lements of death, standing doggedly at bay before grey waves
that broke upon them as a sullen sea breaks and recedes before a jutting
point of land ...

With the reinforcements the tide turned, ebbing back in a struggling,
writhing fury, and soon the ground was clear again of all save the wreck
that such a wave leaves behind it. Once the line was re-established and
the soldiers holding it steadily, the coolies, once more the wielders of
pick and shovel, returned to the work of trench repairing, leaving the
fighting to those to whom it belonged.

The officers were puzzled. What had started them? What had injected that
mad fighting spirit into their yellow hides? What had caused them to
make that swift, wild, wonderful stand?

"Hey, you, John!" The commanding officer addressed one of them when a
lull came and they were busy again at the tumbled earth. "What you fight
for, hey?"

The coolie grinned foolishly.

"Him say fight. Him heap big man, alle same have Dlagon's blood. Him say
fight, we fight, _sabe_?" And he pointed to Kan Wong--Kan Wong, his head
bleeding from a wound, his eyes glowing with a green fury from between
their narrow lids, his long, strong hands, red with blood other than his
own, still clutching his rifle with a grip that had a tenderly savage
joy _in_ it.

The officer approached him.

"Are you the man who rallied the coolies and held the line?" he asked
shortly.

Kan Wong stiffened with a dignity to which he now felt he had a right.

"Me fight," he said quietly--"me fight, coolie fight, too. Me belong
Dlagon's blood. One time my people fighting men; long time I wait."

"You'll wait no longer," said the officer. He unpinned the cross from
his tunic and fastened it to the torn, bloody blouse of Kan Wong. "Off
to the east are men of your own race, fighting-men from China,
Cochin-China. That is the place for a man of the Dragon's blood--and
that is the tool that belongs in your hand till we're done with this
mess." He pointed to the rifle that Kan Wong still held with a stiff,
loving, lingering grip.

And so, on the other side of the world, the son of the Dragon came to
his own and realized the dreams of a glory he had missed.

"HUMORESQUE"

By FANNIE HURST

From _Cosmopolitan_

On either side of the Bowery, which cuts through like a drain to catch
its sewage, Every Man's Land, a reeking march of humanity and humidity,
steams with the excrement of seventeen languages, flung in _