The Ruby of Suratan Singh: The Adventures of Scarlet and Bradshaw, Volume 2 , livre ebook

The Ruby of Suratan Singh: The Adventures of Scarlet and Bradshaw, Volume 2
by
Theodore Roscoe

Altus Press • 2018
Copyright Information

© 2018 Steeger Properties, LLC, under license to Altus Press

Publication History:
“Moon Up” originally appeared in the October 12, 1929 issue of Argosy magazine (Vol. 207, No. 2). Copyright © 1929 by The Frank A. Munsey Company. Copyright renewed © 1956 and assigned to Steeger Properties, LLC. All rights reserved.
“The Blue Cat of Buddha” originally appeared in the March 22, 1930 issue of Argosy magazine (Vol. 211, No. 1). Copyright © 1930 by The Frank A. Munsey Company. Copyright renewed © 1957 and assigned to Steeger Properties, LLC. All rights reserved.
“The Little Gold Dove of Gojjam” originally appeared in the June 21, 1930 issue of Argosy magazine (Vol. 213, No. 2). Copyright © 1930 by The Frank A. Munsey Company. Copyright renewed © 1957 and assigned to Steeger Properties, LLC. All rights reserved.
“Claws” originally appeared in the July 1930 issue of Action Stories magazine (Vol. 9, No. 11). Copyright © 1930 by Fiction House.
“The Ruby of Suratan Singh” originally appeared in the July 21, 1930 issue of Argosy magazine (Vol. 213, No. 5). Copyright © 1930 by The Frank A. Munsey Company. Copyright renewed © 1957 and assigned to Steeger Properties, LLC. All rights reserved.
“The Phantom Buddha” originally appeared in the December 1930 issue of Far East Adventure Stories magazine (Vol. 1, No. 4). Copyright © 1930 by Fiction Publishers.

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 Everard P. Digges LaTouche and Gerd Pircher
MOON UP
Under the night-witchery of the moon in a weird valley of old India, anything can happen—and does

PROLOGUE
MOONLIGHT. To this day it brings the narcotic, heady scent of jungle flowers and green river to my nostrils; chases a cold chill down to the pit of my stomach; and conjures in my mind the vision of Dr. Habighorst as I saw him first—a quaint gnome trudging a kobold’s trail; and as I saw him last—milted to a pair of eerie eyes a-glitter in the moonray.
Weird, unpleasant memories, these; especially the picture of those bodyless optics shining like miniature moons in the moonlight on the sand, while the echo of desperate screaming still lingered among the black crags across the green river. Those bodyless glass disks—all that was left of Gulick Habighorst and his unknown assailant.
You may wonder, in reading, at the ready part I played in this bizarre story. You may believe me to have been ingenuous, or unwitting. Read through to the end, then, and recall your own shortcomings. Remember, too, the setting—Asia; India; the Orient. The very cradle of things strange. Have you ever caught the inscrutable stare of a Hindu fakir’s eye, or known the subtly mysterious taste of a mango? There is a magic atmosphere east of De Lesseps’s Canal impossible to Denver, Detroit or Old Broadway. And those of you who have succumbed to legerdemain in the fairly rational atmosphere of Denver, Detroit or Broadway can imagine me in that thoroughly irrational, Orient-steeped valley of Houglan Ra.
As for the moon: go out into your sane American back yard any clement night, and see how irrational and improbable and ethereal she seems, somehow a phenomenon not to be taken for granted. The sun is friendly, wholehearted, masculine. The moon is aloof, feminine. Being a woman, she is given to subtleties. She is difficult to divine, illogical, possessed of a mysterious secretive way. Always she casts a spell. And when she dwells East of Suez, her powers are doubled. She’s a little nearer earth out there. Aren’t these lines from “Othello”?
It is the very error of the moon;
She comes more nearer Earth than she was wont,
And makes men mad!
This is an East-of-Suez story. A story about moonlight and men made mad.

