And so it happened that in Jan’s jeep they all rattled away to learn in a few short lessons what life could be like in China.
Mai-da’s was one of the truly old families of China. The high wall that surrounded it was more than three hundred years old. Inside were no great mansions but many small houses. Though in peace time seventy people lived here everyone had a little place all his own.
To Jan their strange customs, eating rice with chop-sticks, gathering at night to hear the aged grandfather read from the Chinese classics, and their curious religious customs were amusing. But to Isabelle, who was interested in the life lived by all the people of the world, this seemed a charming interlude in the midst of a great and terrible war.
They were not, however, to be free from the war for long. On the fifth day of their stay, with the remark that her jeep was getting rheumatism in its joints, Jan drove back for an hour’s visit at camp. She had not been gone long when just at twilight from the west came the roar of heavy planes. No one paid any attention at first, believing them to be American planes.
All of a sudden Isabelle, who had given much time to the study of airplane spotting, sprang up with a cry:
“Those are enemy bombers, and they are headed this way!” Something seemed to tell her that this home that had stood so long was to be the target of those bombers.
“They’ll bomb his place,” she exclaimed, scarcely knowing why she said it. “We should all escape into the hills.”
“Why? Why? Why?” came from every side. But having more than once witnessed the terror of the Jap’s fury, they all raced away into the hills. There, sitting on the sloping side of a deep gully, they waited the coming of terror from the sky.
There can be no doubt but that Isabelle’s advice saved their lives, for flying straight as swallows, three heavy bombers sped across the sky to at last go sweeping in a wide circle and drop their loads of hate on the defenseless homes.
Women wept, children screamed, and old men gnashed their teeth as they saw the small homes leap into the air, then burst into flames.