llows who had been stricken that day. He knew that near
the last of the fray a man whom he had admired and loved second to
Lieutenant Alford, big Clint Graham, of a royally fine old family of state
builders in far-away Kansas, had fallen by the mistaken shot of Russian
cannon, and the weight of that loss hung heavy about the edge of his
consciousness wherever he turned. But what followed the battle Thaine
Aydelot will never forget.

Twelve hundred men rose no more from that bloody field before Yang-Tsun.
The fighting force, sixteen thousand strong, was wearing off at the rate
of almost a regiment and a half a day, and it was yet a hundred miles to
Peking.

All about Thaine were men with faces grimy as his own; their lips, like
his, split and purple from the alkali dust. They had had no water to drink
in all that long day's twelve miles of marching and six hours of fighting.
Fearful is the price paid out when the wilderness goes forth to war! And
heroic, sublimely heroic, may be the Christianity of the battlefield.

"We must help these fellows," Thaine said to his comrades as the wail for
water went up from wounded men.

"The river is this way," McLearn declared. "Hurry! the boys are dying."

So over countless forms they hurried to the river's brink for water.
Thaine and Tasker and Boehringer were accustomed to muddy streams, for the
prairie waters are never clear. But Goodrich from Boston had a memory of
mountain brooks. The Pennsylvania man, McLearn, the cold springs of the
Alleghanies, and for Binford there was old Broad Ripple out beyond
Indianapolis. All these men came down with dry canteens to the Peiho by
Yang-Tsun. The river was choked with dead Chinamen and dead dogs and
horses. They must push aside the bodies to find room to dip in their
canteens.

* * * * *

"You have one more lesson. You must learn to be a Christian."

Somehow the words seemed to ring round and round just out of Thaine's
mental sight.

"Vasser! Vasser!" cried a big German soldier before him.

Thaine stooped to give him a drink, and as he lifted up the man's head he
saw the stained face of Hans Wyker.

"It's very goot," Hans murmured, licking his lips for more. "Wisky not so
goot as vasser," and then he trailed off into a delirium. "Don't tell.
Don't tell," he pleaded. "I neffer mean to get Schmitt. I not know he
would be der yet. I hide for Yacob, an' I get Schmitt in der back and I
only