orderlies, was
evidently waiting on some signal. Sentries were posted at regular
intervals along the curb. The people in the houses and shops from time
to time stopped packing up their effects long enough to go to the doors
and look up and down apprehensively, asking bootless, nervous questions.

"Are they coming yet?"

"Do you think they will come?"

"Are you sure it's going to be war?"

"Will they shell the town?"

"There'll be time enough for you to get away!" shouted the major. "All
we know is what is written in our instructions, and we shall act on them
when the thing starts. Then we are in command. Meanwhile, get ready!"

A lieutenant of a detachment of engineers coming at the double from a
cross street stopped to inquire:

"This way to the knitting mills?"

"Straight ahead! Can't go wrong!" the major answered.

"We are going to loophole their walls for the infantry," explained the
lieutenant as he hurried on.

"Then they're going to fight in the town!"

"Blow our homes to pieces!"

"Destroy our property!"

After this fusillade from the people the major glared at the retreating
back of the lieutenant as much as to say that some men would never learn
to hold their tongues. Naturally, the duty of looking after refugees was
not to his soldierly taste.

"We are doing it all for you, for the country," he explained. "We are
going to make them pay for every foot they take--the invaders!"

"Yes, make them pay!" called a voice from the houses.

"Make them pay!" other voices joined in.

"It isn't the fellows just across the border that want to take our
property," said an elderly man. "They're good friends enough. It's the
Grays' politicians and the fire-eaters in the other provinces."

"The robbers!" piped a woman's high-pitched note. "I've got a son in the
army, and if ever he leaves that mountain range and goes down the other
side with the Grays chasing him, he'll get worse from me than the Grays
could give him!"

"That's right! That's the way to talk!" came a chorus.

Then the major became aware of a young woman who was going in the wrong
direction. Her cheeks were flushed from her rapid walk, her lips were
parted, showing firm, white teeth, and her black eyes were regarding him
in a blaze of satire or amusement; an emotion, whatever it was, that
thoroughly centred his attention.

"Yes," she said, anger getting the better of her, "make them pay--and
they make you pay--and you make them pay--an