ds the dusty highway where the ambulances were hurrying,
and close to the abutments of a massive stone bridge that crossed a
tributary of the Pasig, three officers, a surgeon, and half-a-dozen
soldiers were grouped about a prostrate form in the pale blue uniform,
with the gold embroidery and broad stripes of a Filipino captain, but
the face was ghastly white, the language ghastly Anglo-Saxon.

With the blood welling from a shothole in his broad, burly chest and the
seal of death already settling on his ashen brow, he was scowling up
into the half-compassionate, half-contemptuous faces about him. Here
lay the "_Capitan Americano_" of whom the Tagal soldiers had been
boasting for a month--a deserter from the army of the United States, a
commissioned officer in the ranks of Aguinaldo, shot to death in his
first battle in sight of some who had seen and known him "in the blue."

Lieutenant Stuyvesant, revived by a long pull at the doctor's flask, his
bleeding stanched, had again pressed forward to take his part in the
fight, but now lay back in the low Victoria that the men had run forward
from the village, and looked down upon the man who in bitter wrath and
hatred had vowed long months before to have his heart's blood,--the man
who had so nearly done him to death in Honolulu. Even now in Sackett's
dying eyes something of the same brutal rage mingled with the instant
gleam of recognition that for a moment flashed across his distorted
features. It seemed retribution indeed that his last conscious glance
should fall upon the living face of the man to whom he owed his rescue
from a fearful death that night in far-away Nevada.

But, badly as he was whipped that brilliant Sunday, "Johnny Filipino"
had the wit to note that Uncle Sam had hardly a handful of cavalry and
nowhere near enough men to follow up the advantages, and hence the long
campaign of minor affairs that had to follow. In that campaign Sandy Ray
was far too busy at the front to know very much of what was going on at
the rear in Manila. He listened with little sympathy to Farquhar's brief
disposition of poor Foster's case. "They could remove the desertion and
give him a commission, but they couldn't make Wally a soldier. He went
home when the fighting had hardly begun." Somebody was mean enough to
say if he hadn't his mother would have come for him.

There was no question as to the identity of the soldier who died in
Filipino uniform. Not only did Stuyvesant recog