Kitabı oku: «The North Pacific», sayfa 14

"And my packs?"

"They are in the out-house."

"Very well; I'll go to sleep, if the lady of the house will point out my bedroom."

Kanuka spoke to the woman, who withdrew for a moment. She came back with two skins, one of a reindeer and the other a shaggy pelt which Fred did not recognise. She threw these down in a corner of the room, opposite the fire.

"There is your bed," said the guide. "Sleep well."

"Same to you," said Fred, yawning. "Good-night, ma'am!"

Neither of the Manchurians paid the slightest attention to him as he spread the rugs and stretched himself at full length between them. The wind roared around the little hut, and he could hear the snow beating against its sides. Before long Kanuka and the woman left him alone, having carefully covered the coals of fire with ashes, just as he had often seen his grandmother cover them in his New England home. Thinking about that home, and listening to the storm, he was soon sound asleep.

The travel-worn correspondent had a curious dream. He thought he was back on the old farm in Brookfield hoeing corn. There was snow between the hills, and instead of drawing up warm, brown earth around the six-inch blades of corn, he packed them nicely in snow, shivering as he did so. There were icicles on his hoe and he could hardly have kept at work had he not been aided by two Manchurian ponies who pawed the snow toward the hills, and asked him to hurry, for a balloon was coming for them at precisely four o'clock. He was by no means surprised to hear them speak, especially as one of them was dressed in a ragged gown and the other in a sheepskin cloak.

"What time is it?" asked the old-woman pony sharply. He was too cold to look, and both ponies started to fumble at his watch-guard with their hoofs. Their eyes flashed fire. He began to be afraid, and made a tremendous effort to push them back, but he could not move a finger. With a cry of terror he awoke.

Awoke to find himself bound, hand and foot, with the light of the greasy lamp shining in his face. The old hag was stooping over him and drawing his watch from his pocket. By the dim light in the room he saw half a dozen wild-looking men standing around him. All were armed and their bearded faces were wolfish. Kanuka knelt beside him tying the last knot in the rope that bound his ankles together. As he caught sight of Fred's wide-open eyes fixed upon him he uttered an exclamation and drew a long knife from his belt.

CHAPTER XXIV.
THE LITTLE FATHER

Although the correspondent of the Bulletin was not aware of the fact when he started on his eventful journey northward, active hostilities had already begun at the front. The two immense armies, as we have seen, lay entrenched, facing each other, in lines extending, nearly one hundred miles from east to west, across the railroad south of Moukden, the ancient capital of the Manchus. While the Japanese had thrown up temporary earthworks here and there, and of course had taken advantage of the configuration of the ground to secure their positions against surprise, as well as to afford shelter for their troops against the inclemency of the Manchurian winter, the Russians were far more strongly fortified and were determined to hold their ground. Railroad trains, running between Moukden and Harbin, their great military base, supplied them with constantly renewed stores of ammunition, food, and clothing, and, moreover, removed the sick and wounded from the front and filled their places with fresh recruits as fast as they arrived from the west over the Trans-Siberian route.

Such was the situation when Field Marshal Oyama, having kept his vast armies under perfect discipline all winter, and replaced the losses incurred at Liaoyang, determined to move on the enemy, who, refreshed and confident, awaited behind their ramparts the advance of the Japanese.

Exactly the same tactics were employed as at Liaoyang. The ends of the hundred-mile frontal line struck heavily, and bent the Russian bar of steel inward at both extremities. The attack began on February 20th, and four days later the Japanese were in possession of a strong Russian position at the village of Tsinketchen, far to the east of Moukden. At the same time the Japanese left wing began its march on Sinmintin, at the western end of the line. The Russians, out-flanked, fell back. The extremities of the two wings would doubtless have been effectively reinforced had not the crafty Oyama delivered a simultaneous assault upon the very centre at Putiloff, or "Lone-Tree Hill," to use the name that soon became familiar to newspaper readers all over the globe. A furious artillery fire was opened upon this hill by the Japanese. It was taken and retaken. The scenes that had horrified the world at Port Arthur and Liaoyang were repeated. Assault after assault was delivered, but for a week the devoted band of Muscovites held that little acre of ground on the hill-top, while regiment after regiment of the soldiers of Nippon melted away before the terrific fire from the fortress. It was like wading up streams of molten lava, to fight a volcano in full eruption. The Russians were never driven from the hill by direct assault; but Kouropatkin, seeing his wings bent inward and backward farther and farther, and his front once more assuming the terrible horse-shoe shape, reluctantly gave orders to his brave men to withdraw from Putiloff and fall back on the line of the railroad.

