A few moments after he had left, however, and while I was sitting on my saddle and rugs trying to control my laughter, the little slide through which the dishes are passed from the kitchen into the dining-car was suddenly opened, and the aperture filled with a stern, beardless, yellow face, with ugly, determined mouth and slanting eyes, which pierced me unrelentingly like gimlets for fully a minute. It was the face of a Japanese; and, though I was conscious of no crime, I felt as uneasy under its stare as if it had been the face of a judge drawing on the black cap to condemn me to death.
A few stations further on, I found a Japanese horseman— undoubtedly a soldier, although he wore civilian dress — staring at me with equal intentness through the carriage window; but, luckily, I passed Kupanze without being interfered with.
Immediately after we left Kupanze, the slide which I have already spoken of was again drawn aside, and the aperture filled with a face very different to the last one. It was a fat, rubicund, Semitic visage, and at the same time a cheerful voice began speaking to me in bad Russian, offering vague, incoherent and respectful promises of help. The owner of the voice, a prosperous Greek or Jewish sutler who had just come down from Mukden and Tsinmintun, after having successfully sold a large consignment of liquor to the Russians, was divided between awe of me, who might turn out to be a general, and intense curiosity to know what I was up to.
I disappointed him keenly, however, by telling him coldly that I was an Englishman, and not a Russian.
" Well, I only heard the people in the carriage talking about you," he mumbled in an apologetic tone, " saying that you had been with that party which attacked Newchwang yesterday, that you came on at a wayside station where by right this train should not stop, and that you were hiding here. I don't want to know anything about you, but" — mysteriously — "I may tell you that I'm working for the Russians myself. See here " — and he handed me a Russian paper which I at once saw to be merely a sutler's pass allowing him to convey goods inside the Russian lines at Tsinmintun.
He then went on to speak of his intimacy with Colonel Agorodinkoff, the Russian military agent at Tientsin, and of the confidence reposed in him by Kuropatkin himself, until, to get rid of him, I left my hiding-place, and, to the unutterable horror of my English Tommy, walked right into the dining-car. Here I found several Greek sutlers, also on their way from Mukden for more liquor, a few Japanese, and a few Chinese, who were, no doubt, disguised Japanese officers.
At Shan-hai-kwan, where we arrived after nightfall, my English friend insisted on enveloping me in a greatcoat, giving me a bowler hat in place of my Russian cap, and bringing me with the utmost secrecy to his own lodgings, which I quitted next morning in a suit of my friend's clothes, and, to all appearances, quite a different man. My friend had even insisted on giving me the name of Brown; but, of course, the Japanese intelligence officers in Shan-hai-kwan recognised me at once. One of them was within earshot when I asked for my ticket, and another never took his eyes off me all the way to Tientsin.
I might here mention a trifling but characteristic circumstance, that afterwards occurred to me at Kupanze station, on my way back to the Russians. A Chinaman, whom I did not know, walked up to me and handed me a letter addressed to me by my real name — which, by the way, I had not used once during this trip. Forgetting for the moment that I was Mr. Brown, I accepted the letter mechanically; but its contents were not in keeping with the mysterious manner in which it had been delivered to me, for it was simply a last demand from the tax-collecting bureau of Tokio (in which city I had lived for a long time) for the payment of income-tax. Meanwhile the Chinaman had disappeared, but how he had got to know my name was a mystery.
All the way down to Tientsin the Greek sutler and his friends spoke loudly and disrespectfully about Japan, drank expensive wines, and freely displayed bundles of five-hundred rouble notes which they had got up in Mukden. I went down horribly in their estimation by suggesting that they might bring cameras and books into Mukden next trip. " What we makes money on, young man," said one of them, turning his back on me contemptuously, " is — booze! "