Thaine knew his comrades shared his hope, whether for the same high purpose he could not have asked. He had no longer dreams of military glory for himself. His joy was in achievement, no matter by whose hand. "There's an order for somebody to go up on the wall." The word was passed along the line. Before it reached Thaine and his comrades a young soldier had leaped forward to obey the order. "Glory be, America first!" Goodrich said fervently. "And a Kansan. A Jayhawker!" Thaine did not know who said it. He saw the soldier, young Calvin Titus, a Kansas boy, leap after the Japanese coolies who ran forward toward the wall with the long bamboo scaling ladders. And for one instant's flash of time the old level prairies came sweeping into view, the winding line of Grass River with the sand dunes beyond; the wheat fields, the windbreaks, the sunflowers beside the trail, and far away the three headlands veiled in the golden haze of an August morning. A Kansas boy the hero of the day--first of all that army to stand on top of that hoary old wall! The prairies had grown another name for the annals of history. Before him were the little brown coolies holding the ladder, and up its slender swaying height, round by round, went young Titus nimbly as a squirrel up a cottonwood limb. The Kansas men went wild. "Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K U! oo!" they shouted again and again, ending in the long quavering wail as the University yell must always end. Up and up went Titus, sixty feet, to the top of the wall. Then as he stood above the strange old Oriental city, rilled now with frenzied fighters; above the poor starving Christians in their Compound--saved as by a miracle; above the twelve thousand soldiers sent hither from the far homelands beyond the seas to rescue human beings from deadly peril. As he stood over all these, a target for a hundred guns, the khaki-clad young Kansan lifted his right hand high above his head and swung out the Stars and Stripes to all the breezes of that August morning. Then came the belching of cannon, the bursting of huge timbers, the groaning of twisting iron, and through the splintered gates the Allied Armies had entered the city. Inside the walls the hundred thousand Boxers renewed the strife. The walls and gates of the Foreign Legation were as stubbornly defended by the Chinese fanatics on the outside now as the besieged Christians had defended them against the Chinese on the inside. Entrance was made at last through the sluiceway, or open sewer, draining out under the city walls. It was a strange looking line of creatures who came crawling, waist-deep in filth, through the sewer's channel. The old Aydelot sense of humor had saved Thaine many a time. And he wondered afterward if he had not seen by chance the ludicrous picture of himself in a huge mirror, if his heart would not have burst with grief when Pryor Gaines came toward him, mute and pallid, with outstretched hands.