In the division of the Japanese troops to whom the capture of this hill – the keystone of Kouropatkin's arch – was assigned was the regiment in which Oshima served. Thus far Oto's old friend had seemed to bear a charmed life. He had fought in battle after battle, but had received no wound of any moment. His company had been decimated again and again, but the ranks had been filled and the stern young captain still held his place in front, as it wheeled into line when the regiment was called upon for new duties.

Upon hearing the order to move upon Lone-Tree Hill, the men set up a cheer. The officers burnished their swords and stepped alertly to and fro, aligning the ranks and glancing along the files to see that every equipment was in order and every man ready. This was in the early afternoon. It was understood that the artillery would open upon the hill batteries at sundown, and two hours later the assault would be made.

Impatiently the compact mass of small brown men waited for the word. The great siege guns, brought with infinite labour from Port Arthur, roared and thundered. Putiloff answered, and shrapnel burst over the Japanese troops, who burrowed as best they might in trenches and holes and behind every hillock, while they hastily devoured their scant field rations. The night came on, dark and heavy. At last the welcome word was received.

"Forward!" cried Oshima, brandishing his sword so that it glittered in the flashes of the cannon.

The regiment hurled itself upon the slopes of the hill, solid shot ploughing awful furrows through their ranks. The survivors kept on, undaunted. That night meant for them victory or a glorious death. No one thought of retreat.

As he saw his men swept downward by the pitiless hail of steel, Oshima lost all sense of danger, and the old spirit of his Samurai ancestors blazed out. "Strike! Strike!" he shouted to his men, springing in front of them as the broken line faltered for a moment. "Up the hill! It is ours! Banzai dai Nippon!"

With the wild cheer of Japan upon his lips he suddenly threw his arms aloft and fell headlong to the ground. The column swept by and over him in the darkness. Then two slightly wounded men raised their captain, his hand still grasping his sword, and tottered down the hill with him, stumbling over the bodies of the fallen.

Not far in the rear were Red-Cross workers, and the silent figure of the brave officer was borne swiftly to a hospital tent, where he partly regained consciousness. He was shot through the body, and the surgeons shook their heads as they examined the wound. Still, there was a chance for his life, and Oshima was despatched to the coast, the first part of the way in an ambulance, then by railway. At Antung he remained until the hospital ship was ready to sail with its sad freight of torn, pierced, and mangled soldiers. The staunch vessel – painted white, with a broad green stripe along its hull, like the sash of a military surgeon – conveyed him safely to Hiroshima, where he was placed in a cot near an eastern window. Kind hands ministered to him, and gentle faces bent over him. As he recovered full possession of his senses he saw one sweet face that was familiar to him.

"Hana!" he whispered. "O-Hana-San, is it you?"

Day after day the battle raged in Manchuria. Shells began to fall in Moukden, and in an hour the city was a scene of ghastly confusion and panic. Hospital trains, loaded to the doors with wounded and dying, pulled out of the station, the groans and shrieks of the sufferers mingling with the clank and clatter of the iron wheels. Men and women rushed to and fro in the muddy streets – for this was the first week in March, and a few warm days had turned snow and ice to mire, ankle deep – and fought each other in a frenzied fear as they struggled for places in carts and railway cars, with such of their personal effects as they could carry in their arms. Thieves and drunken soldiery looted shops and private houses boldly.

