The three armies, having overcome every obstacle, were in touch before Liaoyang. They formed a huge horse-shoe, with its ends resting on the Taitse River, on the south bank of which stood Liaoyang. The Russians formed an inner horse-shoe in a similar position. On each side were over two hundred thousand men, nearly half a million human beings, all animated with the one desire to kill! On the morning of August 30th, at the first grey of dawn a puff of white broke upward from the Japanese lines and a shell, filled with shrapnel, flew screaming across the peaceful plain--a dread messenger to announce the beginning of the longest and greatest battle the world had ever known. One battery after another opened fire, throughout the entire front of nearly forty miles. Under cover of the artillery attack the Russians charged furiously, often driving the Japanese before them at the point of the bayonet; but no sooner was a company or a regiment annihilated than another took its place, and was hurled against the foe. Positions were taken and retaken. The carnage was terrible. Never in the world's history had such enormous masses of men thrown their lives away with utter abandon. On each side a thousand cannon thundered from morning till night. At noon of the second day a slow rain began to fall, transforming the plain into a quagmire, crossed and recrossed by endless trains of men, a part charging toward the front with wild shouts of defiance, a part halting, crawling, limping, or lying in carts, seeking the hospitals, where their ghastly wounds could be treated. When the second night fell it was reported in every capital in both hemispheres that after two days of desperate fighting Kouropatkin had gained a decided advantage. Fred Larkin was in his element. Dashing to and fro on a shaggy little Siberian pony, he gathered news as if by instinct. His experience in the Spanish-American War served him in good stead, and he not only knew what deductions to draw from certain movements on both sides, but what information was most desired by his paper and the great reading public at home. In Boston the crowds in lower Washington Street read on the bulletin boards the despatches he dashed off in his note-book and sent from the Liaoyang telegraph office after they had been duly censored. Late in the afternoon on the second day of the battle he was making his way back to the town across the miry fields south of Liaoyang. The shaggy pony shook his mane and snorted as the rain fell, but was too tired to trot. "Tough day, pony," said Fred, who himself was so used up with his exertions that he could hardly sit upright in the saddle. "Never mind, old boy. In half an hour you will be in your stable, munching oats. You shall have an extra good supper for the hard work you've--hallo! be careful!"