Past them the soldiers streamed, foul with fight, their hot guns spitting viciously back into the rolling, pungent grey fog that followed them malignantly.  Confusion reigned, and in that confusion a perfect riot of death.  On all sides the soldiers fell, blighted by the Dragon’s breath.  The coolies crouched in the heaped-up ruins of their newly dug ditches, knowing not which way to turn, bereft of leadership since the Foreign Devil who commanded them was gone, buried beneath a pile of earth where a giant cracker had fallen.

Suddenly Kan Wong noticed that there were no more soldiers save only those who lay writhing or in still, twisted heaps upon the harrowed ground.  The coolie crowd huddled here alone, clutching their futile picks and shovels, grovelling in helpless panic.  Disaster had overtaken them.  The Dragon was upon them, and they were unprotected.  All about them in scattered heaps lay discarded equipment, guns, even the sharp-barking death-spitting, tiny instrument that the soldiers handled so lovingly and so gently when it was not in action.  But those who manned the weapons had passed on, back through the thick curtain of smoke that hung between them and the comparative safety of the rear.

Kan Wong’s eyes were ahead, striving to pierce the pungent veil that hid the enemy.  Suddenly his keen eyes noted them—­the strange uniforms and stranger faces, ducking forward here and there through the hell of their own making.  The blood of the Dragon within him boiled up, now that the enemy was really near enough to feel the teeth and claws of the Dragon’s whelps.  This was the hour for which he had lived.  This was the Tai-ping glory come again for him to share.  Reaching down, he picked up the rifle of a fallen soldier, fondled its mechanism lovingly for a moment, and then, cuddling it tenderly beneath his chin, his finger bade it spit death at the misty grey figures crawling through the greyer fog in front.

When the magazine was exhausted he filled it with fresh clips and turned with the authority he had always wielded, and a new one that they instantly recognized, upon his shivering countrymen.

“What are ye?” he yelled with withering scorn.  “Sons of pigs who root in the dung of this Foreign Devil’s land, or men of the Dragon’s blood?  Are ye the scum of the Yangtze River or honourable descendants of the Hairy Rebels?  Would ye avenge your brothers who have choked to death in the breath of the stink-pots that have been flung among us?  Will ye let escape this horde of Foreign Devil enemies who have hurled at us giant crackers that have spit death, now that they are near enough to feel how the Dragon’s blood can strike?  Here are the Dragon’s claws!” He waved his bayoneted gun aloft.  “Will ye die like men, or like slinking rats stamped into the earth?  All who are not cowards—­come!” He waved the way through the smoke to the grey figures emerging from it.

The Chinaman is no coward when once aroused.  Death he faces as he faces life, stoically, imperturbably.  The coolies, reaching for the nearest weapons, followed the man who showed the Dragon’s blood.  Many of them understood the use of arms, having borne them for New China.  Death was upon them, and they went to meet it with death in their hands.