“Dam’ me, but she was a stunning woman, a ripping woman—and out after——”
She crashed the door shut and bolted it against the pestilence.... Had the powers of evil this night consummated a heinous mockery to test her soul, because her soul was strong?... In terror and agony, she knelt by the open window. The Wall was still there, sleeping in the moonlight—the biggest man-made thing in the world, and the quietest. It steadied her, and the stuff of martyrs came back.
The man in charge of the cable-office in Shanhaikwan told her the next morning that a correspondent who signed himself “A. V. Weed” had brought in a long message for New York, just after the Yalu battle, but had not tarried even a night in town. “A tall, haggard stranger with a low voice,” the man described him.... There was little more to be learned, but this was life to her, and the first tangible word, that he lived, since her father’s death. Noreen spent the day walking alone on the beaches and through the foreign concession.
From the top of the Wall in the afternoon, she stared down at the little walled city which grew out of the great masonry. There she could see a bit of living China—all its drones and workers and sections and galleries, as in a glass bee-hive. Big thoughts took the breath from her. Europe seemed young and tawdry beside this. She picked up one of the loose stones—touched the hem of the Wall’s garment, as it were—and again she had but to close her eyes and look back centuries into the youth of time, when the Wall was building, to see the Mongols swarming like ants over the raw, half-done thing.... There was a little French garrison in the town; and the Sikh infantry, at target-practice on the beach, brought India back. The day was not without fascination to her relieved mind.
The evening train from Peking brought a white man who added to the stability of Shanhaikwan—Talliaferro of the Commonwealth. The dry little man was greatly disturbed in heart. He had deliberately given up his place with Oku’s second army, choosing to miss the smoky back-thresh of future actions in the field, in order to get what he could out on the free cable. Peter Pellen’s “Excalibur,” credited with acumen, flying and submarine, had broken under the Japanese pressure.
“Have you seen or heard of Mr. Routledge?” she whispered at dinner.
“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——”