So the command was given for a volunteer to scale the wall, to stand up a target for the Chinese rifles! To be blown to pieces by Chinese cannon! Yet the armies must know what awaited them. There must be no debouching into a death-trap for a wholesale massacre.
Thaine Aydelot had cherished one hope since the twilight hour on the battlefield at Yang-Tsun—that when this day should come the American might lead the way through the Peking gates and be first to enter the strange old city. Not merely because he was an American patriot, but because to him the American soldiers with all their sins and follies of youth and military life were yet world missionaries.
Thaine knew his comrades shared his hope, whether for the same high purpose he could not have asked. He had no longer dreams of military glory for himself. His joy was in achievement, no matter by whose hand.
“There’s an order for somebody to go up on the wall.”
The word was passed along the line. Before it reached 387 Thaine and his comrades a young soldier had leaped forward to obey the order.
“Glory be, America first!” Goodrich said fervently.
“And a Kansan. A Jayhawker!”
Thaine did not know who said it. He saw the soldier, young Calvin Titus, a Kansas boy, leap after the Japanese coolies who ran forward toward the wall with the long bamboo scaling ladders. And for one instant’s flash of time the old level prairies came sweeping into view, the winding line of Grass River with the sand dunes beyond; the wheat fields, the windbreaks, the sunflowers beside the trail, and far away the three headlands veiled in the golden haze of an August morning. A Kansas boy the hero of the day—first of all that army to stand on top of that hoary old wall! The prairies had grown another name for the annals of history.
Before him were the little brown coolies holding the ladder, and up its slender swaying height, round by round, went young Titus nimbly as a squirrel up a cottonwood limb.
The Kansas men went wild.