Colonel Swank made a low, murmured exclamation.
“History tells us,” he said, “how the rich cities of antiquity were looted by the soldiery of invading armies; but there can hardly have been a parallel to this in any known case. The whole country for a considerable distance on either side of the line of march was denuded of every article of value, even the venerated images of Buddha in the holy temple of Ten Thousand Ages were broken to pieces with dynamite, under the impression that they concealed articles of value. Of course, the Chinese population stowed away everything they could; but they could not hide the women, and they were not always able to conceal their treasures; such as carved ivory, cloisonné, vases, silks, furs, and the like.”
“The lid was off,” said Bow Bell, “about as it would be in India if the English went out. I once asked a Rajah in the Punjab what he would do if the English left India, and you ought to have seen his grin. ‘I’d take my regiment and go down to the coast, and there wouldn’t be a virgin or a ten-anna bit left in Bombay.’ ... Cut along with your story. The Chink gave you two gold twenties to bring in Major Dillard, with four more in his hand if you put it over. You brought him in, didn’t you? Gawd, is there anything you wouldn’t do for a hundred and twenty dollars! Name it, Colonel, let me hear what it sounds like.”
Swank’s voice did not change. He was unresponsive to the taunt.
“Yes,” he said, “I was so fortunate as to induce Major Dillard to visit the monastery under my guidance, though it required some diplomatic effort, and some insistence; but the Major had confidence in my cloth, and he was making every effort to prevent a looting of the country along the line of march.”
Bow Bell laughed in a high staccato.
“Confidence in your cloth! It was just a piece of your damned luck that the American officer never heard of you. He thought you were an honest-to-God missionary. You’d know all the tricks. You’d be sanctimonious enough to fool the Devil, for a handful of yellow boys minted in America. I’d lay a quid on the Saints that you fooled him all right.... Well, go on and tell me about it. You say the old Viceroy, with the Boxers on one side and the foreign devils on the other, was cooped up in a monastery along the line of march, with the women of all the important families in the Province, and everything of value that they hadn’t time to bury. You’d nose it out, Johnny-on-the-spot. You couldn’t get it yourself—some Chink would have put a knife in you—and it was no good to you for the foreign devils to get it, so you took your little old hundred and twenty, and went in to the American Headquarters to see Major Dillard, eh, what!”
He went on condensing the unessentials in the hope of getting Colonel Swank forward with his narrative.
“The viceroy was sick, and too old to travel. It was all he could do to sit up. His only chance was to put himself under the protection of the American Expeditionary Force. The English were on ahead, and he knew what the Russians and Germans would do to him. Gawd! He’d gathered it up for ’em! It was like saying, ‘Come along, boys. I’ve got the stuff corralled for you. Here’s the girlies, and here’s the pieces of eight. Go to it. Gawd!... No wonder they dug up the yellow boys.... You’d ’a’ got more if you had held out. Did that occur to you?”
Swank made a vague gesture,—a languorous moving of his hand over his threadbare knee.