It was hard holding in, thinking of Marie over there among the palm-trees, and the boys in Balangiga, and Billy Murphy making his little speech over the wire; but the Lieutenant was right, and when the orders did come, we didn't have any kick coming about the way he let us carry them out. It was the roughest little old fighting I've ever been through.

You'd naturally thought the little man would brace up and get into it, after seeing what he'd seen. But he just got peakeder and meeker every day. Seemed like he was half asleep, and only woke up long enough to talk about his dreams. And his talk was enough to drive you loco.

One night we'd just come into camp, when Terry pitched his rifle away and dug for his boot as fast as he could. "Damn that ant," he says. "Who'd think a little thing like that could bite worse'n a good big horse-fly?"

"Terry," says Scuts, "how do you reckon it feels to have millions of red ants crawlin' all over you, an' you all cut an'—"

"Damn you, Scuts," says Terry, reaching for him and cuffing him, "will you shut up?"

At last one day we ran into them in full force in a little meadow that was broken up with clumps of bamboo and tall grass. We started firing in close order, for it's dangerous to get spread out in country like that, when you're fighting men with knives. But after a while, them rushing first one side of the line and then the other, and us getting after them with the bayonet, we opened out. Finally we got 'em going just like we wanted 'em, in bunches. We'd fire as they ran till they had to drop into cover, and then we'd rush 'em with the bayonet and butt. It was the easiest sort of going, more like chasing rabbits than men, and when the recall blowed we had only five men missing, Scuts among them. The Lieutenant sent out half a dozen of us to hunt them up, and in a little hollow, 'way ahead of where anybody else had gone, we found the little man lying curled up on his face looking comfortable, the way a man that's been killed quick most always does. Around him there was a heap of dead natives, no wounded ones. Terry turned him over. He had a bolo in his hand, and he was smiling his little weak-eyed smile.

"The son of a gun!" says Terry, gulping. "The damn little son of a gun! What the hell are you fellers standin' there for?" he says to us, picking up the little man and laying him over his shoulder. "There's four other lads you've got to find before sundown."

CHAPTER IV
A LITTLE RIPPLE OF PATRIOTISM

"You are bold, my son, at any rate," murmured my heathen priest, blandly smiling through me into vacancy. "The last man to knock at the gate of Tzin Piaôu with his foot, found the foot grown fast to the stone. They had to cut it off to set him free. That must have been a hundred years ago, more or less. I forget. The foot, with the gate-post attached to it, is standing in the Great Hall of the Images. Relic, you know. It's rather interesting, it's so out of the common run of relics. You might like to glance at it?"