Winning the Wilderness Part 58

Before him were the little brown coolies holding the ladder, and up its slender swaying height, round by round, went young t.i.tus nimbly as a squirrel up a cottonwood limb.

The Kansas men went wild.

"Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K U! oo!" they shouted again and again, ending in the long quavering wail as the University yell must always end.

Up and up went t.i.tus, sixty feet, to the top of the wall. Then as he stood above the strange old Oriental city, rilled now with frenzied fighters; above the poor starving Christians in their Compound--saved as by a miracle; above the twelve thousand soldiers sent hither from the far homelands beyond the seas to rescue human beings from deadly peril. As he stood over all these, a target for a hundred guns, the khaki-clad young Kansan lifted his right hand high above his head and swung out the Stars and Stripes to all the breezes of that August morning.

Then came the belching of cannon, the bursting of huge timbers, the groaning of twisting iron, and through the splintered gates the Allied Armies had entered the city.

Inside the walls the hundred thousand Boxers renewed the strife. The walls and gates of the Foreign Legation were as stubbornly defended by the Chinese fanatics on the outside now as the besieged Christians had defended them against the Chinese on the inside. Entrance was made at last through the sluiceway, or open sewer, draining out under the city walls.

It was a strange looking line of creatures who came crawling, waist-deep in filth, through the sewer's channel. The old Aydelot sense of humor had saved Thaine many a time. And he wondered afterward if he had not seen by chance the ludicrous picture of himself in a huge mirror, if his heart would not have burst with grief when Pryor Gaines came toward him, mute and pallid, with outstretched hands.

The little group of soldiers who had fought and marched together had not had off their clothes for seven days. A stubby two weeks' beard was on each face. Their feet were raw from hard marching. Rain and dust and mud and powder smoke had trimmed their uniforms, and now the baptism by immersion in the Compound sewer had given them the finis.h.i.+ng touches. But the gaunt-faced men and women, the pitiful, big-eyed children, whose emaciated forms told the tale of the six weeks' imprisonment, made them forget themselves as these poor rescued Christians hugged and kissed their brave rescuers.

Thaine hadn't kissed any woman except his mother since the evening when he and Leigh s.h.i.+rley had lingered on the Purple Notches in a sad-sweet moment of separation. It lifted the pressure crus.h.i.+ng round his heart when he saw Goodrich, with s.h.i.+ning eyes, bending to let a poor little missionary stroke his grimy cheek.

The Boxers retired by degrees before the superior force, entrenching themselves inside the Imperial City. Never in its history, centuries on centuries old, had this Imperial City's sacred precincts been defiled by foreign feet. Here the Boxer felt himself secure. Here the G.o.ds of his fathers would permit no foreigner to enter. On these h.o.a.ry old walls no Christian would dare to stand. On three sides of the Imperial City these walls were invincible. The fourth was equipped with six heavy gates.

In a council of the powers the impossibility of storming these gates was fully made clear. The number of soldiers was carefully estimated--American, j.a.panese, Russian, German, French, and Italian, Sikh and Sepoy, Bengalese, Scotchman, Welsh, and Royal Englishmen. All had suffered heavily in this campaign. None more grievously than the American.

The decision of the council was overwhelming that the Imperial City could not be taken by this little force outside its battlements. Only General Chaffee protested against giving up the attempt.

"Can your men take those walls?" The query came from the leaders.

"My men can take h.e.l.l," General Chaffee replied, with less of profanity than of truth in his terms. And the attempt was given over to the Americans.

One of the six gates stood wide open, a death-trap laid by the wily Boxer, believing that the foreign forces would rush through it to be shot down like rats in a hole. Beyond it was a paved court some five hundred yards wide, reaching up to a second wall, equipped likewise with six great gates.

Thaine's company was singled out to go inside the open gate and draw the Boxer fire toward themselves while the American army stormed the closed gates. The little group of men lay flat on the pavement, defending themselves and hara.s.sing the enemy. They knew why they had been sent in, but they were seasoned soldiers. Thaine looked down the line of less than a hundred men, McLearn, and Boehringer, Tasker, Goodrich, and Binford, all were in that line. He felt a thrill of soldier pride as he said to himself:

"We are fit. They have chosen us for the sacrifice. We'll prove ourselves." Then he thought of nothing else but duty all that day.

The capture of the first wall opened the way to a second with a paved court beyond it, and beyond that lay a third, and a fourth, and a fifth; wall and court, wall and court, through which, and across which the American army forced its way by heaviest bombarding under heaviest fire, leaving a clean rear for the other armies to follow in. Only the sixth and last wall remained. General Chaffee's men had not failed. The flag of red, white, and blue had led steadily on 'mid a storm of sh.e.l.ls and a deluge of bullets.

One more onslaught and the last gates would burst wide open. Eagerly the American soldiers waited the command to finish the task. But it was not given. The leaders of the other armies had counseled together and prevailed against further advance, whether moved by military prudence or governed by jealousy of the ability of General Chaffee and the magnificent record of the American soldiers in the Orient, the privates could not know.

Just as the command to retire was sounded j.a.panese coolies had run with scaling ladders to the last wall. It was the supreme moment for Thaine Aydelot. He was only a private, but in that instant all the old dominant Cavalier blood of the Thaines, all the old fearless independence of the Huguenot Aydelots, all the calm poise and courage of the Quaker Penningtons throbbed again in his every pulse-beat. He threw aside his soldier obligation and stood up a man, guided alone by the light within him.