CHAPTER I
NIGHT VISITOR
CERTAINLY that valley of Houglan Ra lay under the spell of the East. You have heard the phrase, “spell of the East”? Yes; it came from that jungle-infested little ravine sliced out of the Himalaya foothills to allow a crooked river to come sneaking down from the peaks. The valley of Houglan Ra. Oriental witchery simmered there between those clay-colored cliffs, and it was a place where no Christian man belonged.
There was a little and ancient Buddhist shrine squatting among the banyans of the valley’s upper end, and when the hot breeze stirred its temple bell the valley was beyond relief. The bell emphasized the quiet, and the valley of Houglan Ra was too quiet to be healthy.
I sat on the bungalow veranda, sipping gin slings and listening to the silence. It occurred to me that the valley was always listening for something, too. There was no noise. Leaves rustled on the stalwart branches of the giant peepul tree commanding the center of the compound. The jungle that screened us in was whispering. Somewhere off a tiger coughed in its striped throat and startled a bevy of sleepy parrakeets into squeaking. But there wasn’t any noise.
Mardo, my Punjabi native boy, squatted on his hams atop the veranda step and murmured out his evening devotionals. “Ram, ram, ram, ram, ram, ram—” But the prayer was scarcely audible; wasn’t a sound. It fitted in, like the whisper of the peepul blossoms, the tinkle of the temple bell, the throaty cough of the tiger. It “belonged.” But it made me nervous as I stared across the compound into an old-rose twilight that made a pattern of shadows among the cottonwoods and palms. I shouted at him to stop, and, naturally, he didn’t. “Ram, ram, ram, ram, ram, ram—”
There was a monkey in the bungalow, and she began to cheep uneasily. The bungalow belonged to Holmes Bradshaw. You have heard of Holmes Bradshaw, the gaunt Kelantan naturalist. As a collector his name is known from Khartum to the Celebes Seas. It was he who donated the American Museum of Natural History its famous aardvark (Orycteropus capensis); donated the Berlin Hall of Science its sole specimen of the rare climbing fish (Anabas scandens); and donated Port-Light Pete Wong, the famous China Coast renegade, a bullet in the belly.
Early that summer I had encountered him in Bombay, and the usual libationary rituals of old-time college mates meeting ten years later in an out-of-the-way corner of the world were indulged. After a round of Scotch and sodas, he had dug into his pocket and handed me a key. Did I want to do some real hunting, some tiger shooting in a corner of the Orient that was one hundred per cent Orient? The key opened his bungalow up there. His house boys would take care of me; I would find a rack of guns; and there were tigers and plenty of game.
In a few weeks or so he would follow me and we could shoot together. He wanted to trek a river up there and shoot a few giant gavials to send the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. There were gavials in that river measuring twenty-two feet in length; and if I didn’t get myself a prize crocodile hide and a few choice tiger skins, he didn’t know the place.
That had been some two months past, and Bradshaw had failed to show up. Frankly, I was a bit dismayed at staying there alone. I hadn’t bagged my tiger, and I was going a bit deaf from quinine. Houglan Ra was a lonely cranny of the world with that temple bell tinkling softly into the jungly stillness and Mardo squatting like a wraith in the evening dusk, murmuring his prayer to Rama, the seventh incarnation of Vishnu, ruler of Hindustan. “Ram, ram, ram, ram, ram, ram—” A devout chap, Mardo.
“SAHIB,” Mardo spoke suddenly, “some one is coming. Footsteps come up the trail from the south.”
That was Mardo. I tell you, there were times when the skinny Hindu made my flesh crawl. Here he had been squatting on the edge of the veranda, wrapped in a spiritual lethargy, eyes as vacant as the soul of a brass image. Then suddenly he could pivot on his heels, grin at me with a mouth made crimson by betelnut juice, and proffer the information that some one was coming up the trail.
Undoubtedly he had caught a sound foreign to the jungle quietude. No use in asking him how he heard such things, though. He would not admit he had heard. He would tell you he felt it, in his finger tips. He was a son of those jungle-clad foothills, and he often told me how the spirits of the night communicated with him.
“An enemy of mine in Peshawar has voted me a curse in his shrine tonight, sahib. It has dealt me the colic. Would the infinitely kind sahib loan me a drink of his whisky to ease the pain?”
Or: “Ah, sahib, the night wind brings me evil news. My aged mother in Calcutta died five minutes ago. Would the genial sahib —a gentleman and a prince, by the Oath of the Cow—loan me a few pice with which to condone the gods and salve her departed soul?”
Amazingly enough, in the latter case I found out later that his mother had died on the night in question. Perhaps there was something in the rascal’s dirty finger tips after all.
Now he pointed a crooked thumb at the trail where it twisted atop the crest of a black sand cliff behind a wedge of palms, then ducked down through the trees and wandered up to the compound gate.
“Watch there, sahib. Soon you will see our visitor. No doubt it is the B