mental ring of growth every year, and I
believe the biggest place for me to get this will be with my feet on the
prairie sod. Meantime, I shall reenlist, as I said."

"Sit down, Thaine, and let me ask you one question," Dr. Carey said.

The young man dropped to his seat again.

"When your service is done is there anything to hold you from going
straight to the Grass River Valley again?"

Thaine leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head
while he looked steadily at the splashing waters before him as he said
frankly:

"Yes, there is. When I go back I want Leigh Shirley--and it's no use
wanting."

"Thaine, you were a law-abiding civilian at home. The university made you
a student. You came out here a fearless soldier to fight your country's
enemies. Alford's death made you a patriot who would plant American ideals
in these islands. May I tell you that there is still one more lesson to
learn?"

Thaine looked up inquiringly.

"You must learn to be a Christian. You must know what service for humanity
means. Then the call to duty will be a bugle note of victory wherever that
duty may be. You needn't hunt for opportunity to prove this. The
opportunity is hurrying toward you now from out of the Unknown."

The fine head with the heavy masses of white hair seemed halo-crowned at
that moment. It was as he appeared that night that Thaine Aydelot always
remembers him. Two weeks later Thaine enlisted in the Fourteenth United
States Infantry, stationed in Luzon. Dr. Carey was also enrolled in its
hospital staff. In July the regiment was ordered from the Philippines to
join the allied armies of the World Powers at Tien-Tsin in a northern
Chinese province, where the Boxer forces were massing about Peking. And
Thaine's opportunity for learning his greatest lesson came hurrying toward
him from out of the Unknown.

This notorious Boxer uprising, gone now into military annals, had reached
the high tide of its power. Beginning in the southern province of China,
it spread northward, menacing the entire Empire. A secret sect at first,
it was augmented by the riffraff that feeds on any new, and especially
lawless, body; by deserters disloyal to the imperial government; by the
ignorant and the unthinking; by the intimidated and the intimidating. It
enrolled an armed force of one hundred and seventy-five thousand soldiers.
Its purposes were fanatical. It aimed by the crudest means to root out
every idea of modern li