It was rumoured that the awful Japanese line was closing in on the north, and that the railroad would be cut. This added to the panic. Dazed, mud-stained, deafened with the roar of battle, half senseless with intoxication, thousands of stragglers and camp-followers staggered through the city, joining the mad rush. "To the north! To the north!" was the one thought, the one wild cry. Emerging from the densely populated town, the throng of refugees fled up the valley. Wherever the defile narrowed, the crowd crushed together, screaming, pushing, fighting their way on; through back alleys of little villages on the route; along the railroad track, separating to allow a train to roar through their midst, shaking frenzied fists at it as it passed and left them behind; flinging away food, clothing, household treasures to which they had thus far clung mechanically; shouted at by retreating battalions whose progress they blocked, and cursed by artillery-men as the horses sprang forward over the clogged and miry road, or crashed through the low willows and over mud-walls surrounding the hovels of the natives; still on and on, through the black night and the chill grey dawn, the frantic multitude streamed northward toward Harbin and safety.

At Tie Pass there was a halt. Here Kouropatkin made a desperate attempt to stand, and did succeed in checking the enemy until the shattered Russian forces could reunite in the semblance of a disciplined army, while the wounded, and such stores and guns as had been saved from the disastrous defeat, were sent northward. Then the army fell sullenly back, a few versts each day, repulsing the attacks of the exhausted Japanese. These attacks diminished in number and force, until Kouropatkin could breathe more freely and even consider establishing a new line of permanent defence. Before, however, he could reorganise his troops or lay out a single line of fortifications a despatch flashed over the wires from St. Petersburg removing him from the supreme command of the army and appointing General Linevitch, his former subordinate, in his place.

Like a brave and generous soldier he not only laid down his command without a word of protest, but at once petitioned for and obtained permission to serve under Linevitch. Truly, the "Little Father" had reason to be proud of his children!

But the Czar of all the Russias, in his white palace on the Neva, had cares beyond even those which gathered, bat-winged, around the prospects of his army in the Far East. Throughout his vast realm, from the Caucasus to the Baltic, from Sebastopol to the Arctic Seas, in the remote provinces and at the very gates of his palace, signs multiplied that a long-dreaded event was coming to pass: the Russian peasant was awakening! Aroused by proclamations of Nihilists, by sermons and appeals from religious leaders, by stinging words from such patriots as Tolstoi and Gorky, the peasant stirred in his long sleep, he smiled in his stupid, good-humoured, harmless way; he grew graver as the import of the fiery words that were borne on every breeze penetrated his dull brain. Cruelty – oppression – injustice – could it be true? Nay, the Little Father would put it all right. They would tell him about it; they would go to him with these wrongs as a little child kneels at his bedside and prays sleepily and trustfully, to his Father in Heaven; and he, the Ruler of all the Russias, the White Czar, the father of his people, would listen and would hear their prayer and grant relief, if relief were needed.

A great throng of such peasants, headed by a priest, flocked to the city, asking, poor, bewildered souls, to see the Czar, and to be allowed to pray to him. They were rebuffed and roughly ordered back by men with glistening bayonets. Then, still childlike and foolish, they actually tried to force their way to their father's house, believing that although his minions might use them rudely, he, whom they loved with all their big, ignorant, devoted hearts, would suffer them to come unto him, and forbid them not.

Another surge forward, over the paved street, to the fatal bridge. "Halt! Disperse!"

They would not. Their priest leader held his cross aloft and waved them on.

Then it came – a rattling crash like the near thunder close upon the lightning. Shrieks and moans of dying men and children. Another volley, and another. And the Little Father was so near – could he not hear them?

The people fled from the cruel streets, the red pavement, the hoofs of the war-horses and the flashing sabres of their riders. Back, in a helpless, frightened throng, to the open country, as the fugitives fled from Moukden. But the fierce enemy that was behind them was no foreign foe, thirsting for their lives. It was their Little Father!

Did the young, black-bearded Czar think of all this, as he sat in his gorgeously draped throne room in the palace? Did his cheeks blanch and his lips quiver at the distant sound of musketry in the streets of St. Petersburg? Who can tell? Only He who knoweth all hearts and whose love holds both Czar and peasant.

