Colonel Selborne lost no time in availing himself of the permission and, with his wife and the two young ladies, sailed from Yokohama two days later.
On the evening of the same day, when the City of Pekin was heading eastward with the Americans on board, a small sailboat put out from a village on the west coast of the island. Besides the sailors it had one passenger—a gentleman with smooth face, light complexion, and red hair. The boatmen had agreed, for a large sum, to land him at the nearest point in Korea, unless they should previously fall in with a Russian war-ship. The latter contingency actually came to pass, as the boat was driven northward by a southerly storm, and picked up by one of the Vladivostock squadron, then cruising for prizes.
From Vladivostock, where he was safely landed on the following day, the red-haired gentleman proceeded by rail to Harbin Junction, and then southward to Port Arthur, now nearly cut off by Nogi's troops. Trains, however, were still running regularly between the beleaguered port and Moukden.
Strangely enough, the hair of the mysterious gentleman was now rapidly turning dark. By the time he reached Port Arthur, it was quite black. A stubbly beard and moustache, too, began to show themselves on his sallow face. The man spoke Russian brokenly, and used English when he could. Never a Spanish word came from his lips, and the Barcelona estates proved veritable castles in Spain, fading from his memory.
As the man passed up the street of Port Arthur, under escort of a corporal's guard, he laid his hand triumphantly on his breast. In an inner pocket, beneath it, reposed a sheet of rice paper, on one side of which were scrawled a few lines, in a girlish handwriting. On the other were drawings of moats, counterscarps, and a medley of fortifications, followed by vertical lines of delicate Japanese characters.
"Take me at once to General Stoessel's headquarters," said the sallow-faced man. "I have important information for him. Here is my pass from the War Office at St. Petersburg."
CHAPTER XIV. THE ATTACK OF THE "OCTOPUS".
Since the Stone Age, when long-haired men, half brutes, fought with battle-clubs made by lashing a rudely shaped lump of stone in the cleft end of a club, and with arrows and javelins tipped with hammered flint, through all the successive generations of fighters, human ingenuity has been exercised to its utmost to devise new implements of warfare, and new defences to protect against them.