"Certainly," he said.
Davis got another, but while his interpreter was loading his things again, the same officer came by and tossed them again to the ground. The interpreter protested and tried to explain that he had permission to use the carts, but he hadn't time. That officer turned on him. Now I had been told that there are no oaths and vile epithets in the Japanese tongue, but I know no English vile enough to report what the man said, and if I did I couldn't use it without blistering my tongue and blackening my soul more black than the hair of the blackguard who used it. But let me do the Colonel in command justice to say that when the outraged interpreter, taken to him by us afterward, repeated the insult, the courteous old gentleman looked shocked and deeply hurt, and said he would deal harshly with the man. I hope he did.
This was ominous, but we were still cheerful. Yokoyama appeared and Yokoyama was ominous. He was to handle our canteen and charge us twice the prices that we had known at the Imperial Hotel, on the ground that he would transport our baggage for us. That meant that he was to charge us for the transport service that the Government was to give us—not to him—and furnish us chiefly with canned stuff that each man could have bought for himself for a dollar per day. We did not know this just then, but wily Yokoyama had gathered in 500 yen from each of us in Tokio, and he was ominous before we left Japan. I am putting this in because Yokoyama, too, is woven into the network that fate was casting about us that day. Still we were cheerful. Cannon were making the music we had waited five months to hear. Port Arthur would fall, doubtless, within ten days, and then—Home! The dream was shattered before we went to sleep. No officer came to tell us where we were bound—to explain the shattered word of a Major-General of his own army. It was Yokoyama who dealt the blow—Yokoyama who, in another land, would have been branded as a traitor by his own people and could have been put behind the bars in ours. The truth was that we were not to go to Port Arthur at all. Next day we travelled—whither God only knew—with every boom of a big gun at the Russian fortress behind us sounding the knell of a hope in the heart of each and every man. But we were on the trail of Oku's army into the heart of Manchuria, though nobody knew it for sure, and there was yet before us another tragedy—Liao-Yang.
V
ON THE WAR-DRAGON'S TRAIL
There was the dean of the corps, one Melton Prior, who, in spite of his years—may they be many more—is still the first war artist in the world. He was mounted on a white horse, seventeen hands high and with a weak back that has a history. Prior sold him in the end to a canny Englishman, who sold him to the Japanese—giving Prior the price asked. "Why, didn't you know that he wasn't sound?" said a man of another race, who wondered, perhaps, that in a horse-trade blood should so speak to blood even in a strange land.
"Yes," said the Englishman, "but the Japanese won't know it." They didn't. There was Richard Harding Davis, who, for two reasons—the power to pick from any given incident the most details that will interest the most people, and the good luck or good judgment to be always just where the most interesting thing is taking place (with one natural exception, that shall be told)—is also supreme. Mounted on another big horse was he—one Devery by name—with a mule in the rear, of a name that must equally appeal. Quite early, after purchase, Davis had laid whispering lip to flapping ear.
"I'll call you Williams or I'll call you Walker, just as you choose," he said.