The young man dropped to his seat again.
“When your service is done is there anything to hold you from going straight to the Grass River Valley again?”
Thaine leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head while he looked steadily at the splashing waters before him as he said frankly:
“Yes, there is. When I go back I want Leigh Shirley—and it’s no use wanting.”
“Thaine, you were a law-abiding civilian at home. The university made you a student. You came out here a fearless soldier to fight your country’s enemies. Alford’s death made you a patriot who would plant American ideals in these islands. May I tell you that there is still one more lesson to learn?”
Thaine looked up inquiringly.
“You must learn to be a Christian. You must know what service for humanity means. Then the call to duty will be a bugle note of victory wherever that duty may be. You needn’t hunt for opportunity to prove this. The opportunity is hurrying toward you now from out of the Unknown.”
The fine head with the heavy masses of white hair seemed halo-crowned at that moment. It was as he appeared that night that Thaine Aydelot always remembers him. Two weeks later Thaine enlisted in the Fourteenth United States 365 Infantry, stationed in Luzon. Dr. Carey was also enrolled in its hospital staff. In July the regiment was ordered from the Philippines to join the allied armies of the World Powers at Tien-Tsin in a northern Chinese province, where the Boxer forces were massing about Peking. And Thaine’s opportunity for learning his greatest lesson came hurrying toward him from out of the Unknown.
This notorious Boxer uprising, gone now into military annals, had reached the high tide of its power. Beginning in the southern province of China, it spread northward, menacing the entire Empire. A secret sect at first, it was augmented by the riffraff that feeds on any new, and especially lawless, body; by deserters disloyal to the imperial government; by the ignorant and the unthinking; by the intimidated and the intimidating. It enrolled an armed force of one hundred and seventy-five thousand soldiers. Its purposes were fanatical. It aimed by the crudest means to root out every idea of modern life and thought in China; every occidental invention, every progressive method of society, every scientific discovery for the betterment of humanity. And especially did it aim to put to death every native Chinese Christian, to massacre every missionary of the Christ, and to drive out or destroy every foreign citizen in China. Its resources were abundant, its equipment was ample, its methods unspeakably atrocious. Month after month the published record of this rebellion was sickening—its unwritten history beyond human imagining. Impenetrable were its walled cities, countless in numbers, unknown the scenes of its vast plains and rivers and barren fields and mountain fastnesses. Fifteen thousand native Christians and hundreds of foreigners were brutally 366 massacred. At last it centered its strength about the great city of Peking. And a faint, smothered wail for deliverance came from the Foreign Legation shut in behind beleaguered walls inside that city to starve or perish at the hands of the bloody Boxers.
Very patiently the World Powers waited and warned the Chinese leaders of a day of retribution. Fanatics are fanatics because they cannot learn. The conditions only whetted the Boxers to greater barbarity. They believed themselves invincible and they laughed to scorn all thought of foreign interference. Then came the sword of the Lord and of Gideon to the battle lines at Tien-Tsin on the Peiho River, as it came once long ago to the valley of Jezreel.