all. Behind, Lewis was eating the road up with a swinging English stride, and, drinking the dust of the world, we followed. Fuji had side-stepped from barrack yard into that road, sawing on his bit, pawing the earth and squealing challenges or boisterous love-calls to anything and everything that walked. Sex, species, biped or quadruped—never knew I such indiscriminate buoyancy—all were one to Fuji. With malediction on tongue and murder in heart, I sawed his gutta percha mouth until my fingers were blistered and my very jaws ached—but I could hold him back only a while. We overtook the Italian, a handsome boy with a wild intensity of eye—one puttee unwound and flying after him. The iron-gray was giving trouble and he, too, was unhappy. We passed Reggie—his great body stretched on a lumpy heap of baggage—with a pipe in his mouth, that was halved with his perennial smile of unshakable good humor and the other Frenchman squatting between the two humps of baggage on a jolting cart.
“Ah!” he cried with extended hands, “you see—you see—” his head was tossed to one side just then, he clutched wildly first one way and then the other and with palms upward again—“you see how comfortable I am. It ees gr-reat—gr-reat!” From laughter I let Fuji go then and he went—through coil after coil of that war-dragon’s length, past the creaking, straining vertebræ, taking a whack with teeth or heels at something now and then and something now and then taking a similar whack at him. The etiquette of the road Fuji either knew not, or cared for—nor cared he for distinctions of rank in his own world nor in mine. By rights the led cavalry horses should have had precedence. But nay, Fuji passed two regiments without so much as “by your leave”; but I was doing that for him vigorously and, whenever he broke through the line, I said two things and I kept saying them that I might not be cut off with a sword:
“Warui desu!” I said, which means “He’s bad!” and “Gomen nasai,” which is Japanese for “Beg pardon.” These two phrases never failed to bring a smile instead of the curse that I might have got in any other army in the world. We passed even an officer who seemed and was, no doubt, in a great and just hurry but even his eyes had to take the dust thrown from Fuji’s heels. I pulled him in at last on top of a little hill whence I could see the battle-hills of Nanshan. But I cared no more for that field than did Fuji, both of us being too much interested in life to care much for post-mortems and when the rest came up, we rode by Nanshan without turning up its green slopes, and on to where the first walled Chinese city I had ever seen lifted its gate-towers and high notched walls in glaring sunlight and a mist of strangling dust. We passed in through the city gates and stopped where I know not. It was some bad-smelling spot under a hot sun and being off Fuji and in that sun, I cared not. I have vague memories of white men coming by and telling me to come out of the sun and of not coming out of the sun; of horses kicking and stamping nearby and an occasional neigh from Fuji hitched in the shade of the city wall and guarded by a Chinaman; of a yellow man asleep on a cart, his unguarded face stark to that sun and a hundred flies crawling about his open mouth; and, of an altercation going on between two white men. One said:
“Your horse has kicked mine—remove him!”
“Move your own,” said another and his tone was that of some Lord Cyril in a melodrama. “Mine was there first.”
The other took off his coat:
“Tm sorry, but I’ve got to fight you.”
“Very well, then,” said Lord Cyril, stripping, too, and then the voice of a peacemaker that I knew well broke in and in a moment all was still. Takeuchi rode in on a mule. No hitting the dust for the proud feet of Takeuchi then, as I learned, nor afterwards, when there were any other four feet that could be made to travel for hire.
“I, want a ‘betto’,” he said—which is Japanese for hostler—“for Fuji.”
“Whatever need there be for Fuji, the accursed,” said I, lapsing into such Oriental phraseology as I had read in books, “buy, and buy quickly—my money is in thy belt.” He bought then and kept on buying afterwards.
Straightway I fell again into sun-dreams with the yellow man nearby whose mouth was wide, for it was my first experience with the God of Fire in his hell-hot Eastern home and I strayed in them until I was shaken into consciousness by a white man with a beer bottle in his hand. I remember a