The outbreak found Hoover at Tientsin having but recently returned from Pekin with Mrs. Hoover, and both just recovering from severe attacks of influenza. If opportunity for thorough organizing of the mines of China had failed him he now had full scope for organizing a military defense of his home and wife and his many employees, foreign and native, for Tientsin, for a month, was the scene of hot fighting. It was a besieged household in a beleaguered city. Hoover could have gotten out with his wife and few Caucasian assistants at the beginning of the trouble, but he would not desert his few hundred Chinese helpers and their families--and his wife would not desert him. So they staid on together through all the rifle and shell fire and conflagrations of the Tientsin siege, building and defending barricades of rice and sugar sacks, organizing food and water supplies, and cheerfully "carrying on" in the face of certain death, and worse, if the outnumbering fanatic Boxers happened to win. But there were occasional lighter incidents amid the many grave ones of the fighting weeks. Mrs. Hoover tells one, her favorite story of those days, in something like the following words. "We had a cow, famous and influential in the community, which cow was the mother of a promising calf. One day the cow was stolen and Mr. Hoover set out to find her. With three or four friends and half a dozen attendant Chinese boys he took out the tiny calf one night and by the light of a lantern led the little orphan, bleating for its mother, about the streets of the town. Finally, as they passed in front of the barracks of the German contingent of the international defending army, there came, from within, an answering moo, and Mr. Hoover, addressing the sentry, demanded his cow. The sentry made no move to comply, but, summoning all his _Woerterbuch_ English, countered with the inquiry: 'Is that the calf of the cow inside?' Upon receiving an affirmative reply to his Ollendorff question, he calmly declared, 'Also, then, calf outside must join itself to cow inside.' And thereupon by aid of a suggestive manipulation of his bayonet, he confiscated the calf, and sent Mr. Hoover home empty-handed."