Page:Ralph Paine--The praying skipper.djvu/227

Rh Saunders was able to sit up a little and talk with the men around him. But the violence of these early impressions in hospital had unstrung a system drained by long service in the Philippines, and by the contrasting hardships of the cold winter in North China. The gloomy temple frightened the soldier, for sometimes the private has nerves, but he kept his fears to himself, thinking them womanish. He fell to brooding too much of home, and the more he dwelt upon the distance between Peking and those who loved him the more insistent became his morbid fear that he would not go back with his company.

It happened almost daily that the Ninth Regiment band trailed through the hospital compound, playing a dead march. There was always a halt in front of the stone stairway, and after a few moments the dragging music sounded fainter and farther away. A little later those in the temple could barely hear the silvery wail of "taps" floating from a corner of the outer wall, where a line of mounds was growing longer week by week. Then the band returned, playing a Sousa march or