Banzai! by Parabellum. Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
little pictures portray our war of extermination against the red man. They are terribly exaggerated and distorted, which was not at all necessary, by the way, for the events of that war do not add to the fame of our nation. Up here," explained Harryman, while several officers, among them the colonel, stepped up to the table, "you see the story of the infected blankets from the fever hospitals which were sent to the Indians; here the butchery of an Indian tribe; here, for comparison, the fight on the summit of the volcano of Ilo-Ilo, where the Tagala were finally driven into the open crater; and here, at the end, the practical application for the Tagala: 'As the Americans have destroyed the red man, so will you slowly perish under the American rule. They have hurled your countrymen into the chasm of the volcano. This crater will devour you all if you do not turn those weapons which were once broken by Spanish bondage against your deliverers of 1898, who have since become your oppressors.'"
"Where did you get the scrawl?" asked the colonel excitedly.
"Do you want me to procure hundreds, thousands like it for you?" returned Harryman coolly.
The colonel pressed down the ashes in his pipe with his thumb, and asked indifferently: "You understand Japanese?"
"Tagala also," supplemented Harryman simply.
"And you mean to say that thousands——?"
"Millions of these pictures, with Japanese and Malayan text, are being circulated in the Philippines," said Harryman positively.
"Under our eyes?" asked a lieutenant naïvely.
"Under our eyes," replied Harryman, smiling, "our eyes which carelessly overlook such things."
Colonel Webster rose and offered Harryman his hand. "I have misjudged you," he said heartily. "I belong to your party from now on."
"It isn't a question of party," answered Harryman warmly, "or rather there will soon be only the one party."
"Do you think," asked Colonel McCabe, "that the supposed Japanese plan of attack on the Philippines, published at the beginning of the year in the North China Daily News, was authentic?"
"That question cannot be answered unless you know who gave the document to the Shanghai paper, and what object he had in doing so," replied Harryman.
"How do you mean?"
"Well," continued Harryman, "only two possibilities can exist: the document was either genuine or false. If genuine, then it was an indiscretion on the part of a Japanese who betrayed his country to an English paper—an English paper which no sooner gets possession of this important document than it immediately proceeds to publish its contents, thereby getting its ally into a nice pickle. You will at once observe here three improbabilities: treason, indiscretion, and, finally, England in the act of tripping her ally. These actions would be incompatible, in the first place, with the almost hysterical sense of patriotism of the Japanese; in the second, with their absolute silence and secrecy, and, in the third place, with the behavior of our English cousin since his marriage to Madame Chrysanthemum——"
"The document was therefore not genuine?" asked the colonel.
"Think it over. What was it that the supposed plan of attack set forth? A Japanese invasion of Manila with the fleet and a landing force of eighty thousand men, and then, following the example of Cuba, an insurrection of the natives, which would gradually exhaust our troops, while the Japanese would calmly settle matters at sea, Roschestwenski's tracks being regarded as a sufficient scare for our admirals."
"That would no doubt be the best course to pursue in an endeavor to pocket the Philippines," answered the colonel thoughtfully; "and the plan would be aided by the widespread and growing opposition at home to keeping the archipelago and putting more and more millions into the Asiatic branch business."
"Quite so," continued Harryman quickly, "if Japan wanted nothing else but the Philippines."
"What on earth does she want in addition?" asked Webster.
"The mastery of the Pacific," said Harryman in a decided voice.
"Commercial mastery?" asked Parrington, "or——"
"No; political, too, and with solid foundations," answered Harryman.
Colonel McCabe had sat down again, and was studying the pamphlet, Parrington picked at the label on his whisky bottle, and the others remained silent, but buried in thought. In the next room a clock struck ten with a hurried, tinkling sound which seemed to break up the uneasy silence into so many small pieces.
"And if it was not genuine?" began Colonel McCabe again, hoarsely. He cleared his throat and repeated the question in a low tone of voice: "And if it was not genuine?"
Harryman shrugged his shoulders.
"Then it would be a trap for us to have us secure our information from the wrong quarter," said the colonel, answering his own question.
"A trap into which we are rushing at full speed," continued Webster, laying stress on each word, though his thoughts seemed to be far in advance of what he was saying.
Harryman nodded and twisted his mustache.
"What did you say?" asked Parrington, jumping up and looking from Webster to Harryman, neither of whom, however, volunteered a reply. "We are stumbling into a trap?"
"Two regiments," said Webster, more to himself than to the others. And then, turning to Harryman, he asked briskly: "When are the transports expected to arrive?"
"The steamers with two regiments on board left 'Frisco on April 10th, therefore—he counted the days on his fingers—they should be here by now."
"No, they were to go straight to Mindanao," said Parrington.
"Straight to Mindanao?" Colonel McCabe meditated silently. Then, as though waking up suddenly, he went on: "And the cable has not been working for six days——"
"Exactly," interrupted Parrington, "we have known nothing, either of the fleet or of anything else, for the last six days."
"Harryman," said Colonel McCabe seriously, "do you think there is danger? If it is all a trap, it would be the most stupid thing that we could do to send our transports unprotected—But that's all nonsense! This heat positively dries up your thoughts. No, no, it's impossible; they're hallucinations bred by the fermented vapors of this God-forsaken country!" He pressed the electric button, and the boy appeared at the door behind him. "Some soda, Pailung!"
"Parrington, are you coming? I ordered my boat for ten o'clock," said Harryman.
"As early as this, Harryman?" remonstrated Webster. "You'll be on board your boat quite soon enough, or do you want to keep a night watch also on your Japanese of the—What sort of a Maru was it?" he broke off, because Colonel McCabe pointed angrily at the approaching boy.
"Oh, nonsense!" growled Webster ill-humoredly. "A creature like that doesn't see or hear a thing."
The colonel glared at Webster, and then noisily mixed his drink.
Harryman and Parrington walked along the quay in silence, their steps resounding loudly in the stillness of the night. On the other side of the street fleeting shadows showed at the lighted windows of several harbor dens, over the entrance to which hung murky lamps and from which loud voices issued, proving that all was still in full swing there. There were only a few more steps to the spot where the yellow circle of light from the lanterns rendered the white uniforms of the sailors in the two boats visible. Parrington stood still. "Harryman," he said, repeating his former question, "do you believe there is danger——"
"I don't know, I really don't know," said Harryman nervously. Then, seizing Parrington's hands, he continued hurriedly, but in a low voice: "For days I have been living as if in a trance. It is as if I were lying in the delirium of fever; my head burns and my thoughts always return to the same spot, boring and burrowing; I feel as though a horrible eye were fixed on me from whose glance I cannot escape. I feel that I may at any moment awake from the trance, and that the awakening will be still