“As we talked, there was a sharp crack of a Krag carbine. I could not rise, but crawled to the doorway. The Mindayans had formed in the plaza for action. Tarrant was coming with his squadron of cavalry to settle for the murders of the night before, and the naked Mindayans essayed to meet him in the open--as the Tagals of Luzon had never dared to do. It was all on in a moment. Out of the jungle came the boys from the States--queer, quick lines, blowing their bubbles of white smoke, dropping down to fire and running forward in skirmish, answering the trumpet-talk as running metal answers to the grooves of a mold. In the blazing open--in a light so intense that it was pain to look through it--the forces met. Mindayans, with guns dating from Magellan; the Americans with their swift, animate Krags; a squadron of white men, three skeleton troops picked from forty States, stacked against a thousand-odd glistening blacks all enthused to die. Hell’s forbidden chambers were emptied that hour, Miss Noreen. I hated war then--but have hated it since far more. “They met--before my eyes they met--and the dead flew out of the lines like chaff, and were trampled like chaff by the toilers. Hand-to-hand at last; shiny black of flesh against the dull green-brown of khaki; the jungle alive with reserves exchanging poisoned salads of metal; science against primal lust; seasoned courage against fanaticism; yellow sky above, yellow sand beneath; blood-letting between, and the eternal jungle on every hand. It was a battle to haunt and debase a watcher’s brain. “I did not know Tarrant’s prowess until that day. One man might falter in his command, but the lines were rigid as steel. His trumpeter interpreted every movement of the commander’s lips. I pawed the matting of the hut, but could not lift the anchorage of my hips. Rawder stood above me, watching, the lines of his sweating face weaving with sorrow. The thing was growing upon me--what the end of the fight would mean to him--but his sad face was clean of all fear. Years ago, when I was a boy and loved physical courage, I should have worshipped that clean look of his. Tears in his eyes for the men who had brutalized him!... “There is always a last minute to a fight, Miss Noreen,--when each force puts forth its final flicker of courage, and the lesser zeal is killed. The last drain of gameness wins the battle, when strength and strategy are gone. It wins for spiders and boys and armies. Tarrant had it.... When it was all over, the men of Rawder’s troop saw him in the doorway and rushed forward. “‘Mr. Routledge,’ he said softly, ‘they are coming for me. The boys have spoiled my mission here.’ “His hand touched my forehead. The ghastly illness left me.... I don’t believe in telling a lady a story which one would refrain from telling his fellow war-scribes, Miss Noreen, but believe me, you have impelled it with perfect listening----” “His hand touched your forehead,” she repeated.