West from Ping-Yang, the old Korean capital, flows Tai-Dong River into
the Yellow Sea. Where in its mouth the flood tide weakens, and junks with
lumber slung over sides drop their brown mat sails; there, where the
clean sharp hills most beautifully are tricked with mirage and blue mist,
squats the town of Chinnampo.
Kuroki’s army landed there on the March night early in the war when the
ice, as if by magic, ground out toward China. Oiled torches spiked to
rafts bobbed on the chill stream, and the winches of blacker transports
creaked and whistled to the snowy shore. From the holds swung aloft
rice and fodder and knock-kneed, shaggy ponies. Impish guards of the
Mikado in red and green, privates in long coats and spectacles, sprang
forth rigidly on land. No noise, no fuss; the brown invasion of Asia was
furtively begun. The long barracks were ready, and they that had watched
Jap coolie sappers a-building them—beer and sweet-cake sellers from the
islands, pioneers in the new westward hegira—sat proud and bland that
night in their paper-slat doors. Meanwhile, from his desert of filth and
thatched mud huts all about, crouched cousin Korean in the darkness,
unsurprised and cynical, smoking a yard-long bamboo pipe as he dropped
soft syllables of philosophy on the vanity of effort, and with disdain
drew his wadded white robes closer.
Even when the red sun flag fluttered darkly up its pole, no cheers
followed. But from a hill overlooking the town an oath arose.
“Damn these Japs, damn their mustard bellies,” growled Captain Cyrus
Brewster, chewing a stogie on the porch of his lonely bungalow.
Isolated on his hill, the captain was just such a Yankee, thin-nosed,
blue-eyed and muffin-mouthed but with an imperishable look of youth
for all his curled gray hair, as you might find in a bungalow with a
flag-pole in front were you wrecked, for instance, off Patagonia; which
is to say he was an iconoclast, and hated the world. He shipped from
Chinnampo two million dollars a year in bullion from a gold mine near
the Yalu River, for which he was “agent;” passed white men’s food and
chemicals through the custom-house, and swore at coolies loading them on
the light-draught junks he ran to the head of navigation on the Tai-Dong,
whence carts trundled to the mines.
But worse than the world he hated the Japanese, for they militantly
coveted for barrack joists the only pine grove in the region, which
adorned his homestead. They could not seize the land without stirring
diplomatic mud, since the captain had bought his stake from the Russians,
who had eked it from Seoul in ’96, when the Jap ambassador burned the old
Empress in kerosene, and her son fled to the Slav legation. Therefore
the Islanders had threatened eviction, with smiles and insults; dickered
blandly with bows, lies, and tissue documents inkily fly-tracked, as the
captain repulsed them with a fist blow on the table, and cable blanks
inscribed with fiery messages to Washington, which he never sent.
“War news?” he’d exclaim to missionaries bound up river. “Don’t ask me,
by crotch! I don’t bother the monkeys in their damned town, and they
don’t come up here to me.”
Thus being pro-Russian and a truly brave man, Brewster felt he must
vindicate his notions in action. Having heard that a Cossack captain
near Wonsan on the west coast would be pleased to know how many men and
rice sacks landed with Kuroki, he let a young Russian travel, dressed
as a Japanese, on his junks between the lines. This fellow’s name was
Davydoff, a machinist, who patriotically had quit the mine when the war
broke out, but being lame could not enlist. In disguise, he traveled
by the name of Ikeda. I do not know how the captain squared with his
conscience in abetting a spy, but that Yankee defect is an over-worked
myth, anyhow; and a world malevolent enough to land a man, aged fifty,
alone in Korea, with a past like an erasure in a pirate’s log, should
grant indulgence.
This very hour tonight he awaited Ikeda, erst Davydoff. Now through his
night glass he searched the river, now the silent town distorted by no
flickering camp-fires, the torches, dying into iridescence, revealed
the black Tai-Dong as a covert serpent stealing across a world numb and
indifferent in white age. “Like them yeller oriental hearts, that river,”
he muttered, nodding at the stream, “reaching out acrost the world fer us
white men’s sceptres, learnin’ to smile whiles they suffer. Oh, they’ll
get the sceptres.” You see, the captain believed firmly in the Yellow
Peril. Soon he turned toward the angled thatches of the town, and a white
painted gable far from the barracks caught his eye.
