ng man with a face as genial as his manner was dignified responded
pleasantly to the private's salute, and the rainfall seemed less dreary
and all the camp more cheerful for this lieutenant's presence. No wonder
he seemed a prince to the enthusiastic young soldier whose admiration
deepened into an abiding love he was never to lose out of his life in all
the years to come. In the months that followed Thaine came to know Captain
Clarke and his two lieutenants, Krause and Alford, as soldier knows
soldier. Nor did ever Trojan nor Roman military hero have truer homage
from the common private than the boy from the Grass River Valley paid to
these young men commanding his company.

The hardships of soldier life began for Thaine Aydelot and his regiment
with the day of enlistment. The privations at Camp Leedy were many. The
volunteers had come in meagerly clothed because they expected to be fully
supplied by the government they were to serve. The camp equipments were
insufficient. The food was poor, and day after day the rain poured
mercilessly down on the muddy campground, where the volunteers slept on
wet straw piled on the wet earth. Sore throats, colds, and pneumonia
resulted, and many a homesick boy who learned to wade the rice swamps and
to face the Mauser's bullets fearlessly had his first hard lesson of
endurance taught to him before he left Camp Leedy on the old Topeka Fair
Ground.

Wonderful history-making filled up the May days. While the fleets and land
forces were moving against Cuba, the deep sea cable brought the brief
story from Commodore Dewey in the harbor of Manila, "Eleven Spanish
warships destroyed and no Americans killed."

And suddenly the center of interest shifted from the Cuban Island near at
hand to the Philippines on the other side of the world. The front door of
America that for four centuries had opened on the Atlantic ocean opened
once and forever on Pacific waters. A new frontier receding ever before
the footprint of the Anglo-American flung itself about the far-off island
of the Orient with its old alluring call:

Something lost behind the Ranges!
Over Yonder! Go you there!

And the Twentieth Kansas, under Colonel Fred Funston, broke camp and
hurried to San Francisco to be ready to answer that call.

Thaine Aydelot had never been outside of Kansas before. Small wonder that
the mountains, the desert, the vinelands, and orchard-lands, and
rose-lands of C