“No,” he replied. “In the field we never got a whisper from him. The Pan-Anglo man in Shanghai told me, however, that he thought Routledge was playing the Chinese end--that is, living just outside the war-zone and making sallies in, from time to time, when things are piping hot. The reason he thought Routledge was working this game was the fact that New York has sprung three or four great stories which London has missed entirely. It’s all a guess, Miss Cardinegh, but somebody is doing it, and it’s his kind of service--the perilous, hard-riding kind. Nobody but a man on the _Inside_ of Asia would attempt it. There was an American, named Butzel, shot by the Chinese on the Liao River ten days ago. He was not an accredited correspondent, as I understand it, but was using the war for a living. Butzel’s death was wired in from the interior somewhere, and they had it back from New York in Shanghai when I was there. Did you hear?” “No.” “It appears that Butzel planned to get into Liaoyang for the battle,” Talliaferro went on, “whether the Japanese liked it or not. About the place where the Taitse flows into the Liao, the river-pirates murdered him----” Talliaferro stopped, startled by the look in the face of the woman. Her eyes were wide, almost electric with suffering, her face colorless. The lamp-light heightened the effects; also her dress, which was of black entire. Talliaferro noted such things. He always remembered her hand that moment, as it was raised to check him, white, fragile, emotional. “What is it, Miss Cardinegh?” he asked quickly. “I was thinking,” she replied steadily, “that Mr. Routledge is there in all likelihood--‘playing the Chinese end,’ as you call it. I was thinking that he might not have heard that he is vindicated--that he might be murdered before he learned that my father had confessed.” She hurried away before the dinner was half through, and Talliaferro was left to dislike himself, for a short period, for bringing up the Butzel murder.... Noreen sat again by the window in her room. The story had frightened her, so that she felt the need of being alone to think. The dreadfulness of the night before did not return, however.... The moon rose high to find the Wall again--every part of it, winding in the mountains.... Was it not possible that Talliaferro was over-conscious of the dangers of the Chinese end? Routledge had been up there, possibly since the Yalu battle, and he had proved a master in these single-handed services of his.... She had heard of Talliaferro’s capacity to command the highest price, heard of him as an editorial dictator and of his fine grasp on international affairs, but her father had once remarked that the Excalibur “did not relish dangling his body in the dirty area between two firing lines.”... There was hope in her heart, and she slept.