"Don't shoot, men! I am going out!" cried our lad. As he spoke he leaped the low barricade and ran to the outer parapet, from which the call had seemed to come.
"Jo!" he shouted. "Jo! where are you?"
"Here I am, Rob," came in feeble tone, and in another moment the young American had found his friend crawling weakly in the partial shelter of the parapet, but at the very end of his strength.
Somehow Rob got him behind the barricade, where he lay panting.
"What is it, old man?" cried his friend, bending anxiously over the exhausted and pitiably emaciated figure. "Are you sick, or wounded, or what? Did you get through to Tien-Tsin? Are troops on the way?"
Jo's eyes were closed, and he barely breathed; but his lips moved, and Rob caught the whispered words:
"Army most here. Look, leg bandage, Rob, dear friend—"
That was all, and Chinese Jo never spoke again. The last great, self-imposed duty of his life had splendidly been performed, but at what expense of suffering never can be known, for in the turmoil of the days immediately following his heroic death he was forgotten. Afterwards General Gasalee, commanding the relieving army, could only say that he had given several despatches to as many messengers, with the hope that at least one of them might be got through. The one borne by Jo was found hidden in a blood-stained cloth bound around one of his legs. It was a brief note from the commanding general, stating that an allied force of twenty thousand men, British, American, Japanese, and Russian, were fighting their way towards Pekin, and making such steady progress that they expected to be at Tung Chou, only twelve miles away, on the 12th, and to reach the capital by the 13th or 14th.
This, the first reliable news received from the relieving army, was hailed with extravagant joy by the long-imprisoned inmates of the British Legation, and for hours the bulletin-board on which it was posted was surrounded by a dense throng of all nationalities, many of whom could not read English, while some could not read at all, but all anxious to see the blessed words that promised them speedy safety.
The story of Chinese Jo's bravery was told from mouth to mouth until all knew it; and when, that evening, his poor, emaciated body, covered with mute evidences of his sufferings in the form of livid scars and unhealed wounds, was laid to rest in the legation grounds, his funeral was the most largely attended of any during the siege. Although it was not a military funeral, the guns of his own countrymen, firing upon those he had given his life to save, thundered a requiem alike for him and for the dying era of Chinese national life that was about to close.