His sharp features softened with recollection. “I see yer hev yer
schoolhouse lit, young missy,” he murmured. “Night school. Workin’
overtime civilizin’ Koreans.” For first the invaders had built the
barracks, then the school—copying the white man’s way in lifting a
yellow burden—which to the captain menaced a right regeneration of Korea.
The brown people thus handled the surest civilizing weapons of the white,
who were sealed meanwhile further north in their fortresses of privilege
and prejudice; so the bungalow on the hill and the schoolhouse among the
huts symbolized the passing of Asia.
“Karin San’s there,” mused the captain, and a vision of the white clad
Korean boys with long hair parted in the middle, the girls in green
silk tunics, their snub noses buried in books of English and Japanese,
uprose before him as he had seen them through the doorway, repeating the
alphabet in unison, on a day he had passed the schoolhouse. Then Karin
San had bowed low on the threshold, saying, “It is a beautiful day,
You-think-yes? I am Karin-San-the-school-teacher-of-English,” and a big
red pin had fallen from the shiny convolutions of her oiled hair, as
she bowed so low. “Great Christopher!” the captain had gasped; the same
dizziness now touched his breast as he watched.
Many times since he had visited Karin San, stealing down to the school
unknown to the Japs, or even Davydoff. He would sit beside her on her
platform, and she would turn to him for correction when her red lips
mistrusted how an English word should sound. After lessons they would
talk of Japan and America, for the captain had the reserve of age and
disappointment, and to Karin the war was no more a subject for discussion
than the coming of spring itself.
“Shame me for lovin’ you, Karin San,” he muttered now tonight. “One of
the yeller-bellies I hates. Hypocrite!” and he turned toward a gigantic
sort of dog-house under his flag-pole, where hibernated in winter and
dozed in summer, the captain’s big brown Siberian bear, Kuropatkin, which
he loved even more than his twisty pine trees. He tapped on the house
with his bamboo stick, and wished the General “Happy New Year.”
“It’s time ye waked and brushed yer teeth,” he said. “World’s a bit
livelier in these parts than when ye went to bed last year.”
The rattle of a chain told the hibernation was over, while eight hundred
pounds of shagginess squeezed into the open; tested the ground for frost
with a paw, waved its head as a man sounds a stiff neck, and as if to
say, “My! but this is early in the summer to wake a fellow!”
But the captain had stooped quickly and snatched at a red object in
Kuropatkin’s house. “Cuss them, Gen’ral!” he exclaimed, grasping a
shinbone hung with flesh. “The Japs has tried to pizen ye! Peach
kunnels,” he growled holding the meat to his nose. “But Mr. Jap
Mustard-belly ain’t so all-fired wise, and don’t know God A’mighty can’t
pizen a b’ar. He’ll learn a thing or two ’bout Rooshian b’ars some fine
day, though now he’s got the nerve and numbers to do most anything.”
Kuropatkin, cocking his head on one side, raised an ankle, and, pointing
like a setter dog into the pine-grove, let out an “Oof!”
“You see Mr. Mustard yonder?” drawled the captain, following the
General’s gaze. “You’re sayin’ you’re pretty wise, you b’ars, ain’t you?
I guess the’ ain’t no monkey law _yit_ about watch dog _or_ b’ar licenses
in this country. My timber’s lyin’ pretty loose about this hill. We’ve
likely got a vendetta on, General,” and having kicked away the poisoned
bone, the captain unhooked Kuropatkin’s ankle chain, thus freeing him.
Quite right was the Yankee about Jap nerve and a vendetta. The Islanders’
next militant move in the feud came that very night. In his French
bedstead—the only kind in Korea, with its thin iron mosquito-frame
aloft—he was wakened by a rasping, cracking sound out in his grove. Now
and then came a swish and a thump. Then——
“Yai! Yai! Eee! Eee! and a diabolical yeodle curdled the moonlight on the
hill-side. Presently a big brown object lolled from the shadows of the
pines, and stalked majestically toward the flag-pole.
