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The freckle-faced little fellow opened wider his skim-milk eyes and his weak mouth. "Come again, ma'am, please." "Corrid'y'right. Takel'vatorthir'doorleft," she repeated. "Next." The inquirer knew as much as he did before, but he lacked the courage to ask for an English translation. A woman behind was prodding him between the shoulder-blades with the sharp edge of a package wrapped for mailing. He shuffled away from the window and wandered helplessly, swept up by the tide of hurrying people that flowed continuously into the building and ebbed out of it. From this he was tossed into a backwater that brought him to another window. "I wantta see the postmaster of this burg," he announced again with a plaintive whine. "What about?" asked the man back of the grating. "Important business, _amigo_. Where's he at?" The man directed him to a door upon which was printed the legend, "Superintendent of Complaints." Inside, a man was dictating a letter to a stenographer. The bow-legged man in the wrinkled suit waited awkwardly until the letter was finished, twirling in his hands a white, broad-rimmed hat with pinched-in crown. He was chewing tobacco. He wondered whether it would be "etiquette" to squirt the juice into a waste-paper basket standing conveniently near. "Well, sir! What can I do for you?" the man behind the big desk snapped. "I wantta see the postmaster." "What about?" "I got important business with him." "Who are you?" "Me, I'm Johnnie Green of the B-in-a-Box Ranch. I just drapped in from Arizona and I wantta see the postmaster." "Suppose you tell your troubles to me." Johnnie changed his weight to the other foot. "No, suh, I allow to see the postmaster himself personal." "He's busy," explained the official. "He can't possibly see anybody without knowing his business." "Tha's all right. I've lost my pal. I wantta see--" The Superintendent of Complaints cut into his parrot-like repetition. "Yes, you mentioned that. But the postmaster doesn't know where he is, does he?" "He might tell me where his mail goes, as the old sayin' is." "When did you lose your friend?" "I ain't heard from him since he come to New York. So bein' as I got a chanct to go from Tucson with a jackpot trainload of cows to Denver, I kinda made up my mind to come on here the rest of the way and look him up. I'm afraid some one's done him dirt." "Do you know where he's staying?" "No, suh, I don't." The Superintendent of Complaints tapped with his fingers on the desk. Then he smiled. The postmaster was fond of a joke. Why not let this odd little freak from the West have an interview with him? Twenty minutes later Johnnie was telling his story to the postmaster of the City of New York. He had written three times to Clay Lindsay and had received no answer. So he had come to look for him. "And seein' as I was here, thinks I to myself thinks I it costs nothin' Mex to go to the postmaster and ask where Clay's at," explained Johnnie with his wistful, ingratiating, give-me-a-bone smile. "Thinks I, it cayn't be but a little ways down to the office." "Is your friend like you?" asked the postmaster, interested in spite of himself. "No, suh." Johnnie, _alias_ the Runt, began to beam. "He's a sure-enough go-getter, Clay is, every jump of the road. I'd follow his dust any day of the week. You don't never need to think he's any shorthorn cattleman, for he ain't. He's the livest proposition that ever come out of Graham County. You can ce'tainly gamble on that." The postmaster touched a button. A clerk appeared, received orders, and disappeared. Johnnie, now on the subject of his hero, continued to harp on his points. "You're damn whistlin' Clay ain't like me. He's the best hawss-buster in Arizona. The bronco never was built that can pile him, nor the man that can lick him. Clay's no bad _hombre_, you understand, but there can't nobody run it over him. That's whatever. All I'm afraid of is some one's gave him a raw deal. He's the best blamed old. . . . . . .
