“——in those get-away trains from Moscow the poor devils were even hanging to the locomotives—like flies—some standing on the red-hot piston boxes, gripping the cow-catchers. They slammed us into a freight car and locked us in—pitch dark!—men and women, Lord it didn’t make any difference who or what we were!—two hundred and twenty-one of us slammed in a _tepluska_, crammed so tightly we couldn’t raise our hands to our shoulders—twenty-four hours of it—agony just standing up, and when we couldn’t stand up any longer we just sagged on those about us—they took out seventy-eight corpses when they finally unlocked the door and let us out—rode with a dead woman pushed so hard into my right side her cold body hurt my ribs—she was a well-dressed woman too; her fur boa kept tickling my ear—and the typhus down there! What do you hear from the Red Cross? Any trains come out this way?” “Doc Seaver and Cleeve are headed this way with a train. The Consulate expects them some time the last of next week.” Nathan leaned forward with his face in his hands. “Thirty million dead in Russia since the bust started—think of it, fellows—thirty million! That’s an awful mass of dead bodies.” “Yes,” said the Scranton man tersely. And the railroad man observed, “I’m natcherly a peaceable yap. But for once, if they’d lynch that dam’ Kaiser, believe me, I’d pull on the rope!” “Amen!” said the small man who had not spoken. “I wonder what the chances are for getting transportation through to Vladivostok? Lord, I’ve got to get through! Those poor devils off there at ‘Cold-belly’ as we called it, are dying like flies, just for bandages and disinfectant.” “Better go over to the Consulate in the morning and ask Thompson. He’ll know. There’s a he-man.” This from the engineer. “They run a string of ‘empties’ through to Harbin for supplies about once a week,” added the chap from Scranton. “There’s a consular courier named Roach going out when the next one starts. Maybe you could kick in with him.” IV Hartshorn, the Scranton man, offered Nat the upper bunk in the caboose car that night. And Nathan crawled in between blankets for the first time in weeks. It was very easy to think, lying awake there in the dark. But Nathan did not want to think. He wanted to forget—forget quickly. Yet he did think. One great, vital fact stood out white-hot above all other facts in his consciousness—_he was alive!_ He wasn’t out of the mêlée yet. But to date he was alive! A year had passed—gone like a terrific nightmare. And he was alive. Alive, alive, alive! He couldn’t get over that stunning realization.