Bisbee daily review., 1917-05-27

ic her, offering to take her in his arms but she shook her head with little smile.
 "Not here" she begged. mot here, Don dear-while there's moonlight in .he patioI"
 Catching his hand she drew him with her through the doorway. !. The patio was very still and peace tul and deserted. The moonlight sil- vered it exquisitely. Its air was sweet with the scent of flowers. In the shadow of the old well in its center, Patria released Donald's hand. and turned to him, lifting up her face to
 Perhaps for the last time {.
 How she found 1t possible to let aim go, in the end, she never understood. With a sense of the unreality of it ell she watched his soldierly figure, in its khaki field uniform, stride away through the chiaroscuro of milk-white moonlight and inky shadow, till he disappeared in the passageway lead ing to the front of the house.
 And for a long time after he had gone she stood clasping the hands upon which his parting kisses had been pressed, and staring at the spot where she had last seen him.
 It seemed so hideously wrong that these things could be, that this world so beautiful could be made the slaugh- ter-pen of embattled humanity. She thought of France, the land she knew and loved so well; her last night in France had been a summers night, moonsmitten and warm and sweet even as this night. She had sailed for New York the next day; and a week later the great war had broken out. And now ali northern France was the theater of horrors unspeak- able.
 And tomorrow would see the incep- ton of an effort to render her own United States a counterpart of
 The most she could hope for was that the preparations she had made would check temporarily the invading forces, give the country time to real ize its peril and arm against it. For the invasion, once launched, would never be stayed but by overwhelming force. If checked where the Cham ming property met the border, it would only recoil to strike a new and more affao+;va hlou Evan aSSunino tho i'm. possible-that the Charming ranch should prove an impregnable obstacle in its path-it would need only to sweep round it in order to reach a peaceful and defenseless land and blacken it with the infamy of war, turn it into a place of death and terror and torment and hideous waste, make it sister to Belgium.
 And all because purblind people refused to see that the one way to stave of the sin of war was to mako the country so strong for defense that no invader would ever dare set foot across its borders.
 Slowly the girl ascended to her bed chamber.
 Its windows overlooked the south; she stood in one of them for a long time staring incredulously at the mysterious distances that lay beyond the boundary line between the two countries, the shadowed enigma of Mexico that rested so quietly there in the face of the moon. C
 Somewhere out there. somewhere between the border and those serrated mountains that walled in the southern horizon, thousands upon thousands of men, armed and equipped. were marching northward; troops of caval- ry were marching with them: trains of ammunition, companies of artil- lery. machine-gun corps, all the di- visions of modern military service, were astir, under the cloak of the night.
 Her imagination conceived that army of invasion in the guise of great serpent crawling through the shadows to strike at the heart of sleeping giant, a loathy, deadly, vicious thing that squirmed foully upon its way to do a deed of inexcus- able treachery and cruelty. ..
 The vision of that great serpent haunted all her dreams. She slept i'll, fitfully. Between maps she lay awake, staring wide-eyed into the darkness. every sense alert, straining to hear any sound that might be the over- ture to tomorrow's tragedy, fancy ing that she heard the confused but ,rythmic shuttle of those thousands of marching feet.
 Towards dawn she fell into a pro found and dreamless slumber of ex- haustion, from which she was awak- ened in broad daylight by the sound of distant firing.
 Leaping from her bed she seized binoculars and ran to the window.
 But the glasses showed her nothing at first. The sounds of firing persist ed-great thudding detonations ac- companied by the screaming of shrap- nel in the air and shattering explo- sions as the shells found their billets. But nothing in the face of the land beyond the border revealed the source of the firing or betrayed the fact that