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My instructions to Mr. Leggatt, my engineer, had been accurately obeyed. He was to bring my car on completion of annual overhaul, from Coventry _via_ London, to Southampton Docks to await my arrival; and very pretty she looked, under the steamer's side among the railway lines, at six in the morning. Next to her new paint and varnish I was most impressed by her four brand-new tyres. 'But I didn't order new tyres,' I said as we moved away. 'These are Irresilients, too.' 'Treble-ribbed,' said Leggatt. 'Diamond-stud sheathing.' 'Then there has been a mistake.' 'Oh no, sir; they're gratis.' The number of motor manufacturers who give away complete sets of treble-ribbed Irresilient tyres is so limited that I believe I asked Leggatt for an explanation. 'I don't know that I could very well explain, sir,' was the answer. 'It 'ud come better from Mr. Pyecroft. He's on leaf at Portsmouth--staying with his uncle. His uncle 'ad the body all night. I'd defy you to find a scratch on her even with a microscope.' 'Then we will go home by the Portsmouth road,' I said. And we went at those speeds which are allowed before the working-day begins or the police are thawed out. We were blocked near Portsmouth by a battalion of Regulars on the move. 'Whitsuntide manoeuvres just ending,' said Leggatt. 'They've had a fortnight in the Downs.' He said no more until we were in a narrow street somewhere behind Portsmouth Town Railway Station, where he slowed at a green-grocery shop. The door was open, and a small old man sat on three potato-baskets swinging his feet over a stooping blue back. 'You call that shinin' 'em?' he piped. 'Can you see your face in 'em yet? No! Then shine 'em, or I'll give you a beltin' you'll remember!' 'If you stop kickin' me in the mouth perhaps I'd do better,' said Pyecroft's voice meekly. We blew the horn. Pyecroft arose, put away the brushes, and received us not otherwise than as a king in his own country. 'Are you going to leave me up here all day?' said the old man. Pyecroft lifted him down and he hobbled into the back room. 'It's his corns,' Pyecroft explained. 'You can't shine corny feet--and he hasn't had his breakfast.' 'I haven't had mine either,' I said. 'Breakfast for two more, uncle,' Pyecroft sang out. 'Go out an' buy it then,' was the answer, 'or else it's half-rations.' Pyecroft turned to Leggatt, gave him his marketing orders, and despatched him with the coppers. 'I have got four new tyres on my car,' I began impressively. 'Yes,' said Mr. Pyecroft. 'You have, and I _will_ say'--he patted my car's bonnet--'you earned 'em.' 'I want to know why--,' I went on. 'Quite justifiable. You haven't noticed anything in the papers, have you?' 'I've only just landed. I haven't seen a paper for weeks.' 'Then you can lend me a virgin ear. There's been a scandal in the Junior Service--the Army, I believe they call 'em.' A bag of coffee-beans pitched on the counter. 'Roast that,' said the uncle from within. Pyecroft rigged a small coffee-roaster, while I took down the shutters, and sold a young lady in curl-papers two bunches of mixed greens and one soft orange. 'Sickly stuff to handle on an empty stomach, ain't it?' said Pyecroft. 'What about my new tyres?' I insisted. 'Oh, any amount. But the question is'--he looked at me steadily--'is this what you might call a court-martial or a post-mortem inquiry?' 'Strictly a post-mortem,' said I. 'That being so,' said Pyecroft, 'we can rapidly arrive at facts. Last Thursday--the shutters go behind those baskets--last Thursday at five. . . . . . .
