came a young officer and said, 'Colonel,
the son of that old native we're going to shoot this afternoon for
looting, is bothering us and says he wants to be shot instead of his
father. What shall we do with him?' Amen said good-day and cleared out.
By the way, the colonel of the 15th is in a hole just now. He was shut
up in the legations, you know, and all the women there were down on him
because he wouldn't make the sentries salute them when the men were
dead tired with watching. They are charging him with cowardice.
There'll never be an end of this backbiting. It's almost as sickening
as the throat-cutting and stabbing. I confess I'm getting sick of it
all. When you see a private shoot an old native for not blacking his
boots, when the poor fellow was trying to understand him and couldn't,
and smiling as best he could, it's rather tough; and I've seen twenty
babies if I've seen one lying in the streets with a bayonet hole in
them. They have executions every day in one camp or another. I saw one
coolie, who had been working fourteen hours at a stretch loading carts,
shot down because he hadn't the strength to go on."

"I'm afraid the heat is telling on you, Cleary," said Sam. "This is all
sickly sentimentality. War is war. The trouble with you is that there
has been no regular campaign on to occupy your attention. This lying
about doing nothing is a bad thing for everybody. Wait till the
Tutonian Emperor comes out and we'll have something to do."

"He won't find any enemy to fight," said Cleary.

"Trust him for that," replied Sam. "He's every inch a soldier, and
he'll find the way to make war, depend upon it. He's a religious man
too, and he will back up the missionaries better than we've done."

"Yes. Amen thinks the world of him. Amen ought to have been a Tutonian
soldier. He says the best imagery of religion comes from war. I told
him I had an article written about a fight which said that our men
'fought like demons' and 'yelled like fiends,' and I would change it to
read that they fought like seraphs and yelled like cherubim, but he
didn't think it was funny."

CHAPTER XIII

The War-Lord

[Illustration]

As soon as Sam was well enough to be moved the doctors sent him down to
the coast, and Cleary, who had been up and down the river several times
in the course of his newspaper work, went with him. Sam still felt
feeble, and altho he could walk without a crutch,