Banzai! Part 11

"But there are notices at all the street-corners saying that the j.a.panese governor of San Francis...o...b..gs the citizens----"

"Yes, that's where the joke comes in. Perry is going to attack the town as a j.a.p--that's his scheme."

"You haven't had enough sleep," cried Tom. "If all the j.a.ps looked like Admiral Perry, then----"

Tom broke off short and dropped his tea-cup on the floor, staring blankly at the door as if he saw a ghost. Just behind Mr. Allen stood a j.a.p, with a friendly grin on his face, but a j.a.p all the same, most certainly and without the slightest doubt a j.a.p. He looked around the bare office and said in fluent English: "I must ask you to remain in this room for the present." With these words he raised his revolver and kept a sharp eye on the five occupants.

Johnny jumped up and felt instinctively for the revolver in his hip pocket, but in a flash the muzzle of the j.a.p's gun was pointed straight at him and mechanically he obeyed the order "Hands up!"

"Hand that thing over here," said the j.a.p; "you might take it into your head to use it," and he took Johnny's revolver and put it in his pocket.

Several j.a.panese soldiers pa.s.sed by outside. Mr. Allen sank down on a chair; not one of them could make head or tail of the situation.

They were kept waiting for half an hour. Down below in the street, where the wagons were beginning to rattle over the pavement, could be heard the steady march of bodies of soldiers, frequently interrupted by the noise of motor-cycles. There could no longer be any doubt--the affair was getting serious.

The lamps were extinguished and the gray light of dawn filled the rooms as the head Postmaster made his rounds, guarded by a j.a.panese officer.

The official was perspiring profusely from sheer nervousness. He begged the employees to keep calm, and a.s.sured them that it was no joke, but that San Francisco was really in the hands of the j.a.panese. It was the duty of the employees and the citizens, he said, to refrain from all resistance, so that a worse misfortune--a bombardment, he added in a whisper--might not befall the city.

The men were obliged to give up any weapons they had in their possession, and these were collected by the j.a.panese. At seven o'clock, when these details had been attended to, and the few telegraph instruments which were kept in commission were being used by j.a.panese operators--all the others had been rendered useless by the removal of some parts of the mechanism--one of the regular operators asked to be allowed to speak to the Postmaster. Permission having been granted by the j.a.panese guard, he told his chief, in a low voice, that the moment the j.a.panese soldiers had taken possession of the telegraph room he had hurriedly dispatched a message to Sacramento, telling them that San Francisco had been surprised by the j.a.panese fleet and that the whole city was occupied by j.a.panese troops.

"I thank you in the name of our poor country," said the Postmaster, shaking the operator's hand, "I thank you with all my heart; you have done a brave deed."

Just at the time when the operator sent off his telegram to Sacramento, a little, yellow, narrow-eyed fellow, lying in a ditch many miles inland, far to the east of San Francisco, connected his Morse apparatus with the San Francisco-Sacramento telegraph-wire, and intercepted the following message: "Chief of Police, Sacramento.--San Francisco attacked by j.a.panese fleet this morning; whole city in hands of j.a.panese army.

Resistance impossible, as attack took place in thick fog before dawn.

Help imperative."

The little yellow man smiled contentedly, tore off the strip, and handed it to the officer standing near him. The latter drew a deep breath and said: "Thank Heaven, that's settled."

At the time of the occupation of the Post Office building, the j.a.panese outposts had already spun their fine, almost invisible silver threads around all the telegraph-wires far inland and thus cut off all telegraphic communication with the east. The telegram just quoted therefore served only to tell the j.a.panese outposts of the overwhelming success of the j.a.panese arms at the Golden Gate.

But how had all this been accomplished? The enemy could not possibly have depended on the fog from the outset. Nevertheless an unusual barometrical depression had brought in its train several days of disagreeable, stormy weather. The j.a.panese had been fully prepared for a battle with the San Francisco forts and with the few warships stationed in the harbor. The fact that they found such a strong ally in the fog was beyond all their hopes and strategical calculations.

When the sun sank in the waves of the Pacific on the sixth of May, every j.a.panese had his orders for the next few hours, and the five thousand men whose part it was to attend to the work to be accomplished in San Francisco on the morning of the seventh, disappeared silently into the subterranean caves and cellars of the Chinese quarter, to fetch their weapons and be ready for action soon after midnight.

