From the doctor we got the first real news of the puzzling situation.  It appeared that all the men who had arrived Sunday morning from Yuchi to join the Yen-ping rebels were in reality brigands and, to save their own lives, the Hunan soldiers quartered in the city had played a clever trick.  They had pretended to join the rebels but at a given signal had turned upon them, killing or capturing almost every one.  Although their sympathies were really with the South, the Hunan men knew that the rebels in Yen-ping could not hold the city against the Northern soldiers from Foochow and, by crushing the rebellion themselves, they hoped to avert a bigger fight.

As we could not help the doctor he suggested that we might be of some assistance to the wounded in the city, and with rude crosses of red cloth pinned to our white shirt sleeves we left the hospital, accompanied by four Chinese attendants bearing a stretcher.  In the compound we met a chair in which was lying an old man groaning loudly and dripping with blood.  Beside him were his wife and several boys.  The poor woman was crying quietly and, between her sobs, was offering the wounded man mustard pickles from a small dish in her hand!  Poor things, they have so little to eat that they believe food will cure all ills!

The bearers set the chair down as we appeared and lifted the filthy rag which covered a gaping wound in the man’s shoulder, over which had been plastered a great mass of cow dung.  Just think of the infection, but it was the only remedy they knew!

We took the man upstairs where Dr. Trimble was preparing to operate on the fellow who had been shot in the abdomen.  The doctor was working steadily and quietly, making every move count and inspiring his native hospital staff with his own coolness; the way this young missionary handled his cases made us glad that he was an American.

On the way down the hill several soldiers passed us, each carrying four or five rifles and slung about with cartridge belts—­plunder stripped from the men who had been killed.  A few hundred yards farther on we found two brigands lying dead in a narrow street.  The nearest one had fallen on his face and, as we turned him over, we saw that half his head had been blown away; the other was staring upward with wide open eyes on which the flies already were settling in swarms.

There was little use in wasting time over these men who long ago had passed beyond need of our help, and we went on rapidly down the alley to the main thoroughfare.  Guided by a small boy, we hurried over the rough stones for fifteen minutes, and suddenly came to a man lying at the side of the street, his head propped on a wooden block.  An umbrella once had partly covered him but had fallen away, leaving him unprotected in the broiling sun.  His face and a terrible wound in his head were a solid mass of flies, and thousands of insects were crawling over the blood clots on the stones beside him.  At first we thought he was dead but soon saw his abdomen move and realized that he was breathing.  It did not seem possible that a human being could live under such conditions; and yet the bystanders told us that he had been lying there for thirty hours—­he had been shot early the previous morning and it was now three o’clock of the next afternoon.