And by going back to Bira, I lost the trail of Red Sweater, for the last sight I had of him, was from that kitchen-car at Popperoffka. He was evidently trailing General Graves’s special train. X OVER THE AMUR RIVER ON HORSEBACK When I left Bira for Khabarovsk, I was without an interpreter, for my soldier had gone on to Khabarovsk from Popperoffka, ill. The train was so crowded that there was no room for me in any of the cars, and all I could do was load my heavy bedding-roll and grip on between the cars, and then stand outside with it. The trip took all day, and till two the next morning. The weather was too cold for comfort, despite my heavy sheepskin coat. But a provodnik insisted that I share his compartment. Except for a little Russian, our conversation was limited, but all through the day and night we entertained each other, exchanging English and Russian lessons. He claimed to be a Pole from Warsaw, spoke German, Polish and Russian, and his eagerness to learn English was pathetic. He asserted that his one ambition was to get to America, and said he had almost enough rubles to pay his passage, although it developed that he did not know the price of a ticket from Vladivostok to Japan, and thence to San Francisco. He probably had more than enough money to pay his passage, for the lowly provodnik absorbs much money and smuggles many commodities, from sugar to opium. And many provodniks are German or Bolshevist agents--they make an admirable system for “underground” lines of communication. The fact that I had to watch my baggage kept me from getting meals from the stations along the line. But the provodnik filled his tea-kettle with hot water, we brewed tea, and he came in with a monstrous loaf of bread and big consignment of reddish salmon-roe. I never intended to eat the latter stuff, for I had no gas-mask, but when my hospitable provodnik plastered an inch of the stuff on a slice of bread and handed it to me, I ate the eekrah to get the bread. I enjoyed it quite as much as the baked sheep’s eyes once served me by an Arab in the desert. We reached Khabarovsk at two in the morning, our passenger train coming into the yards in such fashion that some six freight trains were between us and the station, which is generally the case. As the freights were being shifted about continuously, it was impossible to attempt to go under them with my baggage, and when, after an hour’s wait, I got a porter, it appeared that we would spend the remainder of the night running round the tracks of the yard. For having gone a quarter of a mile to get round a line of freight cars on one track, another train on the next track would come rolling down between us and the station. It was nearly daylight when we got out of that moving labyrinth. And the single drosky-driver at the station, knowing that he had a monopoly on my business, for all the others had departed with incoming passengers, demanded sixty rubles to take me to the American post.