1
DOANE walked, carelessly erect, to a knoll something less than a hundred yards northeast of the compound and off to the left of the ride pits. Here he stood for a brief time, listening. He purposed going out through the lines as he had come in through them, by crawling, hiding, feeling his way foot by foot. The line was thinnest in front of the rifle pits, and just to the left where the upper machine gun commanded a defile.
He had allowed two hours for the journey through the lines, but it consumed nearly four. At one point he lay for an hour behind a stone trough while a squad of Lookers built a fire and brewed tea. A recurring impulse was to walk calmly in among those yellow men and go down fighting. It seemed as good a way as any to go. He found it necessary to hold with a strong effort of will to the thought of his fellow's in the compound; that to save them, and to save Betty, he must carry through.
Toward one o'clock in the morning, now well to the eastward of the besieging force, he swung into his stride. It seemed, in the retrospect, absurdly like the play of children to be hiding and crawling about the hillsides. But he was glad now that he had somehow, painfully, kept his head. Barring the unforeseen, the diplomatic gentlemen up at Peking would find the news awaiting them when they came to their desks in the morning. After that noting that he might do would greatly matter. He could follow these powerfully recurring impulses if he chose; let the end come. That was now his greatest desire. Life had become quite meaningless. Except for Betty....
2
Shau T'ing was but another of the innumerable rural villages that dot northern China. Though there were a railway station, and sidings, and a quaintly American water tank set high on posts. The inns were but the familiar Oriental caravansaries; no modern hotel, no “Astor House,” had sprung up as yet to care for newly created travel.
As he approached the stream that ran through a loess canyon a mile or more west of the village he glimpsed, ahead, a group of soldiers seated about a fire. Just behind them were stacks of rifles; this much he saw and surmised with the help of the firelight. And the first glow of dawn was breaking in the east. He left the highway and swung around through the fields, passing between scattered grave mounds from whose tops the white joss papers fluttered in the gray twilight like timid little ghosts.
He crossed the gorge by the old suspension footbridge, with the crumbling memorial arches at either end bearing, each characteristic inscriptions suggestive of happiness and peace. Looking down-stream he could dimly see that the railway bridge lay, a tangle of twisted steel, in the stream, leaving the abutments of white stone rearing high in the air with wisps of steel swinging aimlessly from the tops.
He half circled the village, and waited outside the eastern gate until the massive doors swung open at sunrise.
He went to the leading inn, and gave up an hour to eating the food in his knapsack and cleaning his mud-dyed clothing. The innkeeper informed him, when he brought the boiled water, that another white man had been there for three days. After this Doane went down to the station. A solitary engine was puffing and clanking among the sidings, apparently making up a train.