It dragged on for another month and a half before the blockade was raised and hostilities ceased. Six weeks elapsed after that before Keelung was evacuated, and the French squadron and transports sailed away, leaving their silent city of the dead, their tale of killed and wounded and missing.
Through the month of March and half of April, Sinclair laboured on among the wounded of the Chinese army. He was their Life-Healer. By one of the strange ironies of life two of those Hakka tribesmen who had gone down before his revolver on the seventh of March, were brought to him for treatment, and he healed them. They looked with wonder, not unmixed with fear, at the big fair-haired foreigner, who had been so ferocious a day or two before. Now his touch was as gentle as it before had been terrible, and in his very word was healing. They did not understand. It was a part of the foreign devil's madness. It was a part of his magic.
But there was one over whom Sinclair spent more time than over any other. It was the big sergeant of the Foreign Legion. He was desperately wounded, and for a long time lay silently unconscious. From that stage he passed into one of delirium. Then he raved, sometimes in French, sometimes in German, sometimes in English, sometimes in a jumble of languages like the Babel of tongues in the famous corps to which he belonged. But there was one language which he used more than all the others, and when he used it, his voice was soft and his accents tender, like those of a child talking to his mother, or of a lover to his beloved. That language Sinclair did not understand.
Day after day, night after night, he sat by the wounded man's bed in the tent where he and Gorman had their quarters. Every moment he could get off duty among the Chinese he was at his post. There was something about this French sergeant which attracted him strangely. He was big and dark, with jet black hair and large, dark eyes. When he was wounded his face, save where it was covered by thick, black, stubbly whiskers, was tanned to a dark brown. But as the days and weeks of illness passed by, the sunburn faded from his face, and left his skin clear, almost to transparency. Then Gorman shaved him, "to make the poor craythur a little more comfortable loike." The fineness of the features at once struck Sinclair. Was it only fancy, or was it a fact that he had somewhere seen some one who resembled this man? He racked his brain to recall who it was, or where he had seen that expression and form of face.
"I can't think. But I know that I have seen that face or its counterpart somewhere."
The big dark eyes of the patient opened, and began to wander over every object in the tent. Then the wounded man began to talk. It was in the language Sinclair did not understand.
"I wonder would Gorman know anything of that," he said to himself. "He has a little bit of each of a score of tongues."
A native boy ran for the sergeant. He came quickly. The wounded soldier was silent when he entered, and Sinclair was afraid that he would not speak again. Presently his eyes began to rove around. Then he spoke in a low, soft voice, words of the unknown tongue. For a few moments Gorman stood silent with a puzzled look on his face, as if unable to get the sense of what was being said. Then with a sudden start he lifted his hands above his head.
"Be all the saints in glory, docther, do you not know that? It's what you'll have to speak whin you get to hiven. It's Gaelic. Not Irish, but Scotch! The man's a Highlander.... He's jist a bit of a gossoon ag'in, wid his mother croonin' over him and puttin' him to sleep, an' him not wantin' to go. Och, the poor bhoy! The poor bhoy! An' the divils had nearly cut off his head!"
Sinclair sprang to his feet, his face as pale as death, his whole frame trembling with excitement.