ant, half-savage peasantry,
plotted craftily with his associates for the seizure of the rich capital
of Luzon and dreamed of the autocratic power and heaps of looted treasure
that he should soon control. For weeks in sight of the American outposts,
the Filipinos had strengthened their trenches, and established their
fortifications, the while they bided the hour of outbreak and slaughter
of the despised Americanos, and the seizing of the rich booty afterward.

Upon the Tondo road, running north from Manila to Caloocan, Thaine
Aydelot, with a Kansas University comrade, was doing silent sentinel duty.
The outpost was nearly a mile away from a bridge on the outskirts of
Manila. In the attack imminent, this bridge would be one of the keys to
the city, and the command had been given to hold it against all invaders
at any cost.

Between Thaine and the bridge was a stretch of dusty road, flanked on one
side by nipa huts. On the other side were scattered dwellings, tall
shrubbery, and low-lying rice fields, beyond which lay the jungle.

Before the young sentinel the road made a sharp bend, cutting off the view
and giving no hint to the enemy around this bend of how strong a force
might be filling the road toward the bridge.

Thaine knew that around that bend and behind the rice dykes and in the
nearby trenches were Filipino insurgents with finger on the trigger ready
to begin an assault. But until the first gun of the first battle is fired,
battle seems impossible to the young soldier.

As Thaine turned from the dim road, he caught the glint of starlight on
the edge of a rice swamp. He wanted to fight Filipinos tonight, not
memories. But the memory of the Aydelot grove and the water lilies opening
their creamy hearts to the moonlight, and Leigh Shirley in her white dress
with her cheeks faintly pink in the clear shadows, all swept his mind and
challenged him to forget everything else.

The same grip on a principle, coupled with a daring spirit and love of
adventure that had brought old Jean Aydelot to the Virginia colony long
ago, and had pushed Francis Aydelot across the Alleghanies into the
forests of the Ohio frontier, and had called Asher Aydelot to the
unconquered prairies of the big West--the same love of adventure and
daring spirit and belief in a cause bigger than his own interests had
lured Thaine Aydelot on to the islands of Oriental seas. With the military
schooling and unschooling where discipline tends to make