The Golden Cat: The Adventures of Peter the Brazen, Volume 3

Loring Brent, George F. Worts

Description

Peter the Brazen is back! In this next story in the series, Jonathan Driggs, journeying in search of his love, Gloria Dale, has learned that she was become the mistress of Fong-Chi-Ah, fiend of all Asia. At the same time, the Golden Cat—a symbol of the long-absent Queen Shari—has been stolen. Elsewhere in China, wireless operator Peter Moore receives a message from a "Gloria Dale:" a mysterious woman seemingly kidnapped, and wearing a Golden Cat around her neck.... Written by long-time Argosy author George F. Worts under his primary pen-name, Peter the Brazen made a marked impression on Argosy reader Lester Dent when he co-created Doc Savage. The saga of Peter the Brazen is amongst the best adventure series in the history of pulp fiction.

Sujets

• High Adventure
• Pulp Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Altus Press
• Date de parution: 04 décembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788829567010
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Golden Cat
The Adventures of Peter the Brazen, Volume 3
by
Loring Brent

Altus Press • 2018
Copyright Information

© 2018 Altus Press

Publication History:
“The Cat of Gold” originally appeared as “The Golden Cat” in the November 22, 29, and December 6, 13, 20, and 27, 1919 issues of Argosy magazine (Vol. 114, No. 4–Vol. 116, No. 1). Copyright © 1919 by The Frank A. Munsey Company.
“About the Author” originally appeared in the August 2, 1941 issue of Argosy magazine (Vol. 309, No. 5). Copyright © 1941 by The Frank A. Munsey Company. Copyright renewed © 1968 and assigned to Steeger Properties, LLC. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Special Thanks to Gerd Pircher
CHAPTER I
THE WAYFARER

