So critical was the outlook that another American detachment came the one hundred and fifty miles from Archangel, ten days' journey in the darkness and the cold. But, more important to Pinega than these Christmas reinforcements, was Joel R. Moore, who came with them, wearing the shoulder straps of an infantry captain for the time in being, but whose life profession was that of college instruction, as skilled in applied humanity as the classical Humanities, and possessed of tact and understanding and sympathy, and that indefinable gift of leadership. He organized the Russians for their own defense in this bloody internecine fight, and shamed their leaders to vivid consciousness of dreadful responsibility to their pitifully dependent people. In February, a vicious and prolonged attack in conjunction with the great Vaga offensive was made on Pinega, but the defense was well held, and when the situation looked most strained, and the fall of the city almost sure, the Bolsheviks slackened and fell back without overt cause or reason for relenting in their fierce assault, just as they did on the Vaga when the life of the Expedition was the stake. No soldier who was in it will ever forget that mid-winter march from Archangel in gray days and cold, when the spruce trees cracked in the frost with the report of rifle shots; when the wind, a blearing blast, swept down and piled great billowy swells on the whitened trail, covered men head and foot like powdered, clownish figures, plastered their eyelids and nostrils grotesquely white with hoary frost, and flicked snow particles under headgear where they stung with the sting of pelting sand; other days when oppressive calm would stifle the air with the mystery of eternal stillness, jarringly profaned by the crunch of heavy, marching feet, the shambling of the little convoy ponies; and the tenacious trail would lower to great sheeted space, that swelled to the summit of long hills where village roofs were etched in steel on a burnished background, where the ineffectual sun strove vainly to thrust back imprisoning cloud curtains, slate hued and black. Sometimes the way brought the soldiers through the phantom glade of a fairy forest, where delicately spun aigrettes and fragile, filmy plumes held by doubtful tenure on a limb would wave precariously in the wind and be lost in shapeless, irretrievable chaos of crumpled snow, but tens of thousands of others would fill their places, and inconceivable, bizarre festoons would spring to magic life, countless balloons and garlands and wreaths, and massive, ponderous globes, all shaped by the infinite artistry of the frost in an endless profusion of enchanting wonderment.