While Russia was thus torn with internal troubles, the situation in the East grew daily more threatening. The danger was now apparent to all. At Harbin the great railway forks, one branch going southward to Port Arthur, and the other continuing eastward to Vladivostock. If the Japanese, pushing northward with their victorious hosts, could cut the line east of Harbin Junction, Russia's one port, her last hope of sea power on the North Pacific, would be at the mercy of the Japanese.

Despatches were sent to Rojestvensky to hurry his ships to the scene of war. Two squadrons were already united under his command. A third was on its way through the Mediterranean, and shortly afterward rendezvoused at Jiboutil, near Aden, at the southern end of the Red Sea. This third squadron was also ordered to proceed eastward across the Indian Ocean at full speed, and overtake the Baltic fleet if possible. Early in April Rojestvensky's ships were sighted off Acheen, at the extreme north-western point of Sumatra.

CHAPTER XXV.
LARKIN RETIRES FROM BUSINESS

When Fred Larkin grasped the full significance of the situation in which he found himself, on awaking in the Manchurian hut, he felt that he was nearer death than ever before in all his hardy, adventurous life. At Santiago, indeed, he had thought himself led out to execution, but this had proved to be a mistake. The Spaniards were but conducting him, under a flag of truce, to the American lines, where he was exchanged for a prisoner of war, one of their own countrymen. In this lonely hovel, in one of the remotest and dreariest districts of Manchuria, cut off from all hope of help, not only by the leagues that lay between him and the travelled road to Feng-Weng-Chang, but by the storm which now shook the hut with its fierce blasts; surrounded by lawless men who thirsted for gold and cared not a whiff from their pipes for a human life; trapped by the cunning guide, and completely at the mercy of his wolfish captors as he lay before them pinioned hand and foot; he realised in a swift flash of thought that he could be saved by little short of a miracle. Still he would try. He was not a man to give up while the faintest shred of hope remained.

"What do you want, Kanuka?" he asked quietly, looking his treacherous guide straight in the eye.

The villain hesitated, and Fred knew his life hung by a hair. The blade did not fall.

"We want everything you have, everything!" said Kanuka. "If you resist we kill you."

"You would gain nothing by that," said the prisoner. "I am perfectly helpless. Who are – your friends?"

"They are not my friends; they are my men. If I lift my finger to them, you are dead. Is it not so?" he added, turning to the motley crew and speaking in his own tongue.

A low snarl went round the circle, and they showed their teeth. They drew still nearer, and fingered the hafts of their knives, which Fred could see sticking in their girdles. Two of the men carried guns. One of the band, younger than the rest, seemed to have no weapons, and remained in the background. The old woman had succeeded in getting possession of the watch and dangled it so that the light shone upon it.

"I don't doubt your word, Kanuka," observed Fred in the same calm, even tones. "Those followers of yours seem quite willing to finish up the job. But you know better than that. You are an intelligent man."

The guide could not conceal a gratified expression, and drew himself up a little.

"You know," continued the reporter, "that if I should be killed there would be a hue and cry after the American war correspondent. The newspaper I represent would spend a fortune in hunting down every man that took part in the murder. Very likely the United States Government would take the matter up, and you would be caught and executed, every man of you, at Pekin, if it took ten years. Probably you remember what happened to the men that put two or three American missionaries to death, a few years ago? Yes, I thought so. And the Chinese method of execution is so very unpleasant, in such cases!"

Kanuka stood erect, motioned back his men, and gnawed his moustache, frowning irresolutely.

"You joke!" said he, with a meaning gesture of his knife.

"Joke? Not a bit of it. I never felt less like joking," said Fred honestly. "I want to get out of this scrape alive, and to do that, I must save you. If I die, you die, and the old lady and your hopeful crowd there, as sure as fate. Pekin never lets an international offence go; and if Pekin would, Washington wouldn't. You know that as well as I do."

"What you propose?" asked the chief.

