His words proved true. Poor Butzel rode back in state that afternoon, his head fallen against the tiller and a bullet hole in his breast. Even his clothing had been taken. The junk was empty except for the body. With a heavy heart, Routledge attended to the burial and marked the spot. That night he rode to Koupangtze, and, by paying the charges, succeeded in arranging for a brief message to be cabled to the _World-News_; also a telegram to the American consul at Shanghai. So much is merely a suggestion of the work that told for his paper that summer. For weeks at a time he was in the saddle, or junking it by sea and river. Except when driven to the telegraph, he avoided every port town and every main-travelled road. He was lean, light but prodigiously strong. A trencherman of ordinary valor would have dragged out a hateful existence of semi-starvation upon the rations that sufficed for Routledge; and none but a man in whom a giant’s strength was concentrated could have followed his travels. The old Manchurian trails burned under his ponies; and, queerly enough, he never ruined a mount. He had left Shanghai on the first of February, ill from confinement, the crowds, and his long sojourn in the great heat of India. The hard physical life at sea in the Liao gulf and afield in Manchuria, and, possibly more than anything, his life apart from the English, restored him to a health of the finest and toughest texture. China challenged him. He never could feel the tenderness of regard for the Yellow Empire that India inspired, but it held an almost equal fascination. China dwelt in a duller, more alien light to his eyes; the people were more complicated, less placable and lovable, than Hindus, but the same mysterious stillness, the same dust of ages, he found in both interiors; and in both peoples the same imperturbable patience and unfathomable capacity to suffer and be silent. Routledge moved in towns almost as unknown to the world as the Martian surfaces; learned enough of the confusion of tongues to procure necessities; supplied himself with documents, bearing the seals of certain dark fraternities, which appeared to pass him from place to place without harm: and, with a luck that balanced the handicap of an outcast, and an energy, mental and physical, utterly impossible to a man with peace in his heart, he pushed through, up to Liaoyang, an almost incredible season’s work.