Jerry wanted the story told for Noreen, and his memories challenged and animated Routledge. “Yes, I wanted to see my boys again,” he acknowledged. “I had one good look at them in Cuba, under Lawton, who was killed a year or so later, under my eyes, on the banks of the Maraquina River in Luzon. The Philippines was a rapid, pretty service, but a service of detachments. I was eager to see how the boys worked in numbers. The American troops are nervous, you know, a little too highly evolved to be atoms. They live for a higher game in their country--commerce and inventions. Some time the nation will rise even to a better growth than that--I mean, to the spiritual evolution. “The boys were mostly ill in China, thin-blooded from the tropical Philippines. The column was full of fever, coughing and cursing a little. They shook in the chill damps of the nights up Tientsin way.... Poor chaps, but it was good to hear them talk, before the gray old walls of Tientsin--that night when the world was hanging to the cable-ends for the flash, ‘battle.’ I rode along the huddled column and heard Texas, Indiana, Nob Hill and the Bronx, Halsted Street and Back Bay--all from the shadows on the ground, that breathed tired oaths and shivered in the drive of the fine, chilled rain.” Jerry took up the picture excitedly: “Do you remember when the spray of sparks shook out from behind the wall?--the party in charge of the fireworks was trying the night to see if it were dark enough. Then followed a succession of booming crashes. It was as if the plain was drawn tight as a drum-head, and they dropped comets on it.... The Chinos got the Russian range about that time, and left open sores in the snaky Slav line. And I want to know, Routledge, did you hear the high-pitched scream from the Japanese when they snatched the glory of the lead?... Ah, we’ll hear from those brown dwarfs again!” “I think so,” said Routledge. “They ran forward like hounds, snapped at each other and gave tongue like a pack closing in for the kill. Yes, I remember, and then the fire broke out behind the wall in the native city, and the sky took on the red--the red of an Indian blanket! It shone red on the faces of the boys from the States.... Miss Noreen, you listen large-eyed as Desdemona.” “Tell me more about your boys,” she whispered.