About mid-day they came to a dip in the hills where Ah-Sam decided to halt, take a meal, and feed his team. This done he remounted to his place, Bob sprang on to the tail of the cart, and the slow journey was resumed. But they had barely begun the ascent of the upward slope when from the left, across the snowy waste, a troop of horsemen were seen galloping rapidly towards them. The riders soon defined themselves by the bright yellow of their uniforms as a sotnia of Cossacks. Ah-Sam at first affected not to notice them, stolidly driving on; but turning his head at length in response to their loud shouts, he drew rein, muttered a warning to Bob and an order to run to the head of the team, and sprang from his perch in time to make half a dozen rapid kow-tows before the Cossacks reached him. He continued his obeisances as the captain of the troop roughly addressed him in Chinese, but suddenly stood erect and began to expostulate in voluble yet obsequious tones when, in response to an order, two of the Cossacks dismounted and approached the cart with drawn swords, evidently with the intention of cutting the traces. Bob, holding the head of one of the mules which was plunging excitedly, of course understood not a word of the colloquy; if he had known Chinese he would have heard the captain curtly inform Ah-Sam that the mules were required for the Russian service, and Ah-Sam’s protest that they were already engaged in that service. He had just delivered, he said, a load of millet and forage stuffs to the honourable contractor to the honourable governor of Antung, and was on his way back to a farm at Kuan-tien to fetch another load. If the honourable captain took his mules, he would be unable to fulfil his commission. The roads, as the honourable captain saw, were so bad that with his team, small enough as it was, he was already behind time. He needed more mules, not less; he had begged the honourable contractor to give him three more, but none were to be found. His strong and capable assistant had been taken away to work in the Russian trenches, and he had been forced to hire at the last moment a big, loutish, dumb fool of a Korean, who could do nothing but eat, and who at this moment, as the honourable captain saw, was an absolutely useless, incapable, soft-muscled— He was interrupted by a general hullabaloo among the mules, which, unused to the handling of a European, were kicking and plunging and threatening to involve the whole team in an inextricable tangle. Stretching his arm, Ah-Sam flicked two or three of the mules with his long whip, roundly abused Bob, and, apparently in ungovernable rage, struck him also with the lash, which cut through the wadding of his trousers and caused him to utter a smothered growl, at which the Cossacks laughed with enjoyment.