hen I give the word. We won't run till our guns are
empty," the captain declared grimly.

The last shot was ready to fly, when a wild yell burst from the darkness
behind them, the shouts to "remember the _Maine_," mingled with the old
university yell of "Rock Chalk, Jay Hawk, K. U. oo!" and reinforcements
charged to the relief of the invincible sixteen.

What disaster might have followed the capture of the Tondo road and the
attack upon the bridge is only conjecture. What did happen is
history--type henceforth of that line of history every company of the
Twentieth Kansas was to help to build. When daylight came, Thaine Aydelot
saw the frontier line that he had proudly felt himself called hither to
push back, and the reality of it was awful. He had pictured captured
trenches, but he had not put in their decoration--the prone forms of dead
Filipinos with staring eyes, seeing nothing earthly any more forever.

Beyond that line, however, lay the new wilderness that the Anglo-American
must conquer, and he flung himself upon the firing line, as if the safety
and honor of the American nation rested on his shoulders alone; while all
his dreams of glorious warfare, where Greek meets Greek in splendid
gallantry, faded out before the actual warfare of the days and nights that
followed.

Thaine's regiment, not the "Kansas Scarecrows," but the "Fighting
Twentieth" now, was one of the regiments on which rested the brunt of
driving back and subduing the rebellious Filipinos. Swiftly the Kansas
boys pushed into the unknown country north of Manila. They rushed across
the rice fields, whose low dykes gave little protection from the enemy.
They plunged through marshes, waist deep in water. They lay for hours
behind their earthworks, half buried in muddy slime. They slept in holes,
drenched to the skin. With the University yell for their battle cry of
freedom, they tore through tropical jungles with the bullets of the enemy
cutting the branches overhead or spattering the dirt about their feet.

The American regiments were six days in reaching Caloocan, a prosperous
town only six miles north of Manila; a mile a day, every foot stubbornly
contested.

On Sabbath morning in the first day's struggle, Thaine was running in a
line of soldiery toward the Filipino fortification, when he was halted
beside a thatched hut that stood between the guns of both armies and was
riddled with bullets.

"Help the corporal here, Aydelot, then double quic