littlest Japanese soldier in the group beat him heavily with a stick much thicker than the thumb. Then they led him praying, howling and limping to the telegraph pole where he stands as an awful example to his fellows. He had stolen some coal and it was his second offense. It was all right, of course, but it was strange to see the apparent joy with which the Japanese did it and stranger still to see the other coolies grinning, chatting and making fun of the culprit. I wonder whether they were crooking the pregnant hinges of the knee or what on earth it did mean. We were hung up here at 3 P. M., and allowed to go no further. There is no order for us to remain—only a “strong desire” that we should—which is the Japanese way. Davis and I had a great bath to-day in a pool which somebody had dammed up—for what purpose I know not. What I do know is that it was not meant for us.
… Sitting on the sand we are this August fifth under birch saplings and by the side of a running stream. Davis and Lewis are asleep in the sand. Fifteen miles only is our métier to-day and Brill is anxious to go on. The roads are bad farther on, say the Japanese, and transportation difficult: the only satisfactory reason yet given for this hideous delay, and this, I’m afraid, not the true one. They simply don’t trust us—that’s all. The body of the dragon is naturally getting bigger and his vertebræ are distinctly more lumpy. For instance, he gathered in a train of thirty freight cars this morning and he had six hundred coolies pulling it for him. The button of him dropped back to-day towards the tip o’ tail that is his anatomical place. Brill passed him on the road. His bicycle tire was punctured and he was trying to mend it, Brill says, with 25-cent postage stamps. He evidently succeeded for he has just arrived. He seems to have had a high old time on the way. At the last Chinese village he halted long enough to offer a prize—what I don’t know—to the Chinese child that could display the prettiest embroidered stomacher. He had them lined up in a shy, smiling row and was about to deliver the prize when the winner was suddenly thrust forward with a wonderful piece on his chubby tum-tum. The wild Irishman gave him the prize, hoisted him on the bicycle and circled the compound swiftly to the delight of the village. I asked him how he communicated with these wild heathens and he said he talked Irish to them. I’m quite sure he does and he seems to make himself understood.
It’s sunset now at North Wa-fang-tien and all of us are out in a hard-packed, sand-floor yard under little birch trees. It was a hot ride to-day—the last mile being over a glaring white road and through glaring white sand. That glare of a fierce sun made the head ache and the very eye-balls burn. I almost reeled from Fuji who, for that mile, was, for the first time, almost docile.
We had a shock and a thrill to-day—Brill, Lewis, Davis and I. It was noon and while we sat on a low stone wall in a grassy grove, a few carts filled with wounded Japanese, passed slowly by. In one cart, sat a man in a red shirt, with a white handkerchief tied over his head and under his chin. Facing him was a bearded Japanese with a musket between his knees. The man in the red shirt wearily turned his face. It was smooth-shaven and white. The thrill was that the man was the first Russian prisoner we had seen—the shock that among those yellow faces was a captive with a skin like ours. I couldn’t help feeling pity and shame—pity for him and a shame for myself that I needn’t explain. I wondered how I should have felt had I been in his place and suddenly found four white men staring at me. It’s no use. Blood is thicker than water—or anything else—in the end.
This is distinctly a human country—a country of corn-fields, beans and potatoes, horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, goats and no freaks in tree-trunk, branch or foliage. But I can’t get over seeing a Chinaman in a corn-field. It is always a shock. He doesn’t seem to have any right there—somehow nobody does except a white man or a darkey. There are tumble-bugs in the dusty road and gray, flying grasshopper-like things that rise from the dust, flutter a few feet from the earth and drop back again, just as they do at home. And the dragon-flies—why they are nothing in the world but the “snake-doctors” that I used to throw stones at when I was a boy in the Bluegrass. The mountains are treeless and volcanic but its a human country and I don’t feel as far from home as I did in Japan. Brill says it all looks like a lot of Montana hills around Ohio corn-fields: only the corn is millet