“The Sphinx must solve her own riddle.”
—Emerson.
AT the summit of the rise he drew rein with an exclamatory outgiving of breath. The surprise was thorough, as if a brown curtain had been unexpectedly snatched aside. Momentarily all of his impulses were numbed. And yet the man on the mule was inured to the astonishments of this life; experience was bitten into his weathered countenance—the hard, seasoned lines told you that.
There was, to be sure, an appalling grandeur in the prospect from the mountain brow. This firm, dark road drooped, ribbon-like, from the granite shoulders of the pass to the coiling blue river which was impressed like a python between banks green as the emerald.
A half mile from the blue river on the opposite shore an ancient city was established, and this was a city that might have been spilled from a jewel casket. It was a hand-painted poem of a city, with tiny houses peeping like bright toys from a brilliant rainbow garden, all held within walls ivory in their virginal whiteness.
A mist grew in the traveller’s eyes. He had been thoroughly unprepared, and surely the richness of its coloring and the ripe greenness of the plain on which centuries ago it had been erected were enough of themselves to pluck the breath from any unsuspecting wanderer.
That was a reasonable explanation. Unpreparedness added to contrast. The man had been pressing onward for hours through gulleys and ravines chopped into fruitless rock. Since dawn, since noon of yesterday, he had been following the unfamiliar trail through a sinister land of browns and grays.
Once in a while he had paused reluctantly for food or a few minutes’ relaxation under an unhappy cembra pine, or, in the lower reaches, where water bubbled at its thoughtless will, a starving date-palm bearing no fruit. On the whole the country through which he had journeyed most recently was a wrack of parched mountains, a harsh, lonely wilderness. Browns and grays were relieved only by the blue of the heaven, and even this at times oppressed him with its unbroken smoothness.
Since dawn of the new morning he had proceeded more rapidly along the treacherous road, urged onward by the delicious scent of the river which crept more sweetly into the crumbling hills as the miles were unrolled. Without warning he had approached the last of the ridges which barred him from the surprise. His mind was saturated with the hateful grays and browns when he reached the final rise in the road.
It was like peeping through the gate into a forbidden Oriental paradise.
The green-satin valley, the python that was a blue river, the miraculous city flung themselves at him and into him. He was no worshipper of scenery; too much of it had been spread under his sage young eyes. His immediate burst of laughter was only an expression of ecstatic relief, and the few intermingling tears were only an indication that the torture endured in the horrible country behind was taking its leave.
The nostrils of the mule he rode and of his smaller pack-mule quivered ardently at the touch of the river’s breath. A breeze was flowing up the mountain side flavored intoxicatingly with valley odors. The sweetness of rose blossoms, of flowery cinnamon, of water lilies, in contrast with the arid, deathly atmosphere of an hour ago, could almost be tasted.
Weary and hungry, Jonathan Driggs sat in his saddle and devoured the tropical city. Ly-Chang was brought all but within reach of his tired fingers by the clearness of the drowsy, sunlit morning. Yet he was unaware of the soft flood of odor carried up with the breeze, unaware of the tender and aged voice of a far-away temple bell.
And while he stoutly professed to dislike scenery, yet his youthful imagination was ravished by all of it. He could not express his thoughts, even to himself, or to the sympathetic and understanding mule, who had mournfully accepted his confidences during the hundreds of terrible miles from the Goblin Gobi.
The mind of Jonathan Driggs was in a roseate uproar. He was miserable; he was filled with the happiness of blissful anticipation—divided between the possibilities of the bitter disappointment and the joyful discovery which that fragrant city had in its power to give him.
It is said by the philosophically wise that a man madly in love is a fool, and in that respect Jonathan Driggs was a noteworthy one. He had been riding furiously for more than a month from the northern borders of Thibet to reach Ly-Chang and the girl who held his happiness in the palm of her hand.
She had been a child the last time he saw her. From Afghanistan to the Sungaria, from the Shamo into China proper, he had killed one mule after another by hard riding—to lay his heart and a diamond trinket at the exquisite feet of the child matured.
Can you imagine any man displaying foolishness so consistently? If you have wandered into the remote corners, you have probably glimpsed such a man, for each is typical of the other. Somewhere along the bund of Shanghai when the green lights are coming on, he steps ashore from a battered sampan; you are given a startling glimpse of murky eyes, of powerful chin, of bizarre garments—a disciple of Romance.
At the Metropole, in Panama, you see him again—boiled to furious redness by the Chagres sun and swollen pitifully with bites administered by the man-loving chigger, yet competent to adorn the bar rail and down some favorite and exotic liquor of amazing power.
You hear the whistle of his footsteps in the lonely singing sands at Rio, the wails produced by his fevered brains as coolies carry him limp from the jungles into Zanzibar, or Singapore. You admire him, you envy him, you disapprove of him, and sometimes you understand him. He toils not, neither does he spin. He is all that your youthful and romantic twenties urged you to be.
And only in your rapturous twenties can you properly understand and sympathize with his impulsiveness, such as the rare impulsiveness which sent Jonathan Driggs from an Italian convalescent hospital at the termination of the war into the festering heart of China, via Afghanistan and the Desert of Gobi and other unspeakable places, to lay his gift and his heart at the feet of a somewhat unattainable angel.
Centuries ago the untainted white walls of Ly-Chang were erected on the western slope of the Si-Kiang, a river which flows into the Bogue, at Canton, becomes the Pearl at that point, and ventures into the China Sea not far from where Hong Kong the beautiful endeavors to rule the morals and the commerce of this portion of the Eastern world.
Ly-Chang was Jonathan Driggs’s goal, but not his destination, for his destination might prove to be any of the places I have mentioned, where adventurous youth may be glimpsed madly pursuing grails and girls of exciting and frequently unadvertised character.
As a matter of fact, Driggs had made a detour some thousands of miles in extent in the hope that Gloria Dale might have continued her one-time residence in Ly-Chang with her adoring father. If Gloria Dale had taken herself to Shanghai or elsewhere, thither Jonathan Driggs intended promptly to take himself and his offering. He harbored no doubts of the outcome in any case.
The theatrical vision of the city and the winding blue river forced new vigor into him. Days and days ago he had lost the enormous yellow fiber hat he had picked up in a Sungarian village; he had, indeed, joyfully witnessed its mad flight over a mountain of black glass, where a furnace-like blast roared and ripped through that particular valley. The loss was negligible. His shapely head upheld a mass of curly brown and the deep brown eyes were sheltered by the strong and prominent forehead of the reasoner.
Days of pitiless tropical sunshine, unhampered by the diamond-clear lower Himalayan atmosphere, had roasted his firm skin to a ripe and pleasing tan. There was a rare, hungering quality in the smile he addressed to the ancient city when he began his descent.
The mule he was riding and the smaller animal that supported his provisions and sleeping roll might not have sensed the glorious promise of the city that came out of a jewel casket. If the flame-like pagoda and the groves of kanaros and banyans did not inspire them, certainly the fragrance of the Si-Kiang made up the loss fully, for they trotted eagerly down the brown ribbon-road to an obvious fording place and drank until their foolish sides were swelled.
Jonathan Driggs, while he indulged them, devoted himself to pointed questioning. Would Gloria Dale comprehend and approve the kind of love that had burned in his soul for years, that had propelled him recklessly across seas, and deserts, and mountains filled with snow, toward a city which had exerted some curious fascination upon her?
He had written to her careful, gently questioning letters, none of t