st what I'm afraid I won't be able to do. That is, it would be
a whole lot better if you didn't know."

"Oh, all right! I don't care, anyhow! I've enlisted for the war. By the
way, what's happened to your scout troop? I thought perhaps there'd be
some good work here in Belgrade for it to do."

"There will be, only there isn't any troop any more. About everyone in
it is with the army, except the very little chaps. I think they'd have
let me fight this time if there wasn't other work for me to do. You see
we lost so many men against Turkey and Bulgaria that we haven't really
enough men to fill the ranks. We have regiments that aren't half
filled--or we did have until this started. By this time, though, I think
there aren't many short battalions left. The old men and the boys will
fight, and they say that some of the country regiments have a lot of
women in them."

"Women? Fighting with the men? That's not allowed, is it?"

"How can you stop it?" asked Steve, with a shrug. "You don't know much
about us yet, Dick, my friend. You don't know what it is to have lived
with the Turks for centuries. I have read about your American women on
the plains, in the times when the Indians went on the war-path. Most of
them could handle a rifle, couldn't they? And they were pretty good
shots, too!"

"Yes, but that's different--"

"Not so very different. I don't believe your Indians were ever worse
than the Bashi-Bazouks. They hated us Servians, you see, because we were
infidels and Christians. And so for hundreds of years they harried us,
burned our homes, carried off our women, killed our men. That sort of
thing gets into the blood after a time. For centuries we Serbs have
stood between all Europe and the Turks. They never wiped us out, though
they beat us by sheer weight of numbers. But here, and in Bosnia, that
the Austrians stole, and in the Black Mountains--Montenegro--a few Serbs
have always held out.

"That's why we aren't so civilized as some of the other countries of
Europe. We haven't had the time to be civilized. We have had to fight
just to keep alive. We have had to fight the Turks for life itself, and
when they did not kill, they burned our fields with the standing grain,
summer after summer, so that the harvest was lost. Yet once there was a
great Serb empire that stretched from the Black Sea to the Aegean--"
Stepan's eyes flashed, and there was a look in them that might have been
worn by his great ancestor and name