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.