pring morning when he talked of
enlisting for the Spanish War. He thought of his father, who had never
known fear in his life. Of his last words:

"As thy days so shall thy strength be."

And keenly he remembered Dr. Carey, somewhere among the troops behind him.
The fine head crowned with white hair, caressed by the moonbeams, as he
had seen it in the Manila garden, and his earnest words:

"You must learn to be a Christian. You must know what service for humanity
means. You need not hunt for the opportunity to prove this. The
opportunity is hurrying toward you now out of the Unknown."

"It is here, the opportunity," he murmured. "Oh, God, make me a fit
soldier for Thy service."

He did not pray for safety from danger and death; he asked for fitness to
serve and in that moment his great lesson was learned. There came an
instant's longing for Dr. Carey; then the battle storm burst and he did
not think any more, he fought. It were useless to picture that struggle.

Nothing counts in warfare till the results are shown. For six hours the
fighting did not cease, and not at Valley Forge, nor Brandywine, Lake
Erie, nor Buena Vista, Gettysburg, nor Shiloh, San Juan Hill, nor in any
jungle in Luzon did the American flag stream out over greater heroes than
it led today on the plains beside the Peiho river before Yang-Tsun.

At last the firing ceased, the smoke lifted above the field; the Boxers,
gathering their shattered forces together, retreated again before the
little line of Allied Troops invading this big strange land. And the last
hours of that long hot day waned to eventide.

There were only a few of its events that Thaine could comprehend. He knew
Little Kemper had received his death wound, blowing his bugle calls again
and again after he had been stricken, till the last reveille sounded for
him. The plucky little body with the big soul, who had found his brief
fifteen years of life so full of "doing."

Thaine knew that in the thick of the fight the native Indian Infantry, the
Sikhs and Sepoys, had fallen in cowardly fear before the Boxer fire. He
remembered how big Schwoebel, and Tasker, and Binford, Goodrich, and
McLearn, with himself and another man whom he recalled afterward as
Boehringer, a Kansas man, had clubbed self-respect into a few of them and
kicked the other whining cowards from their way. He knew that Schwoebel
had been grievously wounded and was being taken back to Tien-Tsin with
many other brave fe