“Got the fisheatin’ Japs in the act, did yer, Pat?” whispered the captain
out the window, shaking with laughter.
“Oofski!” grunted Kuropatkin, crowding into his house. Next morning
Brewster walked to his grove to find that three of his tallest pine trees
had been chopped and carted off, while two axes hung at hasty angles in a
half-felled fourth. After breakfast, Puk-Chong, his Korean “boy,” started
for the Jap headquarters with the copy of a telegram, declared in a brief
note to be then on its way to the American Minister at Tokio. Brewster
himself walked unnoticed down the hill to the cable office, which lies
far from the barracks. He actually despatched the message sent in copy
to the commandant, there being yet no war correspondents, and hence no
censorship in Korea. It was rather a more fire-eating complaint than any
he had pretended to send to Tokio before, and some time passed before he
knew the importance of his act.
After tiffin, two Jap soldiers appeared on his veranda, mutely
inquisitive in their brown leggins, yellow shoulder-straps, and high
crowned caps. They drew white gloves from their hands, smiled, and bowed
three times till their long swords clicked on the floor. The shorter,
darker soldier—he with a wispy convex mustache and eyes like a dissipated
doll—handed the captain a letter bearing the long brown Korean stamp.
The captain whistled as he opened it. It was addressed in a round,
shaded hand suggesting steel pens and primary writing books. Reading it,
he glowered; then smiled, as if he discerned something pleasant on a
mountain across the river; frowned again and more deeply, coughed, and
put the letter gently into his left-hand breast pocket, where his heart
underneath beat faster.
“So Korean postmen ain’t good enough to carry white men’s letters no
more?” demanded the captain.
“We dare no longer trust the shiftless Korean with letters to so august a
person,” explained the taller soldier, and both bowed.
“They won’t let you steam them open and read them, like you have this
one?” said the captain. “Hey?”
“Your bear,” said the doll-eye, after each had stared with polite
blankness at the captain, “is he dangerous?” and the soldier indicated
the flag-pole.
“Mebbe your pardner’s pants ken show that,” drawled the Yankee, taking
the other by the shoulder and turning him around. “Um, no,” he growled,
“but that b’ar knows pizen when he smells it.”
“Pizen?” said the doll-eye vacantly, “What you call pizen?”
“We feed it to b’ars regular in Americky,” replied the captain fiercely.
“We put it on shin bones and shove it in their kennels. It makes them
strong so they ken bust chains and plug axes inter trees.”
“Ah, so, _so_,” gasped the pair, with the Jap stare which conceals
understanding.
The captain knew the soldiers could never have called on so direct a
mission as to deliver a letter or complain of Kuropatkin’s attack; and
that to show anger to mere privates at losing his trees would yield him
only smiles of scorn and pity. What had they come for? Brewster had his
suspicions, which he started to test. He thrust his hands carelessly
into his pockets, observing that he guessed he wouldn’t “get no more
letters at all, steamed or unsteamed.” To which the emissaries replied
that he did them an injustice, that they had no desire to interfere with
the honorable foreigner’s business, but sought rather to safeguard his
privacy by official deliveries.
“_So deska_,” said the captain with falling inflection, which means,
“Well, well, now, you don’t say.” “You mean then, any Jap can bring me
mail?” he challenged.
“Yes,” said the tall one. “Indeed. Certainly. If he is in the army.”
“Then I’d like your boss’s permission,” said the captain slowly, “to
detail that Jap boy Ikeda I have traveling to the mines for me to bring
my mail.”
“Ah—he is expected back soon?” interrupted both at once, stepping
forward eagerly at mention of the spy, confirming Brewster’s suspicion.
“No,” drawled the Yankee. “No. Ikeda’s welched—gone south to Seoul to
fight for the Korean Emperor.”
“_So_,” said both with eager incredulity, “We have a great pity for you.”
“Do you think yer boss could git him back fer me?” asked the captain
sadly.
