The tail of the War-Dragon, whose jaws were snapping at flying Russian heels far on ahead, had been drawn on at dawn, and through dust and mire and sand we followed its squirming wake. On the top of every little hill we could see it painfully crawling ahead--length interminable, its vertebræ carts, coolies, Chinese wagons, its body columns of soldiers, its scales the flashes of sword-scabbard and wagon-tire--and whipping the dust heavenward in clouds. The button on that tail was Lynch the Irishman on a bicycle, and that button was rolling itself headward--leading us all. Behind, Lewis was eating the road up with a swinging English stride, and, drinking the dust of the world, we followed. Fuji had side-stepped from barrack-yard into that road, sawing on his bit, pawing the earth, and squealing challenges or boisterous love-calls to anything and everything that walked. Sex, species, biped, or quadruped--never knew I such indiscriminate buoyancy--all were one to Fuji. With malediction on tongue and murder in heart, I sawed his gutta-percha mouth until my fingers were blistered and my very jaws ached, but I could hold him back only a while. We overtook the Italian, a handsome boy with a wild intensity of eye--one puttee unwound and flying after him. The iron-gray was giving trouble and he, too, was unhappy. We passed Reggie--his great body stretched on a lumpy heap of baggage--with a pipe in his mouth, that was halved with his perennial smile of unshakable good-humor, and the other Frenchman squatting between two humps of baggage on a jolting cart. "Ah!" he cried with extended hands, "you see--you see--" his head was tossed to one side just then, he clutched wildly first one way and then the other and with palms upward again--"you see how com_fort_able I am. It ees gr-reat--gr-reat!" From laughter I let Fuji go then and he went--through coil after coil of that war-dragon's length, past the creaking, straining vertebræ, taking a whack with teeth or heels at something now and then and something now and then taking a similar whack at him. The etiquette of the road Fuji either knew not, or cared nothing for--nor cared he for distinctions of rank in his own world or mine. By rights the led cavalry horses should have had precedence. But nay, Fuji passed two regiments without so much as "by your leave"; but I was doing that for him vigorously and, whenever he broke through the line, I said two things, and I kept saying them that I might not be cut off with a sword: