"How different the captain's face is from what it was before the attack," Thaine thought, as he recalled the moment when Clarke had talked with Lieutenant Alford. And then the image of the young lieutenant's face, so full of life and hope and power and gentleness, swept vividly across his mind. "Who is it, boys?" Clarke called to the soldiers with the stretcher. "Lieutenant Alford," they answered. Something black dropped before Thaine Aydelot's eyes and Doctor Carey's words stung like powder burns in his memory. "Wait till you see a Kansas boy brought in, and count the cost again." In civil life character builds slowly up to higher levels. In war, it leaps upward in an instant. Thaine sprang to his feet and stood up to his full height in the blaze of the tropical sunshine. He did not see his captain, who had dropped to the ground like a wounded thing, stabbed to the soul with an agony of sorrow. He did not see the still form of the young lieutenant outlined under the cover of the stretcher. He did not see the trenches nor the lines of khaki-clad, sun-browned soldiery plunging forward to rid the jungle of its deadly peril. In that one moment he looked down the years with clear vision, as his father, Asher Aydelot, had learned to look before him, and he saw manhood and a new worth in human deeds. He had been a sentimental dreamer, ambitious for honors fairly earned, and eager for adventure. The first shots in the night attack on the Tondo road made him a soldier. The martyrdom of Lieutenant Alford made him a patriot. Humanity must be worth much, it seemed to him, if, in the providence of God, such blood must be spilled to redeem it to nobler civilization. Six weeks after the death of Alford before Caloocan, Dr. Horace Carey came up from the hospital in Manila to the American line to see Thaine Aydelot. The Kansas boys had been on duty in the trenches north of Caloocan for forty days, living beside the breastworks under the rude shelter of bamboo poles, watching a sleepless enemy--a life as full of wearing monotony and hardship as it was full of constant peril. "Well, Thaine, how goes the game?" Carey asked, as he sat beside the young soldier from the Grass River Valley. "I helped you into this world. I'm glad I haven't had to help you out yet." Carey had never before seen any resemblance to Asher Aydelot in his son's face. It was purely a type of the old Thaine family of Virginia. But today, the pose of the head, the expression of the mouth, the far-seeing gaze of the dark eyes, bespoke the heritage of the house of Aydelot.