The general went off to the fleet and the Brents back to shore without
the girls. But in the course of the afternoon four more officers came to
tender their services to "Billy Ray's daughter," and none, not even a
hospital steward, came to do aught for the Red Cross, and by sundown
Maidie Ray had every assurance that the most popular girl at that moment
in Manila army circles was the least popular aboard the Sacramento, and
Kate Porter cried herself to sleep after an out-and-out squabble with
two of the Band, and the emphatic assertion that if she were Marion Ray
she would cut them all dead and go live with her friends ashore.

But when the morrow came was it to be wondered at that Miss Ray had
developed a high fever? Was it not characteristic that before noon, from
the official head down, from Dr. Wells to Dottie Fellows, the most
diminutive of the party, there lived not a woman of their number who was
not eager in tender of services and in desire to be at the sufferer's
bedside? Was it not manlike that Stuyvesant, who had shunned the
sisterhood for days, now sought the very women he had scorned, and
begged for tidings of the girl he loved?

CHAPTER XII.

October had come and the rainy season was going, but still the heat of
the mid-day sun drove everybody within doors except the irrepressible
Yankee soldiery, released "on pass" from routine duty at inner barracks
or outer picket line, and wandering about this strange, old-world
metropolis of the Philippines, reckless of time or temperature in their
determination to see everything there was to be seen about the whilom
stronghold of "the Dons" in Asiatic waters.

Along the narrow sidewalks of the Escolta, already bordered by American
signs--and saloons,--and rendered even more than usually precarious by
American drinks, the blue-shirted boys wandered, open-eyed, marvelling
much to find 'twixt twelve and two the shutters up in all the shops not
conducted, as were the bars, on the American plan, while from some,
still more Oriental, the sun and the shopper both were excluded four
full hours, beginning at eleven.

All over the massive, antiquated fortifications of Old Manila into the
tortuous mazes of the northern districts, through the crowded Chinese
quarter, foul and ill savored, the teeming suburbs of the native Tagals,
humble yet cleanly; along the broad, shaded avenues, bordered by stately
old Spanish mansions, many of them still occupied by their Cast