Hills of Han: A Romantic Incident

ON a day in late March, 1907, Miss Betty Doane sat in the quaintly airy dining-room of the Hotel Miyaka, at Kioto, demurely sketching a man's profile on the back of a menu card.

UNWILLING either to confess like a naughty child or to go on keeping this rather large and distinctly exciting secret under cover, Betty, at teatime, brought the matter to an is...

AT the point where the ancient highway, linking Northern China with Thibet, the Kukunor region and Mongolia, emerges from the treeless, red-brown tumbling hills of Hansi Provinc...

DOANE stood on the Bund at Hankow, by the railing, his great frame towering above the passers-by. He had lunched with the consul general, an old acquaintance. He had arranged to...

THE Boatwrights were at this time in the thirties; he perhaps thirty-six or seven, she thirty-three or four. As has already been noted through the observing eyes of Mr. Withery,...

DOANE left the compound a little before noon, and arrived at So T'ung at six the following morning. The distance, a hundred and eighty _li_, was just short of sixty-five English...

IT WAS early morning--the first day of April--when the Pacific liner that carried Betty Doane and Jonathan Brachey out of Yokohama dropped anchor in the river below Shanghai and...

PASSENGER traffic on the Hansi Line ended at this time at a village called Shau T'ing, in the heart of the red mountains. Brachey spent the night in a native caravansary, his fo...

IF Brachey had approached that East Gate a year later he would have rolled comfortably into the city in a rickshaw (which has followed the white man into China) along a macadami...

The girl stood in the doorway. She looked so slim and small and, even, childlike, that the older woman, to whom responsibility for all things and persons about her was a habit,...

He was dressed almost stiffly--not in knickerbockers now, but in what would be called at home a business suit, with stiff white collar and a soft but correct hat; and he carried...

CHINA, in its vastness, its mystery, its permanence, its ceaseless ebb and flow of myriad, uncounted life, suggests the ocean. The surface is restless, ripped by universal famil...

ON the morning of that same day--while Griggsby Doane was striding down the mountain road from So T'ung to T'ainan-fu--Jonathan Brachey sat in his room at the inn trying to read...

WHEN DOANE had gone Brachey called John and ordered a mule litter for eight n the morning. John found ont of the soldiers among the lounging group by the gate. The soldier slipp...

MOST of the day, advised by Brachey. Betty kept closed the swinging litter doors. The little caravan settled into the routine of the highway, the muleteers trudging beside their...

SHE heard little more for several hours; merely a muffled stirring about, at long intervals, as if he were walking the floor or trying to move a chair very quietly. The cot on w...

MEANTIME, M. Pourmont, at Ping Yang, was calling in his white assistants and sifting out the trustworthy among his native employees in preparation for withstanding a siege. He h...

Elmer Boatwrights chin sagged a little way. For a long moment he stood motionless, making no sound; then, without change of expression on his gray thin face, he moved with a slo...

Faintly through the open window at the foot of the bed came the sound of a distant, shot; another; a rattle of them. And other, nearer shots. Then a slow whistling shriek and a...

DOANE walked, carelessly erect, to a knoll something less than a hundred yards northeast of the compound and off to the left of the ride pits. Here he stood for a brief time, li...

“To begin at first blush,” he said, settling comfortably back as If launched on a long narrative, “while out on scouting leap in dark I stumbled plump on Lookers, and by thunder...

THE day of sudden and dramatic peace was drawing near its close. Seated on the parapet of a rifle pit Betty and Brachey looked out over the red-brown valley. Long, faintly purpl...