"Well, as I said, I can't help your taking all my worldly goods," said the reporter. "The next thing is to get rid of me without imperilling your own head – or limbs," he added significantly. The bandit shuddered in spite of himself. He had witnessed the execution of a Boxer murderer, near Pekin. Fred went on: "I would suggest that as soon as the storm will permit you to move – I assure you I am ready to take considerable risk on the road – you take me, blindfolded if you wish, to some point from which I can strike out for the settlements. You, meanwhile, with your men, could make tracks for parts unknown – of which there happens to be a good supply within easy reach of this forsaken hole."

"You would inform on us," growled the ex-guide. "We should have Japanese police on our trail in twenty-four hours."

"I would give you my word of honour – "

The rascal shrugged his shoulders. "I would not trust you. You newspaper men tell what stories you like."

Fred flushed, and felt an overpowering desire to plant one good blow between the man's sulky, sneering eyes.

"Oh, well," he said, "settle it yourself. You asked my advice and I've given it. When the Chinese authorities are getting ready to deal with you, don't blame me, that's all."

Kanuka turned to his men and talked to them rapidly and in low tones. So far as Fred could judge, the old crone and the youngest of the bandits, who, he afterward learned, was her son, were advocating his liberation. The rest clamoured for blood. The chief seemed undecided, and fingered his knife nervously. At last he spoke to his followers sharply, with an abrupt gesture of dismissal. To Fred's relief they all filed out, leaving him alone with the chief.

"They think it would be foolish to let you go," said the latter. "Dead men tell no tales. But they are beasts – pooh! As you say, I am an intelligent man. You shall not die to-night. In the morning we shall see."

He knelt again beside his prisoner and rummaged his pockets thoroughly, drawing out their contents and surveying them by the light of the lamp. The papers he threw contemptuously into the fireplace; the silver change and small articles he thrust into his own pouch. Fortunately Fred had taken a purse containing about fifty dollars worth of gold pieces, to use on his trip. To the Manchurian this was an enormous sum of money, and it did not occur to him to examine his captive's belt, which contained a much larger amount.

"Look here, old chap," said Fred, as Kanuka rose to his feet with his plunder, "ease up these ropes a little, will you? They cut me, and I want to sleep."

The man gave a contemptuous grunt, and, bestowing a kick on the helpless prisoner, retired without a word. Again Fred's blood boiled, but he realised his utter helplessness, and lay quietly, trying to concoct some plan for escape, or for action, on the following day.

It was evident that he had fallen into the hands of that dangerous and as yet only partly understood power, the Boxer element of north-eastern China. In 1901 these bandits, or highwaymen, – for such they really were, and are – terrorised a district extending from Newchwang to Kirin. Their operations were so systematic and successful that Chinese as well as foreign merchants finally had come to recognise their authority, and it is said that an office was actually established in the port of Newchwang where persons desiring to import goods might secure insurance against molestation from the robbers. When the insurance was paid for, the bandit agent gave the merchant a document and a little flag, and with this document in his possession, and the flag nailed to his cart or boat, he travelled in safety.

As soon as the real Boxer movement was disposed of by the Powers, and by China herself, the Russians undertook the suppression of this systematic brigandage, by which some thousands of outlaws were living in insolent security. Moukden was garrisoned with twelve thousand soldiers, and troops took the field against the robbers. In less than six weeks three thousand bandits were killed and nearly as many captured. The remainder scattered and fled to the fastnesses of the mountains, where they were hunted like wild beasts. As an organised force, they were, indeed, "suppressed"; but strong gangs of criminals escaped, and during the early months of the Japanese war they gained courage and assumed their unlawful calling with something of their former boldness.

Fred knew all this – he had followed the recent history of China carefully – and he had no doubt whatever that he had fallen into the hands of one of the scattered bands of this still powerful organisation. He knew, moreover, that a more daring and remorseless set of men never gained their living by highway robbery than these same bandits, through whose agent, Kanuka, they had so cleverly entrapped him.

Revolving these things in his mind and trying to concoct some sort of plan for escape, the reporter at last fell asleep from sheer exhaustion, in spite of the pain caused by his bonds, and the presence of two bandits who had remained to watch the prisoner.

