"Ay oh"—"Ay oh"—"Ay oh!"
The grip of his delirium weakened in a few days, and the surgeon called him a "mild case." At the end of a week, Saunders was able to sit up a little and talk with the men around him. But the violence of these early impressions in hospital had unstrung a system drained by long service in the Philippines, and by the contrasting hardships of the cold winter in North China. The gloomy temple frightened the soldier, for sometimes the private has nerves, but he kept his fears to himself, thinking them womanish. He fell to brooding too much of home, and the more he dwelt upon the distance between Peking and those who loved him the more insistent became his morbid fear that he would not go back with his company.
It happened almost daily that the Ninth Regiment band trailed through the hospital compound, playing a dead march. There was always a halt in front of the stone stairway, and after a few moments the dragging music sounded fainter and farther away. A little later those in the temple could barely hear the silvery wail of "taps" floating from a corner of the outer wall, where a line of mounds was growing longer week by week. Then the band returned, playing a Sousa march or a "rag-time" medley. The listeners in hospital filled in the gaps between the music, and the mind of Saunders was busiest of them all in picturing the routine of a soldier's funeral in Peking.
The surgeons looked him over in morning inspection rounds, and said there was nothing the matter to prevent his recovery. "Shorty" Blake and "Bat" Jenkins of P Company strove to make Saunders take some interest in life, and would have been cheered if he had even sworn at the rations and the lack of hospital comforts. They brought him jam and condensed milk from the commissary-sergeant, which he refused to eat; they assembled around his cot the most vivacious convalescents, selecting as entertainers those valiant in poker and campaign stories. Finally Saunders was persuaded to overhaul his haversack and show his slender store of souvenirs gathered in Peking. Blake and Jenkins moved over to pass opinion on the riches, and Saunders welcomed them tremulously:
"I was plannin' to take some things home to mother and sister," he began, "but I didn't have a chance to get much while the lootin' was busy. Wouldn't have done me any good if I had, when the captain had the tents searched and collared most of the company stuff. I ain't sorry I missed it on the loot, for the old lady 'ud throw out o' the window all the stuff I sent her, if she thought it wasn't paid for. She's fierce in backin' foreign missions, an' the Chinamen is her purticuler pets."
Shorty broke in with an oath: "Yes, I know all about P Company's captain and his hair-trigger conscience. He swiped all our loot, but he sent home forty-seven mail packages, duty free. I got that from the postal clerk. What you got left, Saunders?"
The invalid spread an embroidered panel of crimson satin and a roll of blue silk on the edge of his cot, and threw a handful of silver ornaments and a cloisonné snuff-box on the blankets.
"I didn't loot even this stuff," he said, with an apologetic air, "but bought it along the Chien-men Road, so it could go to the home folks with a clean bill of ladin'."
The spectators sniffed incredulously, but with unexpected tact hid any livelier display of doubt.
"Why don't you mail the goods home with a letter, and send a good jolly?" said Jenkins. "We'll get 'em off for you. There's a mail wagon goin' to Tientsin early to-morrow mornin'. Tell the old lady you're fat an' sassy. She'll call in the whole village to show 'em the presents from her brave soldier boy out among them poor, benighted, gentle, murderous Chinese heathen."