The straw that broke the camel's back was added to the burden of the beast next morning. The final word came from General Oku, through a Guardsman, that the Russians were in flight, that there would probably be no decisive battle for some time and that if there should be, we were to be allowed no closer than four miles from the firing-line. Well, you cannot see, that far away, how men behave when they fight, are wounded, and die--and as all battles look alike at a long distance, there was nothing for some of us to do but go home. So, on a bright sunny morning, Richard Harding Davis, Melton Prior, the wild Irishman, and I sat alone in the last dirty compound, with the opening guns of Liao-Yang booming in the distance. I had sold Fuji to Guy Scull, and I wondered at the nerve of the man, for the price, though small, was big for Fuji. I pulled that vicious stallion's wayward forelock with malicious affection several times, and watched Scull curvet out on him to a more dangerous fate than any danger that war could hang over him. Away we went, then, Davis, Prior, and the Irishman on horseback--what became of his bicycle, I don't know to this day--on the backward trail of the war-dragon--for home. We went back through Haicheng, and spent a few hours in the same deserted compound that we had left only a few days before. Its silence was eloquent of the clash and clatter and storm of our ten days' imprisonment there. There we went to see General Fukushima, who with great alacrity gave us a pass back to Japan. He could not understand why all of us would have preferred to be at Port Arthur. It mystified him a good deal. "General," said Dean Prior, "you promised me that I should go to Port Arthur." The General laughed. "I tried to get you to stay for the third column," he said, and Prior was silent, whether from conviction or disgust, I don't know. He wanted us to take a roundabout way to Newchwang, so that we would be always under Japanese protection. There were Chinese bandits, he said, along the short cut that we wanted to take, and there had been many murders and robberies along that road. Just the same, we took that road. So away we went, with carts, coolies, interpreters, and servants--they in the road and I stepping the ties of the Siberian Railway. One hundred yards ahead I saw two Japanese soldiers coming toward me on the track. When they saw me--they mistook me for a Russian, I suppose--they jumped from the track and ran back along the edge of a cornfield--disappearing every now and then. I was a little nervous, for I thought they might take a pot shot at me from a covert somewhere, but they were only dashing back to announce my coming to a squad of soldiers, and as I passed them on the track the major in command grinned slightly when he answered my salute.