When he awoke it was broad daylight. The mistress of the hut was occupied in preparing another seething mess over the fire, exactly as she had been when he entered the hut. Fred felt lame and sore from head to foot, and soon discovered, moreover, that he had taken a severe cold. He was hot and feverish, and had a weak longing for his mother's cool, soft hands upon his burning forehead.

The old hag presently lifted the pot from the fire, groaning as she did so.

"I wish I could help you, ma'am," said Fred, trying to assume a cheerful tone, "but 'circumstances over which I have no control,' you know!"

She seemed to gather the import of his words – perhaps remembering his courteous assistance on the preceding night – and dishing out a portion of the nauseous mess offered it to him. When she saw that he was so tightly bound that he could not help himself to food she uttered an exclamation in which he recognised the first hint of pity among his captors. Looking over her shoulder with evident apprehension, she freed his right arm, and when he indicated with a feeble smile and shake of his head that it was benumbed, she rubbed it with a not unwomanly touch until he could use it and feed himself. Having forced down a little of the distasteful food, to avoid hurting her feelings, he lay back on his couch and motioned to her to lay the rope lightly over his arm, giving it its former appearance of confinement. This she did at once, and not too soon, for the whole gang of seven men, including Kanuka, trooped in for their breakfast a minute later.

The storm continued through the day, and Fred found his condition unchanged, save that he was allowed to walk about the room a little, under guard of three of the ugliest-looking of the bandits. As night came on once more, his feverishness increased. He felt faint and giddy. He had no doubt that his drink was drugged the day before, and it was quite possible that the process – though for what purpose he could not guess – was being kept up. He was too feeble to care much what he ate or drank. All he wanted was to be left alone.

At about midnight on the second night in the hut, as the sick man was tossing on his filthy bed, the inner door of the room opened softly, and the woman appeared, shading the flame of the lamp with her hand. Her son, who had been left on guard, was standing silently by the window, gun in hand. The aged crone now knelt beside Fred, and noiselessly cast off the ropes, which had been tied with less caution than at first, it being deemed impossible that the captive, weakened as he was, could make his escape. Fred managed to gain his feet, and stood stiffly, half supported by the woman. She led him to the outer door, which she opened. The stars were shining, and it was bitter cold. The young bandit now slipped around the corner of the house and presently reappeared with one of the ponies, upon which Fred managed to scramble. The old woman gave the reporter a soft pat on the back and whispered something to her son, who stooped and kissed her! Then she went into the house, wiping her eyes on her ragged skirt, and leaving the two men outside, free.

Fred soon found that he could not sit upright in the saddle without help, and the bandit, slinging his gun over his back, put his arm around the rider and so held him on, while the pony picked his way down the mountain trail. In places the drifts made the path almost impassable. The wind still swept fiercely through the defile, although the night was clear. Once the young robber stopped suddenly and unslung his rifle; but the noise he had heard was but that of a falling tree, and he resumed his steady walk beside the pony.

How he survived that night Fred never knew. It was a vague, horrible dream of snow and ice, of piercing chills and fever heats, of monotonous plodding through the snow, alternating with plunging descents over rough ground, that seemed to jar him to pieces, while every bone and muscle was a separate anguish. Still on and on, the guide saying never a word.

Before dawn Fred dimly understood that they had struck the main road to Wiju. Less snow had fallen here, and their progress was more rapid. Early in the forenoon the noise of wheels and loud voices was heard on the path behind them. Whether or not it was a band of pursuers he neither knew nor cared. The world was one wide horror of pain and glaring light and bursting misery of head and limb.

The cavalcade in the rear overtook the rider. It was a train of three ambulance carts returning from the front with wounded Japanese. The guide spoke briefly to the leader and Fred was lifted from his horse with delicate brown hands as gentle as a woman's, and was placed on a cot in one of the wagons. The young bandit disappeared. Fred never saw him again.

Four days later the editor-in-chief of the Bulletin took up a bit of yellow paper and read: "Frederic Larkin, Correspondent, sick in hospital at Hiroshima."

The chief smiled grimly as he laid down the cable despatch.

"In one of his scrapes again!" he said, tossing the paper over to his sub. "We shall have to depend on the Associated for a while!"