In one of them he lost his colors. No one has ever suffered a sharper agony than he—until they were retaken.
"But—the flag! The flag! I am hit! Here! Not much! Gods in the skies! There it is! They have it! The cursed dogs! They have touched it! Defiled it! Come with me—Kondo—Musima—Tani—Ichimon—now! At them!"
And she knew that he had retaken the flag and was bringing it gloriously back; each act was faithfully fought.
But then he missed it. He looked in his hands.
"Do you see my flag?"
"Yes," she cajoled, "it is here."
But she did not convince him, and he slept under his opium unhappily. He thought sometimes that the enemy had again taken it.
When he awoke next morning, still unhappy and in doubt (he had not forgotten it), the flag was in his hand. There was not one in America for the little wife. But that night she made one. He shouted with sudden strength as he gripped it and kept it in his hands until they could feel no more. And then with it lashed to the foot of his bed he lived the little remnant of his life in its glory, and in sight of its crimson and white went out—mad with the supremest ecstasy a Japanese can know—out in the great red death to another reincarnation, at what, for the fourth time, he must have thought the happiest moment of his life.
And then—shall I tell it?—his call came.
And a letter from Zanzi, now a general commanding a brigade. Almost as one would write of love, he wrote.