A Secret Agent in Port Arthur by Wirt Gerrare

One morning I was taking my early breakfast at the Saratoff, when a carriage pulled up. Almost immediately afterwards Mac, Reuter's representative whom I had met in Port Arthur before the war, entered the restaurant and, thirsting as I was for trustworthy news of what had happened outside the fortress, I lost no time in inviting him to be seated at my table. Mac was equally eager to know what had happened in the town whilst he had been absent. We fenced phrases a short time, and I was so intent upon drawing Mac that I had not noticed an officer who had followed him into the restaurant, then seated himself at a near-by table and engaged in conversation one of the civilians of the Port who was breakfasting there. In a few minutes Mac drew my attention to him, and told me that he was the officer of Gendarmes who had him under arrest. That he had come into the fortress with an escort and was furnished with special permission to get what belonged to him, and leave the fortress again within forty-eight hours. When he told this I felt that it was the beginning of the end of my stay at Port Arthur. I learned from Mac that up to the present the military activity of the Japanese was confined to operations in Korea. The way out north was still open, and likely to remain so.

Later that morning, I met Mac again. He had shaken off the police escort and was in the company of an Anglo-Russian resident correspondent, and some civilian foreigners. We took tiffin together at the Saratoff, all of us intent upon getting news of the outer world from the new arrival. Again, as luck had it, Tsintsius, the plain-clothes detective of Port Arthur, came in, shook hands with Mac, and took stock of the company. Me, of course, he did not know, and inquired. Mac obligingly introduced me -- he could not do otherwise -- and told me consolingly that Tsintsius was the man who had arrested him originally, and he wished him anywhere but there.