_Chapter VIII_

IN THE BOWELS OF THE EARTH

It was thought that the earthquake had done away forever with the underground labyrinth of the Chinese quarter--those thousands of pens inhabited by creatures that shunned the light of day, those mole-holes which served as headquarters for a subterranean agitation, the mysterious methods of which have never been revealed to the eye of the white man. When had the old Chinatown been laid out; when had those hidden warehouses, those opium dens and hiding-places of the Mongolian proletariat been erected, those dens in which all manner of criminals celebrated their indescribable orgies and which silently hid all these evil-doers from the far-reaching arm of the police? When had the new Chinatown sprung up? When had the new quarter been provided with an endless network of subterranean pa.s.sages, so that soon all was just as it had been before the earthquake? No one had paid any attention to these things. The Mongolian secret societies never paused for a moment in their invisible conspiracy against the ruling whites, and succeeded in creating a new underground world, over which the street traffic rolled on obliviously.

A narrow cellar entrance and greasy, slippery steps led into Hung Wapu's store, behind which there was a chop-house, which in turn led into an opium-den. The rooms behind the latter, from which daylight was forever excluded, were reserved for still worse things. No policeman would ever have succeeded in raiding these dens of iniquity; he would have found nothing but empty rooms or bunks filled with snoring Chinese; the abominable stench would soon have driven him out again, but if, by any chance, he had attempted to penetrate further and to explore the walls for the purpose of discovering hidden openings, the only result would have been a story in the next day's papers about a "missing" policeman.

Hung Wapu, whose plump face, with its enormous spectacles, resembled that of an old fat boarding-house keeper, was standing at the entrance to his cellar-shop late on the evening of May sixth. A disgusting odor and the murmur of many voices reached the street from the cellar. The policeman had just made his rounds, and Hung Wapu looked after him with a cunning grin as his heavy steps died away in the distance.

The coast was clear for two hours. Hung Wapu went in and locked the door, above which a green paper-lantern swung gently to and fro in the soft night wind. Hung Wapu pa.s.sed through the store to the chop-house, where several dozen Chinese were squatting on the ground dining on unmentionable Chinese delicacies, which consisted of anything and everything soft enough to be chewed. No one watching the vacant expression of these people would have dreamed for a moment that anything was wrong; no one observing these chattering, shouting sons of the Celestial Kingdom would have guessed that anything out of the ordinary was on foot. They kept on eating, and did not even look up when several j.a.ps stole, one by one, through their midst and disappeared through a door at the back. The j.a.ps apparently attracted no attention whatsoever, but a keen observer would have noticed that Hung Wapu placed a little saki-bowl on a low table for every j.a.panese visitor that had entered his shop.

The j.a.ps all went through a side-door of the opium-den into a large room, where they took off their outer clothing and put on uniforms instead. Then they lay down to sleep either on the mats on the floor or on the bundles of clothing which were stacked on the floor along the walls of the room.

Hung Wapu now accompanied one of his Chinese guests up the cellar-steps to the street, and sitting down on the top step began to chat in a low voice with his apparently half-intoxicated countryman. At the same time he polished about two dozen little saki-bowls with an old rag, afterwards arranging them in long rows on the pavement.

The animated traffic in the narrow alley gradually died down. One by one most of the gas-lamps closed their tired eyes, and only the green paper-lantern above Hung Wapu's door continued to swing to and fro in the night-wind, while similar spots of colored light were visible in front of a few of the neighboring houses. Far away a clock struck the hour of midnight, and somewhere else, high up in the air, a bell rang out twelve strokes with a metallic sound. A cool current of air coming from the harbor swept through the hot, ill-smelling alley.

Hung Wapu went on whispering with his companion, and all the time he continued to polish his little saki-bowls. After a while the visitor fell asleep against the door-post and snored with all his might. Misty shadows began to fall slowly and the lights of the street lamps took on a red glow. Suddenly the figure of a drunken man appeared a little distance away; he was carefully feeling his way along the houses, but as soon as he came in sight of Hung Wapu's cellar, he suddenly seemed to sober up for a minute and made directly for it. "Saki!" he stammered, planting himself in front of Hung Wapu, whereupon the latter made a sign. The drunken man, a j.a.panese, whose face looked ghastly pale in the green light from the lantern, stared stupidly at the saki-bowls, which Hung Wapu was trying to shield from the tottering wretch with his arm.

