action. It would be the part of wisdom to wait until nightfall before entering the city. But he could not bring himself to delay.
He was reasonably sure, from the conduct of the men acting as sentinels, that he had not been seen as yet. He had planned no course of action. What he wanted to do, now that he had an idea of the lay of the land, was to get hold of one of the men of Sungan, leper or priest, and question him about the white woman who had been taken prisoner.
Mary had been in Sungan at least three days and nights. Surely the people of the place must know of her. Once Gray had an idea where she was kept, he would be able to proceed.
The venture appeared almost hopeless. How could he enter the ruins, find the girl, and bring her out safely? What would they do then? How was he to deal with the lepers, whose touch meant possible contagion?
But he was hungry for sight of Mary—to know if she was still alive. He could not wait until night to learn this. He marked the position of the nearest men in his mind, returned the glasses to their case, loosened his automatic in its sheath, and slipped down from his lookout behind the ridge.
"I've cut out sentries," he mused grimly, "but not this kind. They don't seem to be armed."
In fact, the men of Sungan were not armed—with modern weapons. But they had a deadly means of defense in the disease which bore a miserable death in its touch.
Gray, for once, blessed the continuous dunes of the Gobi. He went forward cautiously, keeping behind the ridges and edging his way from gully to gully, crawling at times and not daring to lift his head for another look at the sentinels he had located.
His sense of direction was good. He had crawled for the last half hour and the sun was well past mid-day when he heard voices a short distance ahead.
Removing his hat, Gray peered over the sand vigilantly. He found that he had come almost in the line he had planned. A hundred yards away two figures were seated on a rise. They wore the yellow robes he had first noticed.
As he watched, one rose and walked away leisurely toward the ruins. The other remained seated, head bent on his clasped arms which rested on his knees. There was something resigned, almost hopeless, in the man's attitude.
Gray waited until the first priest had had time to walk some distance. Then he wriggled forward alertly.
He had no means of knowing that others were not on the further side of the ridge where the sentry sat. But he heard no further voices, and he had ascertained carefully before he set out that these two were isolated.
Reasonably certain of his prey, Gray pulled himself from stone to stone, from depression to depression. Once the man looked up,—perhaps at a slight sound. Then his head fell on his arms again. Gray rose to his feet and leaped toward the ridge silently.
Eyes bent on the still figure of the priest, he gained the foot of the dune. The man stiffened and raised his head, as if he had sensed danger. Gray was beneath him by now, and stretched out a powerful arm.
His hand closed on a sandaled foot and he pulled the priest down from his perch. Gray's other hand clamped on the man's mouth, preventing outcry. They were sheltered from view from Sungan by the ridge, and the American believed no one would notice the disappearance of the priest.
"If you cry out, you will die," he said in Chinese, kneeling over the other. Cautiously he removed his hand from the priest's mouth.
"Tell me—" he began. Then—"It's a white man!"
He peered at the dark, sunburned face, and the newly shaven skull.
"Delabar," he said slowly. "Professor Arminius Delabar, minus a beard. No mistaking your eyes, Professor. Now what, by all that's unholy, are you doing here in this monkey rig?"