In the end he had happened to be engrossed in some experiments or other with herbs, and it was that which led him to decide upon going to China. He was going to study Chinese herbs. And he had gone, straight, without any stops _en route_, as he did everything. But when he had been in Pekin two weeks the Boxer Rebellion broke out, and there he was in the thick of it; and a god-send he was, too, in the foreign legations, fighting and caring for wounded by turns, day and night, youth and strength and his fresh fine skill counting for ten in that beleaguered handful of desperate men. It was for that he had got his first decoration—Japan’s Order of the Rising Sun, and a little later had come from France, for the same service, and quite to the surprise of Corey, the scarlet ribbon of the Legion of Honor. There had been, of course, the appropriate furore—pictures and full-page interviews in the San Francisco papers on his way home, and Dubuque expecting to see him come back transformed, a hero, conscious of honors won. But he had arrived, to their amazement, merely himself, and they had accepted him, after a day or two, at his own valuation. That was the first, and it seemed after that, although he was always off to one of the far corners of the earth, they were never able to look upon him when he came home as a distinguished traveler returned. He was simply, as he seemed to wish to be, “Jim,” or sometimes “Doc” Corey come home again. And yet they knew about the things he had done. They knew where he had been. And they knew, too, about his decorations. They had seen them on one or two occasions, when he had been the guest of the evening at the “Business Men’s Banquet,” and he had “dressed up,” the old gentleman said, in a full-dress suit and all his decorations. “Two rows, all kinds, by then.” One could imagine him doing that, in a spirit of comic masquerade. And one could imagine him also doing it merely to please them. His wife, after he was married, used to get out his decorations and show them to her women friends, and at this Corey only laughed good-humoredly. But she never showed them to men; she seemed to sense how that would embarrass him. I asked when he had married her, and who she was. She had been visiting friends, he said, in Dubuque, when Corey came back, he believed, from the Balkan War, in the spring of 1913. Pretty quick work they made of it, too. In August that same summer they had the wedding at her house in Des Moines. But it had surprised nobody. They knew he’d been wanting to settle down; and she was just the right kind of girl—nice and wholesome, and fond of her home. At last, he said, he was going to begin to live.