No answer.
“You are telling the truth?” said the doll-eye suddenly.
“No,” said the captain, “I ain’t—not altogether. Good morning.”
The soldiers consulted one another with clever glances. The captain
whistled easily, for he was quite sure now that they had come to arrest
Davydoff. “Good morning,” he repeated.
The pair started down the walk to the gate, but turned to bow. As they
did so, the Yankee seemed to see their stoop grow rigid. They gazed
over his head to the door of the bungalow. He turned. Behind him in the
doorway stood what seemed to be a Jap—a man wooden-shoed, in a gray
kimono, a derby hat squashed flat over his ears—Davydoff returned.
“Your boss is pretty obligin’,” called the captain to the soldiers.
“Without my askin’ he seems to have telegraphed Ikeda in Seoul to come
back and carry my letters. An’ he’s come.”
But the soldiers had started back up the garden walk on a run.
“Hi! Pat,” called the captain, “Sic ’em, Pat, _sic ’em_!” he shouted.
A chain in the big dog-house rattled, and before the emissaries had paced
ten yards, their twin brown gaiters were flying across the garden and
swinging over the rail fence, before the galumphing Kuropatkin.
“I hev a great pity fer ye,” imitated the captain. “They expect all lies
or all truth,” he observed, turning to the bewildered spy. “Mix ’em, an’
yer ken wig a yeller-belly—if ye hev an intelligent b’ar.”
The youth exclaimed, trembling; “I have heard all. The two Japanese there
know me for an informer. It is danger to remain here.”
“It’s a bullet fer ye on the bund tomorrow,” said the captain,
thoughtfully eying him, and “jail fer me.”
The boy limped dazedly to the wash-basin in the dining-room, and a black
wig fell to the floor. In a moment a blue-eyed, yellow-haired youth
sat down to tiffin opposite the captain. A whitish beard curled thinly
over his chin, and except for the roundness of his head and his hair’s
creeping low on the forehead—as in all exiles’ and settlers’ sons of the
Siberian steppe—he would have passed in America for the second generation
of a Baltic immigrant, refined and sharpened by transplantation.
“It would be but dying for my country,” he said with effort, but now
calm, after the two had eaten awhile in silence. “The great work is done.
Kosakin, the Cossack, has all the figure of the landing.”
“Yes, Davy, but Rooshia ain’t the captain’s country,” explained the
Yankee. “We got to hide you.”
The captain lapsed again into silence, listening absently to an excited
tale of suspicion, strategy, and escapes on a week’s trip from Wonsan,
told in the Russian’s queer, inverted English. As they rose from the
table, Brewster drew from his pocket the letter given him by the
doll-eyed soldier, and handed it to Davydoff. “Suppose you read this,” he
said. Davy took it, and read:
Exalted Sir? The pupils Oyama school of primary, Chinnampo,
request being you the oneman English speak, observe the
try-on of drama given bye and after Red cross aid, in the new
school house of the night you get this. Appreciation would be
subgestion and correction English spoken. Drama, Uncle Tom’s
Cabin.
Humbly to be yours,
Most Honorific Sir,
Tatso Karin.
“I guess we’ll have to take in the show,” remarked the captain, as the
boy glanced up with a queer look of amazement. “We got to go somewheres.”
“Is there no place else?” asked the boy excitedly, “I would myself
surrender rather than now to enter the schoolhouse.”
The captain met his glance intently. “It’s our one chance, Davy,” he
said, searching the boy’s eyes. “I’ll tell ye. I know thet young school
missy pretty well. Unbeknown to you, I’ve helped her hearing class. She’s
the one friend I have in town. If the game’s up with us, as I believe,
I’d like to say good-bye to her,” and the captain with bent head turned
away.
Davydoff sprang to his feet and paced up and down the room, clenching
and unclenching his hands, darting glances at the captain. “No, no,” he
cried. “Not there! Not there! Never, by my honor!”
The Yankee turned to catch his eye.
“It is ye suspicion the letter’s a trap?” he asked searchingly. “It
ain’t, I promise ye. Jap though she is, she’d never—never—” he stammered.