"It is a far cry from the green Kansas prairies to the heart of old China," he declared to himself. "Yet I'll go to the heart of that heart now, and I'll show it the Stars and Stripes of a free people, so help me G.o.d!"

He turned and sped to the last wall, s.n.a.t.c.hing the flag from a color-bearer as he ran. At the foot of the ladder the men holding it wavered a little. Thaine threw the flag up to a coolie who was already climbing.

"Take it up. If I don't get up, wave it there if you die for it," he cried as he sprang up the ladder behind the color-bearer.

The shots were thick about them as up and up they went until at last Thaine stood beside the indomitable little j.a.panese who had carried the American flag up the ladder.

Below the Kansas boy lay the holy city of an ancient civilization in all its breadth of ingenuity and narrowness of spirit. Standing there, a target for every gun, waving the Star-Spangled Banner out over that old stronghold, he cried:

"This is the end of the wilderness! Look up and see the token of light and hope and love. Other hands than mine will bear them to you, but I have shown you their symbol. I, Thaine Aydelot, of Kansas, first of all the world, have dared to stand on your most sacred walls with Old Glory in my hand. Wherever its shadow falls there is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In G.o.d's good time they will all come to you in peace as they have come to you now in warfare. Mine today has been the soldier service, and mine today the great reward."

CHAPTER XXIV

THE CALL OF THE SUNFLOWER

Sons and daughters of the prairie, Dreaming, dreaming, Of the starry nights that vary, Gleaming, gleaming!

You may wander o'er your country where the vales and mountains be, You may dwell in lands far distant, out beyond the surging sea.

But ah! just a yellow sunflower, though across the world you roam, Will take you back to Kansas and the sun-kissed fields of home.

--Nancy Parker.

Thaine Aydelot sat with Doctor Carey and Pryor Gaines in the latter's home in the Foreign Compound in Peking.

"I have done my work here," Pryor was saying. "I have only one wish--to go back to old Gra.s.s River in Kansas and spend my days with Jim s.h.i.+rley. We two will both live to be old because we are useless; and Leigh will be marrying one of these times, if the Lord ever made a man good enough for her. So Jim and I can chum along down the years together."

"It is the place for you, Pryor," Doctor Carey a.s.serted. "And now that the ranch is making money while Jim sleeps, you two will be happy and busy as bees. Every neighborhood needs a man or two without family ties. You'll be the most useful citizens in that corner of the prairies. And think of eating Jim s.h.i.+rley's cooking after this."

"And you, Thaine? What now?" Pryor asked as he looked fondly at the young battle-tried soldier.

"I have done my work here," Thaine quoted his words. "I've only one wish--to go back to old Gra.s.s River in Kansas to take my place on the prairie and win the soil to its best uses; to do as good a work as my father has done."

Thaine's dark eyes were luminous with hopefulness, and if a line of pathos for a loss in his life that nothing could fill had settled about his firm mouth, it took nothing from the manliness of the strong young face.

"And you, Carey?" Pryor asked.

Doctor Carey did not reply at once. A strange weariness had crept over his countenance, and a far-away look was in his eyes. The man who had forgotten himself in his service for others was coming swiftly toward his reward. But neither of his friends noted the change now. At last he said:

"Years ago I loved a girl as I never could care for any other girl. She would have loved me sooner or later if something hadn't happened. A message from the man she cared for most fell into my hands one day long ago: a withered flower and a little card. I could have kept them back and won her for my wife, but I didn't. I sent the message to her by a servant boy--and she has been happy always in her love."

Doctor Carey turned his face away for the moment. Thaine Aydelot's eyes were so much like Virginia Thaine's to him just then. Presently he went on:

"Sometimes the thing we fail to get helps us to know better how to live and to live happily. You will not be a coward, Thaine, when you come, year by year, to know the greater wilderness inside yourself. You will go back to the prairies where you belong, as you say, and you will do a man's part in the big world that's always needing men."

Thaine recalled the evening hour when he and Leigh were on the Purple Notches and he had declared in the pride of his nineteen years that he wanted to go out into the big world that is always needing men and do a man's part there.

"If the big world needs men anywhere, it is on the old prairies," he declared, and the doctor continued: "I have found my future already. I shall not leave China again. Gra.s.s River may miss me as a friend but not as a doctor of medicine. Doctors are too plentiful there. My place is here henceforth, and I'm still young. I came to the Philippines to be with Thaine"--Horace Carey's voice was low, and the same old winning smile was on his face--"because I love the boy and because I wanted to protect him if it should be my fortune to do it. I saved him from the waters of the Rio Grande and helped to pull him out of the hospital at Manila. He doesn't need me now, for he goes to do a big work, and I stay here to do a big work."

"Out of love for me alone?" Thaine asked affectionately, throwing one arm about Horace Carey's shoulder.

"No, not you alone," Carey answered frankly, "but because something in your face always reminds me of a face I loved long ago. Of one for whose sake I have cared for you here. You are going home a brave man. I believe your life will be full of service and of happiness."

The silence that followed was broken by Pryor Gaines saying:

"All this time--such a tragical time--I have forgotten, Thaine, that I have a message for you, a little package that reached here late last May.

It was sent to me because the sender thought you were coming to China soon, and I was asked to keep it for you. You didn't come, and mails ceased to leave Peking--and then came the siege, the struggle to keep up the defenses, the sickness, the starvation, the deaths, the constant attacks, the final sight of Old Glory on the outer walls, and your triumphal entry through the sewer. You see why I forgot."