"Twenty-eight bowls," he stammered to himself, "twenty-eight saki-bowls----"

At this moment the sleeping Chinaman awoke and looked at the drunken man with a silly laugh.

"Yes, twenty-eight saki-bowls; it's all right--twenty-eight saki-bowls,"

repeated the drunken j.a.p, and reeled on along the houses.

Hung Wapu seemed to have ended his day's work with the polishing of the twenty-eight saki-bowls; he piled them up in a heap and disappeared with them into his cellar, followed with extraordinary agility by the Chinese sleeper. He hurried through the chop-house, the occupants of which were all fast asleep on their straw mats, pa.s.sed through the opium-den, and then, in the third room, divested himself of his Chinese coat. The silk-cap with the pigtail attached was flung into a corner, and then, dressed in a khaki uniform, he seated himself at a table and studied a map of the city of San Francisco, making notes in a small book by the light of a smoky oil lamp.

The drunken j.a.p, who had apparently had doubts about entering Hung Wapu's chop-house, tottered on down the quiet street and made for another paper-lantern, which hung above another cellar door about ten houses farther on.

Here too, curiously enough, he found the Chinese landlord sitting on the top step. He wanted to push him aside and stumble down the steps, but the Chinaman stopped him.

"How much?" stuttered the drunken man.

"How much?" answered the Chinaman. "How much money will the great stranger pay for a meal for his ill.u.s.trious stomach in Si Wafang's miserable hut? Forty kasch, forty kasch the n.o.ble son of the Rising Sun must pay for a shabby meal in Si Wafang's wretched hut."

"Forty kasch? I'll bring the forty kasch, most n.o.ble Si Wafang. 'I won't go home till morning, till daylight does appear,'" bawled the tipsy man, and staggered on down the street, whereupon this landlord also disappeared in his cellar, after extinguishing the paper lantern over the doorway.

A death-like stillness reigned in the street, and no one imagined that the rats were a.s.sembling, that the underground pa.s.sages were full of them, and that it only needed a sign to bring the swarming ma.s.ses to the surface.

A cold breeze from the sea swept through the deserted streets and a misty veil enveloped the yellow light of the gas-lamps. The lanterns hanging in front of the Chinese cellars were extinguished one by one, and everyone apparently turned in. The fog became thicker and thicker, and covered the pavement with moisture.

Suddenly the door of Hung Wapu's cellar squeaked; it was opened cautiously and a low clatter came up from below. Thirty dark forms crept slowly up the steps, one after the other, and without a word they began their march. Ten houses farther on a similar detachment poured out of the other Chinese cellar and joined their ranks.

The gas-lamps shed a dull, yellowish-red light on the gun-barrels of the j.a.panese company, which was marching down to the docks.

Two thousand steps farther on it had become a battalion, which marched rapidly in the direction of the barracks of the Fifth Regiment of regulars in the old Presidio. At the next corner the leader of the battalion un.o.btrusively saluted a man in uniform who stepped suddenly out of a doorway. A few j.a.panese words were exchanged in a low tone.

"This is an unexpected ally," said the j.a.panese colonel, holding out his hand in the dense fog.

Four o'clock struck from the tower of the Union Ferry Depot, and out from the sea, from the Golden Gate, came the bellowing voice of a steamer's whistle. The two officers looked at each other and smiled, and the troops continued their march.

"Halloo!" shouted a roundsman to a policeman who had been leaning against a lamp-post half asleep. "Halloo, Tom, wake up! Who are those fellows over there; where the deuce are they going?"

Tom opened his eyes, and up on the hill, a few blocks away, he could faintly distinguish through the thick fog the outline of a group of rapidly moving soldiers. "I guess they are some of our boys taking part in the naval maneuver. You know, Perry's going to attack us to-day."

"Well, I didn't know that," replied the roundsman. "They're great boys, all right; up and about at four in the morning." Just then the angry bellow from a steamer's whistle came across the water and abruptly ended this early morning conversation.

"I suppose that's Perry now," said Tom. "Well, he can't do much in this beastly fog, anyway."