Part 9

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.