“Or——”
The Russian stopped short and their eyes met. “No, no,” he answered,
“I apprehend no trap, not from Karin. Only if—” he checked himself.
Understanding glimmered in his blue eyes. Then—“If she is as well your
friend, I will go. I will go to the schoolhouse with you.”
At dark, the captain followed by Davy, black-haired and derby-hatted,
with Kuropatkin swaying comfortably between, halted suddenly as they
entered the moon-lit pine grove. Looking back toward the bungalow, they
saw two-brown gaitered figures patter up the garden path and steal behind
the bear house, where one leaped monkey fashion on its roof. The other
with prehensile feet shinned the flag-pole and hurled a stone down upon
Kuropatkin’s roof. Finding he was not at home, they dashed on toward the
bungalow.
“Jes’ caught the gang-plank in time, ain’t we?” laughed the captain.
“Dodged the yeller-bellies so far.”
Emerging from the grove, they stole across frozen stagnant water, among
squalid red clay huts with tiny lattices under the thatching. Four
soldiers, singing with locked arms as they passed, kicked a fallen Korean
chimney—a tin kerosene can. Not a white-robed philosopher was in sight,
but through the huts’ straw fences, they could see long-haired hags
huddled over smoky braziers in which bubbled the head of a dog or hoof
of a bull. Through low door-ways in the haze of tiny, ill-trimmed lamps,
sore-covered children in soiled bright silks rolled on matless earth
beside chests clamped with iron.
At last the schoolhouse, white, high-gabled, and awkwardly occidental,
faced them. They chained the bear to a rail of the steps, and without
knocking entered a long empty room of half a dozen glass windows, its
plain boards lit by two big swinging kerosene lamps, and decorated with
British and Japanese flags. From the platform at the far end, behind a
drawn red cotton curtain strung on a long wire, a spiral stair wound to
the loft under the gable overhead. Chairs and benches were piled in the
corners.
Karin San tripped down the stair in her best iris kimono and big obi,
pausing at intervals as she crossed the floor to bow the glittering comb
in her black hair. Her powdered oval face resembled an enamel shell.
With half closed eyes and red lips parted, she seemed striving to speak
volumes of welcome, and to be intensely amused and overwhelmed by her
inability.
“_Kombomoi kombomoi_,”[1] she gasped and the captain responded, his heart
beating faster, but his eyes suspicious of the vacant building.
[1] “Good Evening!”
“Very sorry, very sorry, Brewster San,” pleaded the little school
mistress. “Tonight, no Uncle Tom. No show.”
Little Eva’s red shawl hung from a nail over the platform, also the gray
beard and spectacles of Uncle Tom, while on it rested a couple of buckets
filled with ice-cakes. From wondering how that spectacular scene of
Eliza’s crossing was to be portrayed—if a samisan could render the proper
jumpy music—the captain’s eyes fixed Davy’s in mute wonder.
“Military authority—Major Kumoda—just now order me no show,” Karin
apologized, again bowing with a smile in which her visitors, though used
to oriental deception, could read no duplicity. “Mebbe soldier come.”
The soft chords in her neck glistened like velvet, but again the captain
turned from them to his spy, saying, “Right you were in growlin’ to come
here. Better say yer prayers, boy, if you Rooshians is as good at prayin’
as they tell. She’s snared us for the mustard-bellies.”
“You shall not so accuse her!” burst out the spy. “May not her deed be
honorable? Did not the soldiers open and read her missive? Having not
found us on the hill, they have reason to look here at once.”
But the schoolmistress had crept to a window and was looking out, her
snub nose pressed tight against the pane. From outside came the mutter of
voices, and crunch of feet on the lingering snow.
“Damn us for fools!” broke out the captain. “And I’ve dragged ye down to
death, boy, for they dassent shoot a Yankee. Davy, blame me. I don’t ask
yer to forgive,” and his voice weakened. “I told yer I come to bid the
girl good-bye. It’s not the first time this cowardly fool heart o’ mine
hes ruined me with others. But after all these useless years o’ my life,
to find this yeller girl respond to all the stored-up sorrers—” he broke
off, gulping.
