Banzai! by Parabellum

by Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff

The high-pressure steam of the speeding locomotive hissed out of all the valves, shaking the mighty steel frame with all its force; the heat of the flames cracked the windows, and wherever the hand sought support, pieces of skin were left on the red-hot spots. A few shots were fired from the outside.

"One minute more," yelled Forster, "and we'll be over."

Fighting Dick collapsed under the influence of the poisonous gases and fainted away on the floor of the cab. And now the flames grew smaller and smaller and gradually became hidden in clouds of smoke.

"Hurrah!" cried Forster; "there's a clear stretch ahead of us!" Then he leaned out of the cab-window to look at the train behind him and saw that the last two cars were in flames. He blew the whistle as a signal that the last car was to be uncoupled and left where it was, for he had just noticed a man standing near the track, swinging his bicycle lamp high above his head.

"Perhaps they'll be able to unload the car after all," he said to Fighting Dick, who was slowly coming to. But the sound of the explosion of some of the boxes of cartridges in the uncoupled car made it fairly certain that there wouldn't be much left to unload.

Five minutes later, after they had passed a dark station, the same signal was noticed, and another car was uncoupled, and similarly one car after another was left on the track. The guns and ammunition-boxes were unloaded as expeditiously as possible and transferred to the wagons that were waiting to receive them. The moment they were ready, the horses galloped off as fast as they could go and disappeared in the darkness, leaving the burning cars behind as a shining beacon.

When, on the morning of June ninth, a Japanese military train from Portland traveled slowly along the line, it came first upon the ruins of an engine which had been blown up by dynamite, and after that it was as much as the Japanese could do to clear away the remnants of the various ruined cars by the end of the day. The bridge, which had been set on fire by a Japanese detachment with the help of several barrels of petroleum, was completely burned down.

But the plot had been successful and Fighting Dick's fame resounded from one ocean to the other, and proved to the nations across the sea that the old energy of the American people had been revived and that the war of extermination against the yellow race had begun, though as yet only on a small scale. And the Japanese troops, too, began to appreciate that the same irresistible force—a patriotic self-sacrifice that swept everything before it—which had in one generation raised Japan to the heights of political power, was now being directed against the foreign invader.

Half the town had known of the plan for removing the rifles and ammunition from Tacoma, but a strong self-control had taken the place of the thoughtless garrulousness of former times. Not a sign, not a word had betrayed the plot to the enemy; every man controlled his feverish emotion and wore an air of stolid indifference. We had learned a lesson from the enemy.

Fourteen Americans were captured with weapons in hand, and in addition about twenty-eight badly wounded. The Japanese commander of Tacoma issued a proclamation the following evening that all the prisoners, without exception, would be tried by court-martial in the course of the next day and condemned to death—the penalty that had been threatened in case of insurrection. The Japanese court-martial arrived in the city on June ninth with a regiment from Seattle. The Tacoma board of aldermen were invited to send two of their number to be present at the trial, but the offer being promptly refused, the Japanese pronounced judgment on the prisoners alone. As had been expected, they were all condemned to death by hanging, but at the earnest pleading of the mayor of Tacoma, the sentence was afterwards mitigated to death by shooting.