with the aid of bricks and stones, so as to have a line of loopholes converging on the entrance.  We trained some of the many rifles we had picked up in the same direction, and strapped them into position, just as the Chinese commands had done all along their barricades during the siege.  In this way we made it so that in a few seconds a dozen of the enemy could be brought to the ground without the defending force showing a finger.  That would be enough for any Cossacks....

Before midday we had added a couple of lookout posts to the roofs, and then, secure in this new-found strength, I determined to go abroad once more to collect supplies and food.  That decision was materially helped by an incident which showed that everyone was acting and that it was the only way.  As we cautiously opened our main gate and prepared to sally out, a cart came by, accompanied by several men from the Legations on horseback, who were much excited.  Well might they be; they had two of their number inside that cart, both shot and bleeding badly from flesh wounds.  They had been right to the east of the city, they reported, where the Russians and Japanese had come in.  It was terrible there, they said.  Nothing but dead people and fires and looting.  Chinese soldiers had still remained there in hiding and were defending some of the bigger buildings belonging to Manchu princes.  Plunderers, also, were everywhere on the road.  They advised caution and told us not to trust ourselves in the alleyways.  They had been caught like that, and their servants and horse-boys had deserted in a body four miles away immediately fire was opened on them from some fortified house.  That made me all the more determined.  I would go and be shot, too, if necessary, since it was the order of the day, but I made up my mind that it would be no easy job to catch me sleeping.  Already I understood fully the new methods and the new requirements.

We rode away, stirrup to stirrup, I, a single white man, with a dozen doubtful adherents, made savage at the idea of loot, as companions, and held to me only by a questionable community of interests.  Yet what did it matter, I thought.  One lives only once and dies only once.  That is elemental truth.  So tant pis.

In our joy at being on those open streets again, with never a passer-by or a vehicle to obstruct one’s rapid passage, we went ahead in a whirlwind of dust.  We passed street after street with always the same silence about us we had noticed the day before.  Everything was closed, tight shut; there was not a cat or a dog stirring abroad.  Near the Legations and the Palace, where the fear lay the heaviest, it seemed like a city of the dead.

Yet we knew that there were plenty of living men only biding their time and waiting their opportunity.  It was only night that these people desired; a good black night so that no one could see them flit about.  You felt in the small of your back as you rode along that ugly faces were looking at you from the silent houses, and that at any moment shots might ring out suddenly and bear you to the ground.  But that was merely a preliminary feeling.  Soon it added zest to the entertainment.  What, indeed, did it matter?  It only made one more and more reckless.