except a few hundred of his troops on either
flank. And these, in panic and terror, had scattered wildly in flight.
We had wiped out a force more than ten times our own number. The right
flank of the American army was saved. And already the Colorado Union,
from behind us, was leaping around in a great circling movement, closing
in on the Han force that was advancing from the ruins of Lo-Tan.

Far away, to the southwest, the southern Gangs, reinforced in the end
by the bulk of our left wing, had struck straight at the enveloping Han
force shattering it like a thunderbolt, and at present were busily
hunting down and destroying its scattered remnants.

But before the Colorado Union could complete the destruction of the
central division of the enemy, the despairing Hans saved them the
trouble. Company after company of them, knowing no escape was possible,
lined up in the forest glades and valleys, while their officers swept
them out of existence by the hundreds with their ray pistols, which they
then turned on themselves.

And so the fall of Lo-Tan was accomplished. Somewhere in the seething
activities of these few days, San-Lan, the "Heaven-Born," Emperor of the
Hans in America, perished, for he was heard of never again, and the
unified action of the Hans vanished with him, though it was several
years before one by one their remaining cities were destroyed and their
populations hunted down, thus completing the reclamation of America and
inaugurating the most glorious and noble era of scientific civilization
in the history of the American race.

* * * * *

As I look back on those emotional and violent years from my present
vantage point of declining existence in an age of peace and good will
toward all mankind, they do seem savage and repellent.

Then there flashes into my memory the picture of Wilma (now long since
gone to her rest) as, screaming in an utter abandon of merciless fury,
she threw herself recklessly, exultantly into the thick of that wild,
relentless slaughter; and my mind can find nothing savage nor repellent
about her.

If I, product of the relatively peaceful Twentieth Century, was so
completely carried away by the fury of that war, intensified by
centuries of unspeakable cruelty on the part of the yellow men who were
mentally gods and morally beasts, shall I be shocked at the
"bloodthirstiness" of a mate who was, after all, but a normal girl of
that day, and who, gi