Read Online The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge by Robert J. Pearsall - Free Book Online

Maxon had sanity enough left to push it before him through the window. He followed the chair head first, and Hardridge plunged through the opening after him.
    I was delayed a little in unlocking the door. I stepped out into a fantastic hollow of ragged rocks, flooded here at the ravine’s beginning with moonlight. There was a narrow pass to the right, but Maxon had missed that pass. And he and Hardridge were leaping like shadows straight down toward Land’s End.
    Maxon seemed to be straining to stop. Perhaps he saw the railing and memory came to him of what was beyond it. But his pace was so great and the grade was so steep that he could not check himself all at once, and he brought up against the railing with such force that it creaked and sagged outward under the impact. But it still held.
    And Hardridge clutched him. But, by the time I got close enough to see clearly, Maxon had seized Hardridge’s wrists and was prying them outward and slowly loosing Hardridge’s grip on his throat. He wrenched Hardridge’s hands away, and Hardridge gripped him around the body.
    But Maxon gripped him likewise and began to bend Hardridge’s body backward.
    “Oh, they’ll be killed. Can’t you— Oh!”
    Miss Maxon had come up, frightened, sobbing. She would have run up to them and thus put herself in danger, but I held her back.
    “My dear Miss Maxon! My dear Miss Maxon!”
    There was nothing else I could say.
    I turned and saw how very like an open door was the end of the cañon. Beyond that door the sky sparkled with stars, and the waters beneath the stars reflected their light. But the water at the base of the cliff must have been too unquiet to reflect it. I could hear it roaring as it surged over the rocks, and I imagined it stretching up white and hungry fingers.
    “Can’t you stop them!” cried Miss Maxon.
    One more look I took at the place where the two men had struggled. Then I stepped between Miss Maxon and that place and urged her gently back toward Cragcastle. For Hardridge, knowing himself overmastered, had suddenly yielded and somehow dragged Maxon with him under the railing. Maxon gripped the edge of the rock, but Hardridge tore his grip relentlessly away. And so there came an end to the bad beginning made many years before.
    I reflected, as I picked a way up the uneven cañon bottom, that the quivering woman whom I led would probably some day be mistress of Cragcastle, since her father was now heir to the Maxon fortune. In that case they could well afford the loss of the sapphire.
    WE PARTED at the base of the mountain, Miss Maxon and I. It was not late, and we could go different ways quite unnoticed into Mill Valley and thence to San Francisco. If the thing that had happened at Cragcastle were ever discovered, there was no possibility that she’d be connected with it, even in thought. While as for me….
    “I’m sorry you’re going back to China,” she said.
    Of course she would be, for I’d told her absolutely nothing of my errand there, unraveling the mystery of the Ko Lao Hui leadership. If she had known what was ahead of me, she would have been glad my eagerness to be at it was to be gratified.
    “You have been—well, fine,” she said.
    I murmured a few deprecating phrases.
    “And—wonderful. I’ve been trying to guess—how much of it all you had planned out ahead. The escape of Hardridge, for instance.”
    “Well?” I questioned noncommittedly.
    “You pretended it was accidental. But I found the string with which you pulled back the bolt of the closet door. That was no accident.”
    “Maybe not,” I replied.
    Frankly, it pleased me a little that she had discovered it.
    “And then you knew—that father would inherit—”
    “Miss Maxon,” I said, “there’s no pursuit so interesting as the pursuit of motives, and none as profitless.”
    She laughed a little.
    “To think,” she remarked, “that, when I think of you—as I shall quite often—I’ll always have to call you to myself