This very hour tonight he awaited Ikeda, erst Davydoff. Now through his night glass he searched the river, now the silent town distorted by no flickering camp-fires, the torches, dying into iridescence, revealed the black Tai-Dong as a covert serpent stealing across a world numb and indifferent in white age. “Like them yeller oriental hearts, that river,” he muttered, nodding at the stream, “reaching out acrost the world fer us white men’s sceptres, learnin’ to smile whiles they suffer. Oh, they’ll get the sceptres.” You see, the captain believed firmly in the Yellow Peril. Soon he turned toward the angled thatches of the town, and a white painted gable far from the barracks caught his eye. His sharp features softened with recollection. “I see yer hev yer schoolhouse lit, young missy,” he murmured. “Night school. Workin’ overtime civilizin’ Koreans.” For first the invaders had built the barracks, then the school—copying the white man’s way in lifting a yellow burden—which to the captain menaced a right regeneration of Korea. The brown people thus handled the surest civilizing weapons of the white, who were sealed meanwhile further north in their fortresses of privilege and prejudice; so the bungalow on the hill and the schoolhouse among the huts symbolized the passing of Asia. “Karin San’s there,” mused the captain, and a vision of the white clad Korean boys with long hair parted in the middle, the girls in green silk tunics, their snub noses buried in books of English and Japanese, uprose before him as he had seen them through the doorway, repeating the alphabet in unison, on a day he had passed the schoolhouse. Then Karin San had bowed low on the threshold, saying, “It is a beautiful day, You-think-yes? I am Karin-San-the-school-teacher-of-English,” and a big red pin had fallen from the shiny convolutions of her oiled hair, as she bowed so low. “Great Christopher!” the captain had gasped; the same dizziness now touched his breast as he watched. Many times since he had visited Karin San, stealing down to the school unknown to the Japs, or even Davydoff. He would sit beside her on her platform, and she would turn to him for correction when her red lips mistrusted how an English word should sound. After lessons they would talk of Japan and America, for the captain had the reserve of age and disappointment, and to Karin the war was no more a subject for discussion than the coming of spring itself. “Shame me for lovin’ you, Karin San,” he muttered now tonight. “One of the yeller-bellies I hates. Hypocrite!” and he turned toward a gigantic sort of dog-house under his flag-pole, where hibernated in winter and dozed in summer, the captain’s big brown Siberian bear, Kuropatkin, which he loved even more than his twisty pine trees. He tapped on the house with his bamboo stick, and wished the General “Happy New Year.” “It’s time ye waked and brushed yer teeth,” he said. “World’s a bit livelier in these parts than when ye went to bed last year.”