There was no response.
"Then I'll call you both," said Davis, and that wayward animal was Williams and Walker through the campaign. A double name was never more appropriate, for a flagrant double life was his. There was Bill the Brill of the gentle heart, on a nice chestnut; Burleigh, the veteran, on a wretched beast that was equally dangerous at either end; Lionel James with cart and coolies of his own, and the Italian on a handsome iron-gray. There were the two Frenchmen—Reggie, the young, the gigantic, the self-controlled and never complaining—so beloved, that his very appearance always brought the Marseillaise from us all—and Laguerié, the courteous, ever-vivacious, irascible—so typical that he might have stepped into Manchuria from the stage. There was Whiting, artist, on the littlest beast with the biggest ambition that I ever saw vaulting on legs; lanky Wallace, whose legs, like Lincoln's, were long enough to reach the ground—even when he was mounted—and there were the two Smiths—English and American—and Lewis, gifted with many tongues and a beautiful barytone, who, his much-boasted milky steed being lame, struck Oku's trail on foot. On Pit-a-Pat, a pony that used to win and lose money for us at the Yokohama races, was little Clarkin the stubborn, the argumentative, who, at a glance, was plainly sponsor for the highest ideals of the paper that, in somebody's words, made virtue a thing to be shunned; and, finally and leastly, there were Fuji and his unhappy attachment, who chronicles this.
These were the men who thought they were going to Port Arthur and who, with the sound of the big guns at that fortress growing fainter behind them, struck Oku's trail, up through a rolling valley that was bordered by two blue volcanic mountain chains. The sky was cloudless and the sun was hot. The roads were as bad as roads would likely be after 4,000 years of travel and 4,000 years of neglect, but the wonder was that, after the Russian army had tramped them twice and the Japanese army had tramped them once, they were not worse.
The tail of the War-Dragon, whose jaws were snapping at flying Russian heels far on ahead, had been drawn on at dawn, and through dust and mire and sand we followed its squirming wake. On the top of every little hill we could see it painfully crawling ahead—length interminable, its vertebræ carts, coolies, Chinese wagons, its body columns of soldiers, its scales the flashes of sword-scabbard and wagon-tire—and whipping the dust heavenward in clouds. The button on that tail was Lynch the Irishman on a bicycle, and that button was rolling itself headward—leading us all. Behind, Lewis was eating the road up with a swinging English stride, and, drinking the dust of the world, we followed. Fuji had side-stepped from barrack-yard into that road, sawing on his bit, pawing the earth, and squealing challenges or boisterous love-calls to anything and everything that walked. Sex, species, biped, or quadruped—never knew I such indiscriminate buoyancy—all were one to Fuji. With malediction on tongue and murder in heart, I sawed his gutta-percha mouth until my fingers were blistered and my very jaws ached, but I could hold him back only a while. We overtook the Italian, a handsome boy with a wild intensity of eye—one puttee unwound and flying after him. The iron-gray was giving trouble and he, too, was unhappy. We passed Reggie—his great body stretched on a lumpy heap of baggage—with a pipe in his mouth, that was halved with his perennial smile of unshakable good-humor, and the other Frenchman squatting between two humps of baggage on a jolting cart.
"Ah!" he cried with extended hands, "you see—you see—" his head was tossed to one side just then, he clutched wildly first one way and then the other and with palms upward again—"you see how comfortable I am. It ees gr-reat—gr-reat!" From laughter I let Fuji go then and he went—through coil after coil of that war-dragon's length, past the creaking, straining vertebræ, taking a whack with teeth or heels at something now and then and something now and then taking a similar whack at him. The etiquette of the road Fuji either knew not, or cared nothing for—nor cared he for distinctions of rank in his own world or mine. By rights the led cavalry horses should have had precedence. But nay, Fuji passed two regiments without so much as "by your leave"; but I was doing that for him vigorously and, whenever he broke through the line, I said two things, and I kept saying them that I might not be cut off with a sword:
"Warui desu!" I said, which means "He's bad!" and "Gomen nasai," which is Japanese for "Beg pardon." These two phrases never failed to bring a smile instead of the curse that I might have got in any other army in the world. We passed even an officer who seemed and was, no doubt, in a great and just hurry, but even his eyes had to take the dust thrown from Fuji's heels. I pulled the beast in at last on top of a little hill whence I could see the battle-hills of Nanshan. But I cared no more for that field than did Fuji, both of us being too much interested in life to care much for post-mortem battle-fields, and when the rest came up, we rode by Nanshan without turning up its green slopes and on to where the first walled Chinese city I had ever seen lifted its gate-towers and high notched walls in glaring sunlight and a mist of strangling dust. We passed in through the city gates and stopped where I know not. It was some bad-smelling spot under a hot sun, and being off Fuji and in that sun, I cared not. I have vague memories of white men coming by and telling me to come out of the sun and of not coming out of the sun; of horses kicking and stamping near by and an occasional neigh from Fuji hitched in the shade of the city wall and guarded by a Chinaman; of a yellow man asleep on a cart, his unguarded face stark to that sun and a hundred flies crawling about his open mouth; and of an altercation going on between two white men. One said:
"Your horse has kicked mine—remove him!"
"Move your own," said another, and his tone was that of some Lord Cyril in a melodrama. "Mine was there first."
The other took off his coat:
"I'm sorry, but I've got to fight you."