“Listen, old man; why don’t you dodge it by kicking into this thing with me? You can’t enlist out here; there’s only the Regulars down at Manila and they’re not taking volunteers. If you wait for the draft, it’ll mean going way back to Vermont, being sent to camp, maybe not getting into the scrap at all. You’re out here now, just a few hundred miles from real war. Enlist in the Red Triangle and come on through to Moscow with me. I’m going straight across Siberia. Man, it’s the chance of your life. We’ll be in the thick of it within a week.” “But I’ve got to wait for an answer to my cable first, Dick. That much is due my employers.” “If you really mean it, Nat, I’ll delay my departure so we can go up together.” Nathan really meant it. Wiley delayed his departure. V Far back in America and up in Vermont five weeks later, Ted Thorne called me on the telephone at the newspaper office. “Just got a long letter from Nathan, Bill!” he cried. “And what do you suppose that darned son-of-a-gun has gone to work and done? He not only found our goods and took ’em in charge, but he’s engineered a sale to the Japanese Government for twenty-two cents per garment more than we ever dreamed of getting from the Russians. And by the living Jehoshaphat, he’s got his money!” “That’s bully, Ted. I always thought Nat had the stuff in him, if he only had a chance. What’s he going to do now—come home?” “No, that’s why I called you up—thought you’d like to know. He wants to join the American Red Triangle and plunge into the heart of Russia.” “Well, you’re going to let him, aren’t you?” “Holy Moses! Do you think I’d try to stop him? But believe me, he’s going to have some job with us if he ever comes home!” VI Nathan and his friend Wiley sailed into the Golden Horn Bay at Vladivostok on a drizzly morning, the first day of the following July. The steamer was the perky little _Pensa_ of the Russian Volunteer Fleet. Against a great arch of murky sky on the three hills to the northward lay the bizarre city—huge, gaunt, towering, ponderous, mosque-domed—Siberia! To meet the _Pensa_ and tie it up along the wharf with maximum clumsiness and confusion were a mob of men who resembled the foreigners below the railroad yards back home in Paris, who once had beer delivered to them regularly on Saturday afternoons and got into fights Sundays. Nathan and his friend had come into a nation of them, the land of Whiskers, Vodka and “_Nichevo_!” which translated into plain United States means “I should worry!” He was in a khaki uniform and a military cap. On his sleeve was a flaming scarlet triangle. “Dick,” he cried, as he stood with his companion in the lee of a deck-house to escape the rain, “there’s adventure!” Nat made a gesture at Vladivostok and what lay in its mystic hills behind. “You said a mouthful!” returned Wiley. “And us for it!”