“Then I am happy to come,” said the Russian with tense slowness, “if for
your sake, my captain. It is then not the forgiveness, I owe,” he added
bitterly, with set teeth, “but—” and he burst out laughing, shouting—“So
there was no place else to hide? As well here as elsewhere might one be
taken!”
“Boy, I knew ye had no fear of death,” said the captain, laying a hand on
Davy’s shoulder. “An’ how I love her—Karin!”
He walked to the bright little figure tremblingly preoccupied by the
window, and extended his arms. The Russian could stand it no longer. With
fierce Slavic impulse, he tore off his disguise with one dash of his
arm, and, erect with blazing eyes, checked the captain.
“Captain! Fear of death? Never!” he cried. “Because the soldier
must think Karin in league with me, a vile spy, I would rather have
surrendered myself than come here to hide with her. Yet I go, because
you, my friend—dear to me—request, and jealously I think you also love
her. You confess, Captain, we have long been esteemed together, and to
you I owe more than my life; yet Karin you shall not seize from me, even
in the moment of my death. I love her better than my life or your own,
or her life. We have long loved. Yet may she love you the more. In this
hour, I leave to her to choose between us!”
With a cry, the little schoolmistress threw herself into Davy’s
outstretched arms, and was smothered in a long embrace.
The captain bent his head. “Davy, forgive me,” he whispered after a
silence. “I never guessed she was yourn a’ready, else I’d not—I do ask
yer forgiveness now.”
The spy limped toward the Yankee to press his outstretched hand, and a
stone struck the schoolhouse door. “You hear,” laughed Karin, at the
window again with woman’s tact, but losing innocence of her lover’s
danger. “Major and two soldiers afraid of him. He very brave, but I think
soon soldier shoot him. They would come arrest you! You will hide? Go, go
upstair! My room!” she cried excitedly, pointing to the spiral.
The captain looked out. “Hold yer ground, Gen’ral,” he called. “This
ain’t no picnic bitin’ wood thieves. He’ll hold on to the last, Davy. I
seen him nip the major’s sword, and wink at me—By crotch, they’re gaggin’
him!” He turned to the lovers. “Go, Davy, go! Up them stairs with her.
It’s yer one chance. I’ll face the monkeys and take my medicine. It’s
the least I owe yer,” and a vain thought of his cable message and the
American gunboat at Chemulpo a hundred miles away flashed through him.
Karin San seized the spy by the arm, and they vanished up the spiral
stairway. Immediately bayonets crashed upon the door, and it burst open.
The doll-eyed soldier and his companion of the morning, preceded by
the green-capped cavalry officer, hurled themselves into the room. The
officer seized the captain by both arms. “Brewster, American, we arrest!”
he cried, and turning to the doll-eye, delivered a rapid order to search
the house,—so judged the Yankee—for he smiled and bowed at his prisoner,
saying, “We find also you friend, Russki spy.”
But the doll-eye and his mate were checked in ascending the stair by
Karin San descending with upraised arms and her sweetest smile. The
privates paused and bowed. The three at first spoke calmly back and
forth. Then the doll-eye began shouting at the schoolmistress, once with
what the captain was certain would be an oath in English. But always she
replied to them earnestly smiling, never pleadingly, gravely shaking her
head, her hand upon her heart; always quiet, determined, arguing with
utter self-possession, calmly appealing—to what? wondered the captain, in
such fanatics of patriotism.
At length both soldiers turned and saluted the Major, uttered a short
sentence, and descended the stair.
The officer turned to Brewster, elevating his long mustachios in a
sardonic smile. “You see,” he said, “the love of country of the Japanese.
Perhaps you think it is the respect for woman, wherefore my soldier do
not search the teacher room. It is not. Boy, man, woman, all labor for
the same end, our country. No one would betray; we trust one another
absolute. It is so we exist; we fight; we win.
“We think the spy Russki enter here with you. But Karin San, as much
myself officer of the Emperor, declare he is not here,” he went on with
a self-satisfied smile. “We believe her. He has escape,” and turning to
the soldiers he gave them another sharp order—to search the town and the
hills about.
