The one who had them in charge and spoke their tongue gave them their tools and bade them dig narrow ditches head deep.  From them they ran tunnels into deep caves hollowed out far under the ground.  They burrowed like moles, cutting galleries here and there, reinforcing them with timbers, and lining them with a stone which they made out of dust and water.  Many they cut, stretching far back behind the ever present storm in front of them, while from that storm cloud, in swift and unseen lightning bolts that roared and burst and destroyed their work often as fast as it was completed, fell death among them, who were only labourers, not soldiers, as Kan Wong now knew those Foreign Devils in the strange and dirty uniforms to be.

As the storm roared on, never ceasing, it stirred the Dragon’s blood in Kan Wong’s veins.  The pick and shovel irked his hands as he swung them; his palms began to itch for the weapons that the soldiers bore.  Now and then he came upon a gun where it had dropped from its owner’s useless hands.  He studied its mechanism, even asking the Foreign Devil overseer how it was worked, and, being shown, he remembered and practised its use whenever opportunity offered.  He took to talking with his fellow-workers, some of whom had themselves fought with the rebels of New China, who, with just such Foreign Devils’ tools, had clipped the claws of the Manchu Dragon, freeing the Celestial Kingdom forever from its crooked grip.  He took much interest in these war implements.  He became more intimate and friendly with his fellows, feeling them now to be brothers in a danger that had awakened the soldier soul beneath the brown of his coolie skin.

Little could he make of all the strife about him.  All of which he was sure was that this was the Dragon’s Field, and he, a Son of the Dragon, had been guided to it to fulfil a destiny his forefathers had begun in the Yangtze Valley when with the “Hairy Rebels” they had waged such war as this.  The flying death all about him that now and then claimed toll of one of his own kind was but a part of it; but all the time he grew to hate his humble work and long for a part, a real part, in the fighting that raged ahead, where an unseen enemy, of whom he grew to think as his own, hurled destruction among them.  Often he spoke of this to the gang under him, imbuing them with the spirit of the Dragon’s blood that, eager to fulfil its destiny, once more boiled within him.

Then one day the storm grew more furious.  The thunder was a continual roll, and both from the front and rear flew the whining lightning bolts, spewing out death and destruction.  Many a coolie fell, his dust buried under the dust of this fierce foreign land, never to be returned and mixed with that of his own Flowery Kingdom.  Now and then came “stink pots,” filling the air with such foul vapours that men coughed out their lives in the putrid fumes.  The breath of the Dragon, fresh from his awful mouth, was wrapped about them in hot wrath.