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.”