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escaped beyond the restrictions imposed upon him by his government. So far as the business man is concerned he has grasped far more clearly the Western code of business, the Western ethics of business, than has the Japanese. He has learned, as a matter of course, to keep his word or his bond. As yet, the Japanese business man has failed to understand this. When he has signed a time contract and when changing conditions cause him to lose by it, the Japanese merchant cannot understand why he should live up to his contract. It is beyond his comprehension and repulsive to his common sense that he should live up to his contract and thereby lose money. He firmly believes that the changing conditions themselves absolve him. And in so far adaptable as he has shown himself to be in other respects, he fails to grasp a radically new idea where the Chinese succeeds. Here we have the Chinese, four hundred millions of him, occupying a vast land of immense natural resources--resources of a twentieth-century age, of a machine age; resources of coal and iron, which are the backbone of commercial civilization. He is an indefatigable worker. He is not dead to new ideas, new methods, new systems. Under a capable management he can be made to do anything. Truly would he of himself constitute the much-heralded Yellow Peril were it not for his present management. This management, his government, is set, crystallized. It is what binds him down to building as his fathers built. The governing class, entrenched by the precedent and power of centuries and by the stamp it has put upon his mind, will never free him. It would be the suicide of the governing class, and the governing class knows it. Comes now the Japanese. On the streets of Antung, of Feng-Wang-Chang, or of any other Manchurian city, the following is a familiar scene: One is hurrying home through the dark of the unlighted streets when he comes upon a paper lantern resting on the ground. On one side squats a Chinese civilian on his hams, on the other side squats a Japanese soldier. One dips his forefinger in the dust and writes strange, monstrous characters. The other nods understanding, sweeps the dust slate level with his hand, and with his forefinger inscribes similar characters. They are talking. They cannot speak to each other, but they can write. Long ago one borrowed the other's written language, and long before that, untold generations ago, they diverged from a common root, the ancient Mongol stock. There have been changes, differentiations brought about by diverse conditions and infusions of other blood; but down at the bottom of their being, twisted into the fibres of them, is a heritage in common--a sameness in kind which time has not obliterated. The infusion of other blood, Malay, perhaps, has made the Japanese a race of mastery and power, a fighting race through all its history, a race which has always despised commerce and exalted fighting. To-day, equipped with the finest machines and systems of destruction the Caucasian mind has devised, handling machines and systems with remarkable and deadly accuracy, this rejuvenescent Japanese race has embarked on a course of conquest the goal of which no man knows. The head men of Japan are dreaming ambitiously, and the people are dreaming blindly, a Napoleonic dream. And to this dream the Japanese clings and will cling with bull-dog tenacity. The soldier shouting "Nippon, Banzai!" on the walls of Wiju, the widow at home in her paper house committing suicide so that her only son, her sole support, may go to the front, are both expressing the unanimity of the dream. The late disturbance in the Far East marked the clashing of the dreams, for the Slav, too, is dreaming greatly. Granting that the Japanese can hurl back the Slav and that the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race do not despoil him of his spoils, the Japanese dream takes on substantiality. Japan's population is no larger because her people have continually pressed against the means of subsistence. But given poor, empty Korea for a breeding colony and Manchuria for a granary, and at once the Japanese begins to increase by leaps and bounds. Even so, he would not of himself constitute a Brown Peril. He has not the time in which to grow and realize the dream. He is only forty-five millions, and so fast does the economic exploitation of the planet hurry on the planet's partition amongst the Western peoples that, before he could attain the stature requisite to menace, he would see the Western giants in possession of the very stuff of his dream. The menace to the Western world lies, not in the little brown man, but in the four hundred millions of yellow men should the little brown man undertake their management. The Chinese is not dead to new ideas; he is an efficient worker; makes a good soldier, and is wealthy in the essential materials of a machine age. Under a capable management he will go far. The Japanese is prepared and fit to undertake this management. Not only has he proved himself an apt imitator of Western material progress, a sturdy worker, and a capable organizer, but he is far more fit to manage the Chinese than are we. The baffling enigma of the Chinese character is no baffling enigma to him. He understands as we could never school ourselves nor hope to understand. Their mental processes are largely the same. He thinks with the same thought-symbols as does the Chinese, and he thinks in the same peculiar grooves. He goes on where we are balked by the obstacles of incomprehension. He takes the turning which we cannot perceive, twists around the obstacle, and, presto! is out of sight in the ramifications of the Chinese mind where we cannot follow. The Chinese has been called the type of permanence, and well he has merited it, dozing as he has through the ages. And as truly was the Japanese the type of permanence up to a generation ago, when he suddenly awoke and startled the world with a rejuvenescence the like of which the world had never seen before. The ideas of the West were the leaven which quickened the Japanese; and the ideas of the West, transmitted by the Japanese mind into ideas Japanese, may well make the leaven powerful. . . . . . .
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