King stood on a gentle rise of rich turf, gazing off through the binoculars across cultivated fields. Presently up toward him through a shining little valley rode a Japanese on one of the Australian ponies Utterbourne had imported. King lowered his glass and watched, a smile half of amusement on his face. It was Tsuda—an amazing creature of prowess and contradictions. The Captain had plucked him out of a brawl over a geisha girl up in Yezo—“Fancy—h’m?”—to begin with. And after that—oh, but the Captain possessed faculties unfathomable for picking his men. According to Tsuda, the Captain had saved his life—indeed, Tsuda was very dogmatic about it.  
“Ho, there!” King called out, as the Japanese, having dismounted in the shade of a thicket of dwarf palms, trotted up the incline to the spot where the new overseer stood. “Don’t begin any salaaming or kowtowing, Tsuda,” he begged him with a laugh. “I’ve been salaamed to death all morning. What have you done to those poor devils of Ainu?”
 
Tsuda stood beside him, very little and humble. He wheezed some. “Taught the fear of the gods,” he replied. “Yes, sir!”
 
King hooted. “You’ll finish me, Tsuda, with your priest-ideas and your fairy tales. I never heard such a bunch of outlandish nonsense in my life! But of course we’ve got to hand the method credit, I suppose, since it keeps us supplied with free labour.”
 
Tsuda bowed solemnly. “It is—gn—the way of the gods,” he murmured. And then, making sure they were quite alone, he edged a step nearer, assumed a less formal bearing,[106] and added, in a voice which had startlingly acquired a note of the utmost sophistication: “If that fail—gn—there is always the saké!” And he chuckled like an incorrigible urchin up to tricks.
 
Tsuda’s English was quite remarkable. It was rather a mystery where he’d managed to pick it all up, packed, as it was, with slyly winking colloquialisms, even occasional wisps of slang. Tsuda was a genuine man of the world, in his own odd way. Very up-to-date, very devious, subtly sophisticated—a very waggish person, too; though he could upset it all in a minute with revelations of a most utter and child-like simplicity. As for the curious “gn” which now and then punctuated his talk, that mystified rather, till one came to detect about it the humble earmarks of asthma.
 
“Look here, Mr. Priest,” said King, who had raised his binoculars again, “there’s a queer something or other going on—come here and lo............