Nothing counts in warfare till the results are shown. For six hours the fighting did not cease, and not at Valley Forge, nor Brandywine, Lake Erie, nor Buena Vista, Gettysburg, nor Shiloh, San Juan Hill, nor in any jungle in Luzon did the American flag stream out over greater heroes than it led today on the plains beside the Peiho river before Yang-Tsun. At last the firing ceased, the smoke lifted above the field; the Boxers, gathering their shattered forces together, retreated again before the little line of Allied Troops invading this big strange land. And the last hours of that long hot day waned to eventide. There were only a few of its events that Thaine could comprehend. He knew Little Kemper had received his death wound, blowing his bugle calls again and again after he had been stricken, till the last reveille sounded for him. The plucky little body with the big soul, who had found his brief fifteen years of life so full of "doing." Thaine knew that in the thick of the fight the native Indian Infantry, the Sikhs and Sepoys, had fallen in cowardly fear before the Boxer fire. He remembered how big Schwoebel, and Tasker, and Binford, Goodrich, and McLearn, with himself and another man whom he recalled afterward as Boehringer, a Kansas man, had clubbed self-respect into a few of them and kicked the other whining cowards from their way. He knew that Schwoebel had been grievously wounded and was being taken back to Tien-Tsin with many other brave fellows who had been stricken that day. He knew that near the last of the fray a man whom he had admired and loved second to Lieutenant Alford, big Clint Graham, of a royally fine old family of state builders in far-away Kansas, had fallen by the mistaken shot of Russian cannon, and the weight of that loss hung heavy about the edge of his consciousness wherever he turned. But what followed the battle Thaine Aydelot will never forget. Twelve hundred men rose no more from that bloody field before Yang-Tsun. The fighting force, sixteen thousand strong, was wearing off at the rate of almost a regiment and a half a day, and it was yet a hundred miles to Peking. All about Thaine were men with faces grimy as his own; their lips, like his, split and purple from the alkali dust. They had had no water to drink in all that long day's twelve miles of marching and six hours of fighting. Fearful is the price paid out when the wilderness goes forth to war! And heroic, sublimely heroic, may be the Christianity of the battlefield. "We must help these fellows," Thaine said to his comrades as the wail for water went up from wounded men. "The river is this way," McLearn declared. "Hurry! the boys are dying."