Withery rose. “I'll go with you,” he said.
“No. I won't allow that. You haven't the strength. You're not an outdoor man We should have to separate anyway; together we should almost certainly be caught. No. You stay here and get word through to them from day to day if you can find any one to undertake it. It will mean everything to them to hear from the outside world. Good luck!”
He took the packet and went out.
3
Again it was dawn Griggsby Doane stood on the crest of a terraced hi'! looking off into the purple west. But a few miles farther on lay Ping Yang.
Beneath him, near the foot of the slope, four coolies were already at the radiating windlasses of a well, and tiny streams of yellow water were trickling along troughs in the loess toward this and that field, where bent silent farmers waited clod in hand to guide the precious fluid from furrow to furrow. Still farther down, along the sunken highway, a few venturesome muleteers led their trains. No outposts in the Looker uniform were to be seen. And he heard no shots. It would be a lull, then, in the fighting.
He descended the hill, dropped into the road, and walked, head high, toward Ping Yang. As he swung along he heard, far off, the shots his ears had strained for on the hill; one, another, then a spattering volley; but he walked straight on. The Mongols and Chihleans on the road gave him no more than the usual glance of curiosity. He passed through a village; Ping Yang would be the next. The railway grade—here an earthen rampart, there a cutting, yonder a temporary wooden trestle—paralleled the highway, cutting into the heart of old China like a surgeon's knife, letting out superstition and festering poverty, letting n the strong fluids of commerce and education. He felt the health of it profoundly, striding on alone through the cool, dear morning air. It was imperfect, of course, this Western civilization that he had so nearly come to doubt; yet, materialistic in its nature or not, it was the best that the world had to offer at the moment. It was what the amazing instinct in man to push on, to better his body and his brain, had brought the world to. It seemed, now, a larger expression of the vitality he felt within himself, the force that he had so lavishly expended in a direction that was wrong for him.
He felt this, which could not have been less than the beginning of a new focus of his misdirected, scattered powers, and yet he walked straight on toward the red army that was sworn to kill all the whites. And though his brain still told him, coolly, without the slightest sense of personal concern, that he would probably be slain within the hour, his heart, or his rising spirit, as calmly dismissed the report.
It might come, of course. He literally didn't care. Death might come at any moment to any man. The present moment was his; and the next, and the next, until the last whenever it should come. He walked with a thrilling sense of power, above the world. For the world, life itself, was suddenly coming back to him. He had been ill—for years, he knew now—of a sick faith. Now he was well. If the old dogmatic religion was gone, he was sensing a new personal religion of work, of healthy functioning, of unquestioning service in the busy instinctive life of the world. He would turn, not away from life to a mystical Heaven, but straight into life at its busiest, head up, as now on the old highway of Hansi, trusting his instinct as a human creature. No matter how difficult the start he would plunge in and live his life out honestly. Betty remained the problem; he knit his brows at the thought; but the new flame in his heart blazed steadily higher. Whatever the problems, he couldn't he headed now.
“What a morbid, sick fool I've been!” It was the cry of a heart new born to health. It occurred to him, then, as he heard his own voice, that this new sense of light had come to him as suddenly as that other light that smote Paul on the Damascus road. It had the force, as he considered it now, of a miracle....