e said, "it's China--they need you there."

"Sergeant"--an angry light leaped in the steel-gray eyes--"if they want
me in China some one whom I have trusted has betrayed my identity. No
living soul there ever heard of Victor McCalloway, _Mister_ McCalloway,
not General Anything, mind you!"

The newcomer crossed to the centre of the room, and his movements were
quick and precise, as are those of the drill-ground.

"To every other man on earth ye may be _Mister_ McCalloway--but to me ye
are my general. Before I'd betray any trust ye might place in me, sor'r,
I'd cut off that hand at the wrist, as ye ken, sor'r, full well. I've
told nae soul where ye wor'r. I've only said that I'd seek for ye."

"But in God's name how--?"

"If I may interrupt ye, sor'r, I am no longer Sergeant Major MacTavish;
I'm a time-retired man at home, but when I wear a uniform now it's that
of the army of the Manchu Emperor. They seek to reorganize their army
along western lines. They want genius. They ken nothin' of ye save that
one Victor McCalloway was once a British officer of high rank who served
so close to Dinwiddie, that Dinwiddie's strategy is known to him.--Read
this, sor'r, and ye'll understand more of the matter."

The General took the large, official-looking missive and stood for a
moment with a drawn and concentrated brow before he slit its linen-lined
covering.

The feel of the thing in his fingers brought to him a certain stirring
and quickening of the pulses: such a restiveness as may come to the
retired thoroughbred at the far-off sound of the paddock bugle, or to
the spent war horse at the rolling of drums.

The heavy blue paper and the thick seal set into disquieting momentum an
avalanche of memories. Active days which he had resolved to forget were
conjured into rebirth as he handled this bulky envelope which proclaimed
its officialdom. Even the daily papers came to him here with desultory
lack of sequence. He knew in disjointed fashion how that same summer an
anti-foreign revolt had broken out in Shantung and spread to Pechili. He
had read that the Japanese Government had dispatched twenty thousand men
to China. Later he had followed the all too meagre accounts of how the
Allies had raced for Peking to relieve the besieged legations. The young
Emperor's ambition to impress upon his realm the stamp of western
civilization had made him, for two years, a virtual prisoner to the
Empress Dowager and her reactionaries. Now in