Page:Ralph Paine--The praying skipper.djvu/156

132 threading the skyline in a humming loop. The sight hurled him back to the Chien-men Road and the lieutenant alertly picking off Private Smathers with a long snap-shot.

"What's this fool railroad doin' here? I wonder are they consthructin' it to ketch up with me? Come a-runnin' there pronto, chop-chop. Ain't there no gettin' away from annywhere?"

He volleyed the questions at You Han as if they had been jerked out of him. The boy looked puzzled as he replied:

"Devil cart go Pao-ting-fu, then go Peking. No belong to Amelican soldier. English have got."

They crossed the rails on the run, as if the metals burned their feet, and the deserter flogged the mule into a gallop, until their road twisted beyond sight of the track and its unexpected autograph of a civilization they were fleeing headlong. He would not have dared predict it, but in the afternoon Corporal Sweeney began to be a man again. They had passed