Pack-train Thirteen took the field a day or two afterward. Bedient was
not at all himself.... In all the months that followed meeting David
Cairns in Alphonso, the Block-House incident was too close and horrible
for words--though Bedient spoke of Adelaide and the great wind and a
hundred other matters.

There was another slight Manila experience, which took place after the
first parting with David Cairns, the latter being called to China by
rumors of uprising. Pack-train Thirteen had rubbed itself out in
service--was just a name. Bedient was delighting in the thought of
hunting up Cairns in China.... It was dusk again, that redolent hour.
Bedient had just dined. So sensitive were his veins--that coffee roused
him as brandy might another. His health was brought to such perfection,
that its very processes were a subtle joy, which sharpened the mind and
senses. Bedient had been so long in the field, that the sight of even a
Filipino woman was novel. Strange, forbidding woman of the
river-banks--yet in the twilight, and with the inspired eyes of young
manhood, that dusk-softened line from the lobe of the ear to the point
of the shoulder--a passing maid with a tray of fruit upon her head--was
enough to startle him with the richness of romance. It was not
desire--but the great rousing abstraction, Woman, which descends upon
full-powered young men at certain times with the power of a psychic
visitation. His heart poured out in a greeting that girdled the world,
to find the Woman--somewhere.

Bedient did not know at this time of the heart emptiness of the world's
women--a longing so vast, so general, that interstellar space is needed
to hold it all. Still, he had so much to give, it seemed that in the
creative scheme of things there must be a woman to receive and ignite
all these potentials of love.... In this mood his mind reverted to that