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These considerations induced Marshal Oyama to deliver an attack with his whole force during the second half of February, and there resulted a conflict which, under the name of the "battle of Mukden," will go down in the pages of history as the greatest fight on record.
If the Czar of all the Russians had been a wise Little Father he would have encouraged the grip germs to remain loyal to their native land and then he could have sent them out to Manchuria to bite the ramparts out of General Oyama instead of chasing inoffensive American citizens into the drug stores.
Petersburg was stunned by the receipt of this intelligence; and every day added to its dismay: Oyama, leaving the captured fortress behind him, sweeping the Russians back from Mukden; Kuropatkin sending despairing messages to the Tsar, who, bewildered and trembling before his own subjects at home, was still vibrating between the two widely opposing influences the spirit of the old despotism, and that of a new age which clamored to be admitted.
"There was a trouble last year in the Ishigaki Jima Islands where a poacher beat off the Oyama. It was a desperate fight." Captain Selover's eye lit up. "I've commanded a black brigantine, name of The Petrel," he admitted simply. "She was a brigantine aloft, but alow she had much the same lines as the Laughing Lass." He whirled on his heel to roll to one of the covered yacht's cannon.
On the way over Frank had related his conversation over the wire with Captain Hazzard. It appeared that Oyama, the Jap, was missing and that several papers bearing on the objects of the expedition which were, except in a general way, a mystery to the boys themselves, had been stolen.
But when his eye looks like that, then you want to listen close. He sees things then. Lots of times he's seen things. Even last year the Oyama he told about her three days ahead. That's why we were so ready for her," he chuckled. Nothing more developed for a long time except a savage fight between Pulz and Perdosa.
As regards directions, modifications, orders, counter-orders, in precise proportion as his preparations and operation orders have been thoroughly conceived and carried out, so will the actual conflict find him leaving the actual handling of the troops to Hunter-Weston as I am bound to do. Old Oyama cooled his brain during the battle of the Shaho by shooting pigeons sitting on Chinese chimneys.
"I was sure of it," the boy exclaimed as his eyes encountered an abject, huddled-up figure seated next a ragged, besotted-looking tramp. "Sure of what?" demanded Harry. "Why, that Oyama was the man who stole the papers from the Southern Cross." "Well?" "Well, there he is now."
Having said so much by way of preface, I beg my readers to fancy themselves wafted away to the shores of the Bay of Yedo a fair, smiling landscape: gentle slopes, crested by a dark fringe of pines and firs, lead down to the sea; the quaint eaves of many a temple and holy shrine peep out here and there from the groves; the bay itself is studded with picturesque fisher-craft, the torches of which shine by night like glow-worms among the outlying forts; far away to the west loom the goblin-haunted heights of Oyama, and beyond the twin hills of the Hakoné Pass Fuji-Yama, the Peerless Mountain, solitary and grand, stands in the centre of the plain, from which it sprang vomiting flames twenty-one centuries ago.
This dreaded and strange apparition, bristling with bayonets, armed with chains, hung over with holy images; that something not of this world, partaking of a ravenous ghoul, of a blind Djinn grown up from a cloud, and of the Old Man of the Sea, still faces us with its old stupidity, with its strange mystical arrogance, stamping its shadowy feet upon the gravestone of autocracy already cracked beyond repair by the torpedoes of Togo and the guns of Oyama, already heaving in the blood-soaked ground with the first stirrings of a resurrection.
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