l who commanded them was gone, buried beneath a pile of
earth where a giant cracker had fallen.

Suddenly Kan Wong noticed that there were no more soldiers save only
those who lay writhing or in still, twisted heaps upon the harrowed
ground. The coolie crowd huddled here alone, clutching their futile
picks and shovels, grovelling in helpless panic. Disaster had overtaken
them. The Dragon was upon them, and they were unprotected. All about
them in scattered heaps lay discarded equipment, guns, even the
sharp-barking death-spitting, tiny instrument that the soldiers handled
so lovingly and so gently when it was not in action. But those who
manned the weapons had passed on, back through the thick curtain of
smoke that hung between them and the comparative safety of the rear.

Kan Wong's eyes were ahead, striving to pierce the pungent veil that hid
the enemy. Suddenly his keen eyes noted them--the strange uniforms and
stranger faces, ducking forward here and there through the hell of their
own making. The blood of the Dragon within him boiled up, now that the
enemy was really near enough to feel the teeth and claws of the Dragon's
whelps. This was the hour for which he had lived. This was the Tai-ping
glory come again for him to share. Reaching down, he picked up the rifle
of a fallen soldier, fondled its mechanism lovingly for a moment, and
then, cuddling it tenderly beneath his chin, his finger bade it spit
death at the misty grey figures crawling through the greyer fog in
front.

When the magazine was exhausted he filled it with fresh clips and turned
with the authority he had always wielded, and a new one that they
instantly recognized, upon his shivering countrymen.

"What are ye?" he yelled with withering scorn. "Sons of pigs who root in
the dung of this Foreign Devil's land, or men of the Dragon's blood? Are
ye the scum of the Yangtze River or honourable descendants of the Hairy
Rebels? Would ye avenge your brothers who have choked to death in the
breath of the stink-pots that have been flung among us? Will ye let
escape this horde of Foreign Devil enemies who have hurled at us giant
crackers that have spit death, now that they are near enough to feel how
the Dragon's blood can strike? Here are the Dragon's claws!" He waved
his bayoneted gun aloft. "Will ye die like men, or like slinking rats
stamped into the earth? All who are not cowards--come!" He waved the way
through the smoke to the grey figures emerging fro