Banzai! by Parabellum. Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
you like, colonel. I shall give up arguing with you," returned Lieutenant Commander Harryman curtly. "You won't allow yourself to be warned."
"Warned—that's not the question. But this desire of yours to scent Japanese intrigues everywhere, to figure out all politics by the Japanese common denominator, and to see a Japanese spy in every coolie is becoming a positive mania. No, I can't agree with you there," added Webster, who seemed to regret the passionate outburst into which his temperament had betrayed him.
"Really not?" asked Harryman, turning in his comfortable wicker chair toward Webster and looking at him half encouragingly with twinkling eyes.
Such discussions were not at all unusual in the Club at Manila, for they presented the only antidote to the leaden, soul-killing tedium of the dull monotony of garrison duty. Since the new insurrection on Mindanao and in the whole southern portion of the archipelago, the question as to the actual causes of the uprising, or rather the secret authors thereof, continually gave rise to heated discussions. And when both parties, of which one ascribed everything to Japanese intrigue and the other found an explanation in elementary causes, began to liven up, the debate was apt to wax pretty warm. If these discussions did nothing else, they at least produced a sort of mental excitement after the heat of the day which wore out body and mind alike, not even cooling down toward evening.
The Chinese boy, passing quickly and quietly between the chairs, removed the traces of the Webster thunderbolt and placed fresh bottles of soda water on the table, whereupon the officers carefully prepared new drinks.
"He's a spy, too, I suppose?" asked Webster of Harryman, pointing with his thumb over his shoulder at the disappearing boy.
"Of course. Did you ever imagine him to be anything else?"
Webster shrugged his shoulders. A dull silence ensued, during which they tried to recover the lost threads of their thoughts in the drowsy twilight. Harryman irritably chewed the ends of his mustache. The smoke from two dozen shag pipes settled like streaks of mist in the sultry air of the tropical night, which came in at the open windows. Lazily and with long pauses, conversation was kept up at the separate tables. The silence was only broken by the creaking of the wicker chairs and the gurgling and splashing of the soda water, when one of the officers, after having put it off as long as possible, at last found sufficient energy to refill his glass. Motionless as seals on the sandhills in the heat of midday, the officers lolled in their chairs, waiting for the moment when they could turn in with some show of decency.
"It's awful!" groaned Colonel McCabe. "This damned hole is enough to make one childish. I shall go crazy soon." And then he cracked his standing joke of the evening: "My daily morning prayer is: 'Let it soon be evening, O God; the morrow will come of itself.'" The jest was greeted with a dutiful grunt of approval from the occupants of the various chairs.
Lieutenant Parrington, officer in command of the little gunboat Mindoro, which had been captured from the Spaniards some years ago and since the departure of the cruiser squadron for Mindanao been put in commission as substitute guardship in the harbor of Manila, entered the room and dropped into a chair near Harryman; whereupon the Chinese boy, almost inaudible in his broad felt shoes, suddenly appeared beside him and set down the bottle with the pain expeller of the tropics before him.
"Any cable news, Parrington?" asked Colonel McCabe from the other table.
"Not a word," yawned Parrington; "everything is still smashed. We might just as well be sitting under the receiver of an air pump."
Harryman noticed that the boy stared at Parrington for a moment as if startled; but he instantly resumed his Mongolian expression of absolute innocence, and with his customary grin slipped sinuously through the door.
Harryman experienced an unpleasant feeling of momentary discomfort, but, not being able to locate his ideas clearly, he irritably gave up the attempt to arrive at a solution of this instinctive sensation, mumbling to himself: "This tropical hell is enough to set one crazy."
"No news of the fleet, either?" began Colonel McCabe again.
"Positively nothing, either by wire or wireless. It seems as though the rest of the world had sunk into a bottomless pit. Not a single word has reached us from the outer world for six days."
"Do you believe in the seaquake?" struck in Harryman mockingly.
"Why not?" returned the colonel.
Harryman jumped up, walked over to the window with long strides, threw out the end of his cigarette and lighted a new one. In the bright light of the flaming match one could see the commander's features twitching ironically; he was on the warpath again.
"All the same, it's a queer state of affairs. Our home cable snaps between Guam and here, the Hong-Kong cable won't work, and even our island wire has been put out of commission; it must have been a pretty violent catastrophe—" came from another table.
"—All the more violent considering the fact that we noticed nothing of it on land," said Harryman, thoughtfully blowing out a cloud of smoke and swinging himself up backward on the window-sill.
"Exactly," rang out a voice; "but how do you account for that?"
"Account for it!" cried Colonel Webster, in a thundering voice. "Our comrade of the illustrious navy of the United States of America has only one explanation for everything: his Japanese logarithms, by means of which he figures out everything. Now we shall hear that this seaquake can be traced to Japanese villainy, probably brought about by Japanese divers, or even submarine boats." And the colonel began to laugh heartily.
Harryman ignored this attempt to resume their recent dispute, and with head thrown back continued to blow clouds of smoke nervously into the air.
"But seriously, Harryman," began the colonel again, "can you give any explanation?"
"No," answered Harryman curtly; "but perhaps you will remember who was the first to furnish an explanation of the breakdown of the cable. It was the captain of the Japanese Kanga Maru, which has been anchored since Tuesday beside the Monadnock, which I have the honor to command."
"But, my good Harryman, you have hallucinations," interrupted the colonel. "The Japanese captain gave the latest Hong-Kong papers to the Harbor Bureau, and was quite astonished to hear that our cable did not work——"
"When he was going to send a cablegram to Hong-Kong," added Harryman sharply.
"To announce his arrival at Manila," remarked Colonel Webster dryly.
"And the Hong-Kong papers had already published descriptions of the destruction caused by the seaquake, of the tidal waves, and the accidents to ships," came from another quarter.
"The news being of especial interest to this archipelago, where we have the misfortune to be and where we noticed nothing of the whole affair," returned Harryman.
"You don't mean to imply," broke in the colonel, "that the news of this catastrophe is a pure invention—an invention of the English papers in Hong-Kong?"
"Don't know, I'm sure," said Harryman. "Hong-Kong papers are no criterion for me." And then he added quietly: "Yes, man is great, and the newspaper is his prophet."
"But you can't dispute the fact that a seaquake may have taken place, when you consider the striking results as shown by the cable interruptions which we have been experiencing for the last six days," began Webster again.
"Have we really?" said Harryman. "Are you quite sure of it? So far the only authority we have for this supposed seaquake is a Japanese captain—whom, by the way, I am having sharply watched—and a bundle of worthless Hong-Kong newspapers. And as for the rest of my hallucinations"—he jumped down from the window-sill and, going up to Webster, held out a sheet of paper toward him—"I'm in the habit of using other sources of information than the English-Japanese fingerposts."
Webster glanced at the paper and then looked at Harryman questioningly.
"What is it? Do you understand it?"
"Yes,"