ame upon a gun where it had dropped from its owner's useless
hands. He studied its mechanism, even asking the Foreign Devil overseer
how it was worked, and, being shown, he remembered and practised its use
whenever opportunity offered. He took to talking with his
fellow-workers, some of whom had themselves fought with the rebels of
New China, who, with just such Foreign Devils' tools, had clipped the
claws of the Manchu Dragon, freeing the Celestial Kingdom forever from
its crooked grip. He took much interest in these war implements. He
became more intimate and friendly with his fellows, feeling them now to
be brothers in a danger that had awakened the soldier soul beneath the
brown of his coolie skin.

Little could he make of all the strife about him. All of which he was
sure was that this was the Dragon's Field, and he, a Son of the Dragon,
had been guided to it to fulfil a destiny his forefathers had begun in
the Yangtze Valley when with the "Hairy Rebels" they had waged such war
as this. The flying death all about him that now and then claimed toll
of one of his own kind was but a part of it; but all the time he grew to
hate his humble work and long for a part, a real part, in the fighting
that raged ahead, where an unseen enemy, of whom he grew to think as his
own, hurled destruction among them. Often he spoke of this to the gang
under him, imbuing them with the spirit of the Dragon's blood that,
eager to fulfil its destiny, once more boiled within him.

Then one day the storm grew more furious. The thunder was a continual
roll, and both from the front and rear flew the whining lightning bolts,
spewing out death and destruction. Many a coolie fell, his dust buried
under the dust of this fierce foreign land, never to be returned and
mixed with that of his own Flowery Kingdom. Now and then came "stink
pots," filling the air with such foul vapours that men coughed out their
lives in the putrid fumes. The breath of the Dragon, fresh from his
awful mouth, was wrapped about them in hot wrath.

Past them the soldiers streamed, foul with fight, their hot guns
spitting viciously back into the rolling, pungent grey fog that followed
them malignantly. Confusion reigned, and in that confusion a perfect
riot of death. On all sides the soldiers fell, blighted by the Dragon's
breath. The coolies crouched in the heaped-up ruins of their newly dug
ditches, knowing not which way to turn, bereft of leadership since the
Foreign Devi