Next morning, sitting cross-legged and politely silent with his captor,
at a breakfast of sweet chicken hash and cabbage, Captain Brewster sprang
to his feet. “_Bzoo-oo-oooo!_” groaned a whistle under the glittering
hills along the river. Away dashed his manikin host without word or
glance. Between the cedar slats of the captain’s prison—the major’s house
by courtesy—the Yankee sighted the long, thin funnel and squat deck of an
American gunboat.
Two hours passed. Then the doll-eyed soldier who stood guard on the
veranda, slid open the paper house-door. Three tall Yankee tars followed
by a young lieutenant with sandy hair and a long upper lip, scraped heavy
feet on the major’s mats.
“Brewster, are you responsible for this?” said the officer, handing the
captain a pink paper oblong.
“Guess I be,” drawled the prisoner, taking the cable message. He read:
State Department orders unconditional protection for Brewster,
American, Chinnampo.
The telegram was addressed to the commander of the gunboat, dated Tokio,
and signed by the United States Minister there.
The captain whistled a moment.
“Say, what’s your state?” he inquired of his countryman.
“Maine,” replied the lieutenant.
“Aroostook County?” demanded the captain.
“No, Skowhegan on the Amonoosuc. Born in Penobsticook myself, but my
folks was raised on the Allegash,” grinned the officer.
When the captain had whistled again, he observed, “Like to be back there,
wouldn’t you, in a country where they have Christian names you can
pronounce?” And the lieutenant embellished his assent gracefully, with
expletives.
“These young Napoleons,” he began soon, indicating the little major’s
green cap which bobbed in the rear, “are interfering with my orders.
They say that you’ve been running a spy ranch. Their chiefs have pulled
out for the Yalu, so they want to dicker with Tokio before I take you
cruising and talk over the spring fishing back home.”
“Let me give you a tip on that, lieutenant,” said the captain, putting
his hand on the officer’s shoulder. Then he whispered awhile into the
young man’s ear. At first the lieutenant shook his head seriously; then
quite as gravely dug the captain in the ribs. And as the delegation,
including the manikin major, withdrew, Brewster called after to his new
friend, “Mind the boys use only blank shells. We want a bluff, not an
international war.”
And so the little cavalry officer never came back to his prisoner at all.
In half an hour, “Boom-boom!” resounded guns from the blue Tai-Dong. The
doll-eye thrust his head into the paper door. “You hear? You hear?” he
cried pointing to smoke curling about the Stars and Stripes on the river.
“America—Japan—cross—fight—so,” said Brewster, linking his two
forefingers. And the doll-eye dashed away.
The captain’s ruse of firing blank shots to force the telegram had
worked. When he believed that the coast was clear, he stepped out on the
veranda. Only the lieutenant from Maine was walking up the hill.
“I’ve got a Jap servant and his wife that I’d like to take abroad with
us,” said the captain to his savior, as they descended into the town,
where not even a Jap private was in evidence. “They’re over yonder in
that white building,” and he pointed to the schoolhouse. “And wait,”
added the captain, while the officer despatched an orderly from the
landing, “Could he fetch along my—my—pet Newfoundland dog, as well?”
Remarked the younger man from Maine, as the two watched from the gunboat
the clean hills fold over the straw roofs of Chinnampo: “If there’s
trouble from all this, that’s for the dudes in Washington to fix. Spies
is spies, but them pine trees is pine trees, and valuable, as we ought
to know. Too bad about old Kuropatkin, though most orderlies _would_ be
afraid of bears—Hello! Look!”
He pointed to the water. Aport, a black oblong rippled the surface of the
river—Kuropatkin swimming out to the vessel.
“Hi, Pat! Sic ’em, sic ’em!” shouted the captain.
When the ship had heaved to and started again, the captain’s face was
salt and wet against a shaggy brown coat.
Also wet were the faces of a light-haired youth, and a little teacher of
English as she is Japped.
[Illustration]
_Where the Road Dips_