The young women were passing very close now. They were all in uniforms and they were laughing and talking. As they came near, Mayli spoke in a low voice, but very clearly “Pansiao!”
The young girl whom she was watching stopped, turned, and stared at her with rounding eyes. It was Pansiao.
“Oh,” she cried. “You!”
She sprang out from among her fellows and seized Mayli’s hand in both hers and stared at her and laughed and pressed Mayli’s hand to her breast. “Where did you go?” she cried. “Oh, how I missed you when you were gone! It was because of you that I ran away. Yes, because of all you said to us. Do you remember how you would not let me learn ‘Paul Revere’?”
“I do remember,” Mayli said laughing. “Come inside the gate.”
“This is my friend,” Pansiao said joyfully to the other girls, who were standing fixed with astonishment. “This is — she is my teacher — or she was.”
“Come inside, all of you,” Mayli said. So they came inside, and sat down on the marble steps in front of the temple, and there Pansiao told how she had run away from Miss Freem and the school in the caves.
“Six of us ran away,” she said, “and some went one way and some another. Well, it was so easy. I just ran away one day, and the army was not far off and there were enough people moving southward and I went with them. They let me eat what they ate when they heard I went to join the army.”
She looked so naive, so fresh, with her red cheeks and her soft brown eyes, so much a child, though thin and hard-fleshed with walking, that Mayli could not but smile her tenderness. And added to her natural tenderness was this, that Pansiao was Sheng’s sister and it was Pansiao who had first told her about Sheng, and had wanted her, childlike, instantly to be his wife.
“Do you know your brother is somewhere on the way to Burma?” she now asked Pansiao.
Pansiao clapped her hands and then put her hands to her cheeks. “You mean my third brother?”
“I do mean that one,” Mayli replied.
Pansiao leaned close. “You are not — are you?”
“I am not married,” Mayli said, and could not prevent the heat rising to her face.
“Nor is he, yet?” Pansiao asked gently.
“No, he is not,” Mayli said.
She felt her face very hot under the young girl’s clear gaze, but what more could she say and what could she do but speak of something else?
“Where do you go now?” she asked Pansiao.
“I have not been told,” the girl replied.
“Would you like to join us and go west?” she asked.
“Oh, I would like to go with you,” Pansiao cried.
“Then I will see what I can do to bring it about,” Mayli replied. It would be sweet to have this child with her who was Sheng’s sister. She put out her hand and touched Pansiao’s hand. “Go back,” she said, “and come again tomorrow morning with your things. Tonight I shall talk to those who are above me and ask them to let you come with us — with me.”
“Oh, what if they will not!” Pansiao cried.
Mayli smiled. “I think they will,” she said. Her eyes and voice were those of one not used to being refused.
Pansiao jumped up. “I will go and pack my things now,” she said. She dropped to her knees before Mayli.
“Let me come back tonight!” she pleaded.
Who could refuse such adoration? Certainly Mayli could not.
“Very well, tonight,” she said. “It will be best, for we start the day at dawn.”
IX
ALL DURING THESE DAYS Sheng had been waiting, his men gathered grimly about him, on the border of Burma. They had climbed the wall of mountains, cold by night and hot by day even though their feet were in snow. They had walked a thousand miles and more, a steady march of thirty miles a day, each man carrying his rifle and bayonet, a rain hat of bamboo, a helmet, a packet of three days’ food, a second pair of shoes, a water bottle, a spade, twenty bullets and two hand grenades. Carriers came with them, marching beside them. Although each carrier had his load of eighty pounds of rice, Sheng had not forced the march nor delayed it, knowing that his men had their own place in the long steady stream of strength coming out of China. This place was at the head and they were the vanguard, but there were others to the north and the south. As he went he made careful note of the path, the land and the people, remembering especially where food was plentiful and where it was not. If food was scarce it was never that it was withheld from them, for the people everywhere were welcoming and gave whatever they had.
He came near to the borders of Burma with his men on the exact day, lacking six hours, of the time which his General had set for him to be there. His men were mud-stained and weary, but they had fought the enemy many times in the past and now they were full of eagerness for this new battle they believed would be the greatest of all. Not one rifle had been lost or even wet with rain on the march. These rifles were new weapons which the One Above had ordered to be given them, and each man felt his rifle a personal gift and if his own head lay in mud while he slept at least his rifle was laid high and safe. They had dragged artillery behind them, too, over the high mountain gorges, and this they had kept ready oiled and quick for use.
They had another strength than that of weapons. On the day that this march had begun, secretly lest the enemy discover it, the General had told them that they were being sent to Burma not as any usual army might be sent.
“You are going,” the young General had said, standing very slim and tall, “as a token of our leader’s faith in the alliance with the nations now united against the enemy. Our leader is determined to throw all his strength into the struggle against tyranny in the world. We fight in our place in a world war.”
This saying the men had never forgotten. They knew that they must stand for their country and for their leader before the foreigners who were to be their allies, and how proudly each man held himself and how carefully and courageously each did his duty was a sight which day after day struck Sheng’s heart almost with pain.
For, though the General had spoken so clearly to the soldiers, yet Sheng knew very well the doubts in the secret place of the General’s own mind. To Sheng the General had said, and at the last moment: “I wish I had our leader’s faith! I wish I were sure that we are not betraying our own men!”
Sheng had carried all these sayings with him as he led his men through valleys and gorges and over mountainsides. He spoke to his men gravely each evening of the duty that lay upon them to fight beside their foreign allies in such a way that all those who heretofore had looked down upon them as inferior and weak should see how brave they were and how ready and resourceful. How often was he to remember those evenings! They stopped when night fell, wherever they happened to be upon some lonely mountainside, the gorges falling away beneath them into darkness, the sky pulsing with stars above them or bright with the moon. If luck came they found a temple, or a small village clinging to the rocks. Each night when his men had rested and eaten and before they slept they had gathered about him, and then in his simple abrupt way he spoke of the day’s march, what was good and what he wanted mended the next day, and he listened to any questions or complaints, and then at the last he said, each day, something of the same thing, in such words as these:
“You are not to think of yourselves as a common and usual kind of soldier. In the old days soldiers were held in low esteem and they were men of fortune, selling their courage for the highest price. But we are of a different make of man. Here am I, a farmer’s son, and my father was once well-to-do and we were three brothers in his house, always with plenty to eat and wear, and the crops good on the rich river land which now the enemy holds. Here am I, owning nothing today, and I fought my way here, having been first a hill-man and then a soldier, but always with only one hope, to kill as many of the enemy as I could. I have risen to be your head only because luck has been with me and brought me here, and I am no better than you, be sure. We are all equals and brothers in this war, chosen because we are strong and young and because we are not afraid to die. We were chosen by the One Above because we are his best. He sends us to fight beside the white men, to show them what our best can be. Whatever happens no man is to think of retreat or of his own life.”