he officer stood staring at the space so
lately occupied by the man who, for eighteen months, had been his right
hand.

"Strange man!" he muttered. "I didn't know they bred his kind any more.
Why, he's a feudal baron!"

III

There were three people in the observation-car when Michael Joseph
Farrel boarded it a few minutes before eight o'clock the following
morning. Of the three, one was a girl, and, as Farrel entered,
carrying the souvenirs of his service--a helmet and gas-mask--she
glanced at him with the interest which the average civilian manifests
in any soldier obviously just released from service and homeward bound.
Farrel's glance met hers for an instant with equal interest; then he
turned to stow his impedimenta in the brass rack over his seat. He was
granted an equally swift but more direct appraisal of her as he walked
down the observation-car to the rear platform, where he selected a
chair in a corner that offered him sanctuary from the cold, fog-laden
breeze, lighted a cigar, and surrendered himself to contemplating, in
his mind's eye, the joys of home-coming.

He had the platform to himself until after the train had passed Palo
Alto, when others joined him. The first to emerge on the platform was
a Japanese. Farrel favored him with a cool, contemptuous scrutiny, for
he was a Californian and did not hold the members of this race in a
tithe of the esteem he accorded other Orientals. This Japanese was
rather shorter and thinner than the majority of his race. He wore
large, round tortoise-shell spectacles, and clothes that proclaimed the
attention of the very best tailors; a gold-band ring, set with one
blue-white diamond and two exquisite sapphires, adorned the pudgy
finger of his right hand. Farrel judged that his gray beaver hat must
have cost at least fifty dollars.

"We ought to have Jim Crow cars for these cock-sure sons of Nippon,"
the ex-soldier growled to himself. "We'll come to it yet if something
isn't done about them. They breed so fast they'll have us crowded into
back seats in another decade."

He had had some unpleasant clashes with Japanese troops in Siberia, and
the memory of their studied insolence was all the more poignant because
it had gone unchallenged. He observed, now, that the Japanese
passenger had permitted the screen door to slam in the face of the man
following him; with a very definite appreciation of the good things of
life, he had instantly selected the c