After tiffin, two Jap soldiers appeared on his veranda, mutely inquisitive in their brown leggins, yellow shoulder-straps, and high crowned caps. They drew white gloves from their hands, smiled, and bowed three times till their long swords clicked on the floor. The shorter, darker soldier—he with a wispy convex mustache and eyes like a dissipated doll—handed the captain a letter bearing the long brown Korean stamp. The captain whistled as he opened it. It was addressed in a round, shaded hand suggesting steel pens and primary writing books. Reading it, he glowered; then smiled, as if he discerned something pleasant on a mountain across the river; frowned again and more deeply, coughed, and put the letter gently into his left-hand breast pocket, where his heart underneath beat faster. “So Korean postmen ain’t good enough to carry white men’s letters no more?” demanded the captain. “We dare no longer trust the shiftless Korean with letters to so august a person,” explained the taller soldier, and both bowed. “They won’t let you steam them open and read them, like you have this one?” said the captain. “Hey?” “Your bear,” said the doll-eye, after each had stared with polite blankness at the captain, “is he dangerous?” and the soldier indicated the flag-pole. “Mebbe your pardner’s pants ken show that,” drawled the Yankee, taking the other by the shoulder and turning him around. “Um, no,” he growled, “but that b’ar knows pizen when he smells it.” “Pizen?” said the doll-eye vacantly, “What you call pizen?” “We feed it to b’ars regular in Americky,” replied the captain fiercely. “We put it on shin bones and shove it in their kennels. It makes them strong so they ken bust chains and plug axes inter trees.” “Ah, so, _so_,” gasped the pair, with the Jap stare which conceals understanding. The captain knew the soldiers could never have called on so direct a mission as to deliver a letter or complain of Kuropatkin’s attack; and that to show anger to mere privates at losing his trees would yield him only smiles of scorn and pity. What had they come for? Brewster had his suspicions, which he started to test. He thrust his hands carelessly into his pockets, observing that he guessed he wouldn’t “get no more letters at all, steamed or unsteamed.” To which the emissaries replied that he did them an injustice, that they had no desire to interfere with the honorable foreigner’s business, but sought rather to safeguard his privacy by official deliveries. “_So deska_,” said the captain with falling inflection, which means, “Well, well, now, you don’t say.” “You mean then, any Jap can bring me mail?” he challenged. “Yes,” said the tall one. “Indeed. Certainly. If he is in the army.” “Then I’d like your boss’s permission,” said the captain slowly, “to detail that Jap boy Ikeda I have traveling to the mines for me to bring my mail.”