Even when the red sun flag fluttered darkly up its pole, no cheers followed. But from a hill overlooking the town an oath arose. “Damn these Japs, damn their mustard bellies,” growled Captain Cyrus Brewster, chewing a stogie on the porch of his lonely bungalow. Isolated on his hill, the captain was just such a Yankee, thin-nosed, blue-eyed and muffin-mouthed but with an imperishable look of youth for all his curled gray hair, as you might find in a bungalow with a flag-pole in front were you wrecked, for instance, off Patagonia; which is to say he was an iconoclast, and hated the world. He shipped from Chinnampo two million dollars a year in bullion from a gold mine near the Yalu River, for which he was “agent;” passed white men’s food and chemicals through the custom-house, and swore at coolies loading them on the light-draught junks he ran to the head of navigation on the Tai-Dong, whence carts trundled to the mines. But worse than the world he hated the Japanese, for they militantly coveted for barrack joists the only pine grove in the region, which adorned his homestead. They could not seize the land without stirring diplomatic mud, since the captain had bought his stake from the Russians, who had eked it from Seoul in ’96, when the Jap ambassador burned the old Empress in kerosene, and her son fled to the Slav legation. Therefore the Islanders had threatened eviction, with smiles and insults; dickered blandly with bows, lies, and tissue documents inkily fly-tracked, as the captain repulsed them with a fist blow on the table, and cable blanks inscribed with fiery messages to Washington, which he never sent. “War news?” he’d exclaim to missionaries bound up river. “Don’t ask me, by crotch! I don’t bother the monkeys in their damned town, and they don’t come up here to me.” Thus being pro-Russian and a truly brave man, Brewster felt he must vindicate his notions in action. Having heard that a Cossack captain near Wonsan on the west coast would be pleased to know how many men and rice sacks landed with Kuroki, he let a young Russian travel, dressed as a Japanese, on his junks between the lines. This fellow’s name was Davydoff, a machinist, who patriotically had quit the mine when the war broke out, but being lame could not enlist. In disguise, he traveled by the name of Ikeda. I do not know how the captain squared with his conscience in abetting a spy, but that Yankee defect is an over-worked myth, anyhow; and a world malevolent enough to land a man, aged fifty, alone in Korea, with a past like an erasure in a pirate’s log, should grant indulgence.