“Take it up. If I don’t get up, wave it there if you die for it,” he cried as he sprang up the ladder behind the color-bearer.
The shots were thick about them as up and up they went until at last Thaine stood beside the indomitable little Japanese who had carried the American flag up the ladder.
Below the Kansas boy lay the holy city of an ancient civilization in all its breadth of ingenuity and narrowness 392 of spirit. Standing there, a target for every gun, waving the Star-Spangled Banner out over that old stronghold, he cried:
“This is the end of the wilderness! Look up and see the token of light and hope and love. Other hands than mine will bear them to you, but I have shown you their symbol. I, Thaine Aydelot, of Kansas, first of all the world, have dared to stand on your most sacred walls with Old Glory in my hand. Wherever its shadow falls there is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In God’s good time they will all come to you in peace as they have come to you now in warfare. Mine today has been the soldier service, and mine today the great reward.”
CHAPTER XXIV
The Call of the Sunflower
| Sons and daughters of the prairie, Dreaming, dreaming, Of the starry nights that vary, Gleaming, gleaming! You may wander o’er your country where the vales and mountains be, You may dwell in lands far distant, out beyond the surging sea. But ah! just a yellow sunflower, though across the world you roam, Will take you back to Kansas and the sun-kissed fields of home. —Nancy Parker. |
Thaine Aydelot sat with Doctor Carey and Pryor Gaines in the latter’s home in the Foreign Compound in Peking.