Swank’s voice did not change. He was unresponsive to the taunt. “Yes,” he said, “I was so fortunate as to induce Major Dillard to visit the monastery under my guidance, though it required some diplomatic effort, and some insistence; but the Major had confidence in my cloth, and he was making every effort to prevent a looting of the country along the line of march.” Bow Bell laughed in a high staccato. “Confidence in your cloth! It was just a piece of your damned luck that the American officer never heard of you. He thought you were an honest-to-God missionary. You’d know all the tricks. You’d be sanctimonious enough to fool the Devil, for a handful of yellow boys minted in America. I’d lay a quid on the Saints that you fooled him all right.... Well, go on and tell me about it. You say the old Viceroy, with the Boxers on one side and the foreign devils on the other, was cooped up in a monastery along the line of march, with the women of all the important families in the Province, and everything of value that they hadn’t time to bury. You’d nose it out, Johnny-on-the-spot. You couldn’t get it yourself—some Chink would have put a knife in you—and it was no good to you for the foreign devils to get it, so you took your little old hundred and twenty, and went in to the American Headquarters to see Major Dillard, eh, what!” He went on condensing the unessentials in the hope of getting Colonel Swank forward with his narrative. “The viceroy was sick, and too old to travel. It was all he could do to sit up. His only chance was to put himself under the protection of the American Expeditionary Force. The English were on ahead, and he knew what the Russians and Germans would do to him. Gawd! He’d gathered it up for ’em! It was like saying, ‘Come along, boys. I’ve got the stuff corralled for you. Here’s the girlies, and here’s the pieces of eight. Go to it. Gawd!... No wonder they dug up the yellow boys.... You’d ’a’ got more if you had held out. Did that occur to you?” Swank made a vague gesture,—a languorous moving of his hand over his threadbare knee. “One should not consider a reward for aiding others in distress; besides my resources were very low at the time, and American gold in the East was at a premium.” “Too hungry to trade, eh, what?” said Bow Bell. “I have been like that; but you must have been damned hungry, Colonel. Gawd! You must have been starved to the bone ... cut along. Was it night?”