e trenches lay flat to the earth
while the balls fell about them or sang a long whining note through the
air over them. Fiercer grew the fray, and louder roared the guns, and
wilder the bullets flew, as the fighting lines swept over the enemy's
earthworks and struck with deadly force into the heart of its wooded
cover.

Then came a lull for shifting the fighting grip. A relief force was
hurried to the front and the first companies retired for a brief rest.
They fell back in order, while the aids came trooping out of the brush in
groups, bearing the wounded to places of shelter. Thaine Aydelot and his
comrades lifted their heads above the earthworks for an instant. Captain
Clarke sat near on a little knoll staring hard at a stretcher borne toward
him by the aids. The manner of covering indicated a dead body on it.

"How different the captain's face is from what it was before the attack,"
Thaine thought, as he recalled the moment when Clarke had talked with
Lieutenant Alford. And then the image of the young lieutenant's face, so
full of life and hope and power and gentleness, swept vividly across his
mind.

"Who is it, boys?" Clarke called to the soldiers with the stretcher.

"Lieutenant Alford," they answered.

Something black dropped before Thaine Aydelot's eyes and Doctor Carey's
words stung like powder burns in his memory.

"Wait till you see a Kansas boy brought in, and count the cost again."

In civil life character builds slowly up to higher levels. In war, it
leaps upward in an instant. Thaine sprang to his feet and stood up to his
full height in the blaze of the tropical sunshine. He did not see his
captain, who had dropped to the ground like a wounded thing, stabbed to
the soul with an agony of sorrow. He did not see the still form of the
young lieutenant outlined under the cover of the stretcher. He did not see
the trenches nor the lines of khaki-clad, sun-browned soldiery plunging
forward to rid the jungle of its deadly peril. In that one moment he
looked down the years with clear vision, as his father, Asher Aydelot, had
learned to look before him, and he saw manhood and a new worth in human
deeds. He had been a sentimental dreamer, ambitious for honors fairly
earned, and eager for adventure. The first shots in the night attack on
the Tondo road made him a soldier. The martyrdom of Lieutenant Alford made
him a patriot. Humanity must be worth much, it seemed to him, if, in the
providence of God, such bl