Banzai! | Page 4

seaquake can be traced to Japanese villainy, probably brought about by Japanese divers, or even submarine boats." And the colonel began to laugh heartily.
Harryman ignored this attempt to resume their recent dispute, and with head thrown back continued to blow clouds of smoke nervously into the air.
"But seriously, Harryman," began the colonel again, "can you give any explanation?"
"No," answered Harryman curtly; "but perhaps you will remember who was the first to furnish an explanation of the breakdown of the cable. It was the captain of the Japanese Kanga Maru, which has been anchored since Tuesday beside the Monadnock, which I have the honor to command."
"But, my good Harryman, you have hallucinations," interrupted the colonel. "The Japanese captain gave the latest Hong-Kong papers to the Harbor Bureau, and was quite astonished to hear that our cable did not work----"
"When he was going to send a cablegram to Hong-Kong," added Harryman sharply.
"To announce his arrival at Manila," remarked Colonel Webster dryly.
"And the Hong-Kong papers had already published descriptions of the destruction caused by the seaquake, of the tidal waves, and the accidents to ships," came from another quarter.
"The news being of especial interest to this archipelago, where we have the misfortune to be and where we noticed nothing of the whole affair," returned Harryman.
"You don't mean to imply," broke in the colonel, "that the news of this catastrophe is a pure invention--an invention of the English papers in Hong-Kong?"
"Don't know, I'm sure," said Harryman. "Hong-Kong papers are no criterion for me." And then he added quietly: "Yes, man is great, and the newspaper is his prophet."
"But you can't dispute the fact that a seaquake may have taken place, when you consider the striking results as shown by the cable interruptions which we have been experiencing for the last six days," began Webster again.
"Have we really?" said Harryman. "Are you quite sure of it? So far the only authority we have for this supposed seaquake is a Japanese captain--whom, by the way, I am having sharply watched--and a bundle of worthless Hong-Kong newspapers. And as for the rest of my hallucinations"--he jumped down from the window-sill and, going up to Webster, held out a sheet of paper toward him--"I'm in the habit of using other sources of information than the English-Japanese fingerposts."
Webster glanced at the paper and then looked at Harryman questioningly.
"What is it? Do you understand it?"
"Yes," snapped Harryman. "These little pictures portray our war of extermination against the red man. They are terribly exaggerated and distorted, which was not at all necessary, by the way, for the events of that war do not add to the fame of our nation. Up here," explained Harryman, while several officers, among them the colonel, stepped up to the table, "you see the story of the infected blankets from the fever hospitals which were sent to the Indians; here the butchery of an Indian tribe; here, for comparison, the fight on the summit of the volcano of Ilo-Ilo, where the Tagala were finally driven into the open crater; and here, at the end, the practical application for the Tagala: 'As the Americans have destroyed the red man, so will you slowly perish under the American rule. They have hurled your countrymen into the chasm of the volcano. This crater will devour you all if you do not turn those weapons which were once broken by Spanish bondage against your deliverers of 1898, who have since become your oppressors.'"
"Where did you get the scrawl?" asked the colonel excitedly.
"Do you want me to procure hundreds, thousands like it for you?" returned Harryman coolly.
The colonel pressed down the ashes in his pipe with his thumb, and asked indifferently: "You understand Japanese?"
"Tagala also," supplemented Harryman simply.
"And you mean to say that thousands----?"
"Millions of these pictures, with Japanese and Malayan text, are being circulated in the Philippines," said Harryman positively.
"Under our eyes?" asked a lieutenant na?vely.
"Under our eyes," replied Harryman, smiling, "our eyes which carelessly overlook such things."
Colonel Webster rose and offered Harryman his hand. "I have misjudged you," he said heartily. "I belong to your party from now on."
"It isn't a question of party," answered Harryman warmly, "or rather there will soon be only the one party."
"Do you think," asked Colonel McCabe, "that the supposed Japanese plan of attack on the Philippines, published at the beginning of the year in the North China Daily News, was authentic?"
"That question cannot be answered unless you know who gave the document to the Shanghai paper, and what object he had in doing so," replied Harryman.
"How do you mean?"
"Well," continued Harryman, "only two possibilities can exist: the document was either genuine or false. If genuine, then it was an indiscretion on the part of a Japanese who betrayed his country to an English paper--an English paper which no sooner gets possession of this