Day broke with the wind lulled, and the old craft riding monster seas, her poles still to the sky. The daylight sail brought him to Yuenchen; from whence he made his way northward by land to Pingyang. This town was but an hour’s saddle to the east of the railroad and telegraph at Koupangtze--twenty miles west of the junction of the Taitse and the Liao river, and fifty miles west of Liaoyang. Here he established headquarters completely out of the white man’s world, rested and wrote mail stories for several weeks. Toward the end of July, he set out on a ten days’ saddle trip toward Liaoyang, with the idea of becoming familiar with the topography of the country, in preparation for the battle, already in sight. It was on this trip that he was hailed one afternoon by an American, named Butzel. This young man was sitting on the aft-gunnel of a river-junk, rolling a cigarette, when Routledge turned his horse upon the Taitse river-road, four or five miles to the east of the Liao. Routledge would have avoided the meeting had he been given a chance, but Butzel gaily ordered his Chinese to put ashore. The voice was that of a man from the Middle States--and Routledge filled with yearning to take a white hand. His only friend since he had left Rawder in India was Consul Milner at Wangcheng. Butzel had journeyed thus deep into the elder world--as natural an explorer as ever left behind his nerves and his saving portion of fear. He hadn’t any particular credentials, he said, and hadn’t played the newspaper game very strongly up to now. The Japanese had refused to permit him to go out with any of the armies; and he had tried to get into Port Arthur with a junk, but Togo had driven him off. He had very little money, and was tackling China to get to the Russian lines. It was his idea for the Russians to capture him, and, incidentally, to show him how they could defend Liaoyang. In a word, he was eluding Japan, bluffing his way through the interior of China, and about to enforce certain hospitality from the Russians. A great soul--in this little man, Butzel. Routledge delighted in him, but feared for his life. He himself was playing a similar lone-hand, but he carried Red-beard insignia, purchased at a big price; and when he had ventured into a river or sea-junk, he had taken pains to arrange that his receipt for a certain extortion was hung high on the foremast. Thus was he ever approved by the fascinating brotherhood of junk pirates. These were details entirely above the Butzel purse and inclination. The two men parted in fine spirit after an hour, the adventurer urging his Chinese up the Taitse toward the Russian lines. He was not so poor as he had been, and he yelled back joyously to Routledge that there wasn’t enough trails in this little piker of a planet to keep them from meeting again.