This notorious Boxer uprising, gone now into military annals, had reached the high tide of its power. Beginning in the southern province of China, it spread northward, menacing the entire Empire. A secret sect at first, it was augmented by the riffraff that feeds on any new, and especially lawless, body; by deserters disloyal to the imperial government; by the ignorant and the unthinking; by the intimidated and the intimidating. It enrolled an armed force of one hundred and seventy-five thousand soldiers. Its purposes were fanatical. It aimed by the crudest means to root out every idea of modern life and thought in China; every occidental invention, every progressive method of society, every scientific discovery for the betterment of humanity. And especially did it aim to put to death every native Chinese Christian, to massacre every missionary of the Christ, and to drive out or destroy every foreign citizen in China. Its resources were abundant, its equipment was ample, its methods unspeakably atrocious. Month after month the published record of this rebellion was sickening--its unwritten history beyond human imagining. Impenetrable were its walled cities, countless in numbers, unknown the scenes of its vast plains and rivers and barren fields and mountain fastnesses. Fifteen thousand native Christians and hundreds of foreigners were brutally massacred. At last it centered its strength about the great city of Peking. And a faint, smothered wail for deliverance came from the Foreign Legation shut in behind beleaguered walls inside that city to starve or perish at the hands of the bloody Boxers. Very patiently the World Powers waited and warned the Chinese leaders of a day of retribution. Fanatics are fanatics because they cannot learn. The conditions only whetted the Boxers to greater barbarity. They believed themselves invincible and they laughed to scorn all thought of foreign interference. Then came the sword of the Lord and of Gideon to the battle lines at Tien-Tsin on the Peiho River, as it came once long ago to the valley of Jezreel. In the mid-afternoon of an August day Thaine Aydelot heard the bugle note calling the troops to marching order. Thaine was fond of the bugler, a little fifteen-year-old Kansas boy named Kemper, because he remembered that Asher Aydelot had been a drummer boy once when he was no older than "Little Kemper," as the regiment called him. "I wish you were where my father is now, Kemper," Thaine said as the boy skipped by him. "Where's that? It can't be hell or he'd be with us," Little Kemper replied. "No, he's in Kansas," Thaine said. "Oh, that's right next door to heaven, but I can't go just yet. There's too much doing here," the little bugler declared as he hurried away. Young as he was, Little Kemper was the busiest member of the regiment. Life with him was a continual "doing" and he did it joyously and well.