nine o'clock in the morning
When on the following day during church hours -- the Japanese being heathens -- the streets lay deserted in their Sunday calm , the few people who happened to be on Main Street and saw a field battery consisting of six guns and six ammunition wagons turn out of the gate next to the Japanese inn thought they had seen an apparition . The battery started off at once at a sharp trot and left the town to take up a position out in a field in the suburbs , where a dozen men were already busily at work with spades and pick-axes digging a trench . The police of Irvington were at once notified , a sleepy official at the Post Office was roused out of his slumbers , and a telegram was directed to the nearest military post , but the latter proceeding was useless and no answer was received , since the copper wires were long ago in the control of the enemy . Even if it had got through , the telegraphic warning would have come too late , for the military post in question , of which half of the troops were , as usual , on leave , had been attacked and captured by the Japanese at nine o'clock in the morning . A hundred thousand Japanese had established the line of an eastern advance-guard long before the Pacific States had any idea of what was up . During Sunday , after the capture of San Francisco , the occupation of Seattle , San Diego and the other fortified towns on the coast , the landing of the second detachment of the Japanese army began , and by Monday evening the Pacific States were in the grip of no less than one hundred and seventy thousand men . * * * * * When , on Sunday morning , the Japanese had cut off the railway connections , they adopted the plan of allowing all trains going from east to west to pass unmolested , so that there was soon quite a collection of engines and cars to be found within the zone bounded by the Japanese outposts .