When the Military Revolutionary Tribunal began its sittings, more than a hundred speculators were waiting to be put on trial. Peters told me that one day he was riding on a street-car, when the man sitting beside him engaged him in conversation. He offered to sell him twelve hundred bags of flour at two hundred and fifty rubles each, six thousand pounds of sugar, and some butter. Peters got him to write down his name and address, and within the hour he had been arrested and his supplies had been seized. One large consignment of flour was found hidden beneath the birch-wood logs in a barge on the Moika Canal supposed to contain nothing but wood. Despite all efforts to unearth the offenders, a few men waxed hideously rich upon the hunger of the many. All provocation notwithstanding, the guillotine remained simply a name. Wherever the death penalty was inflicted, it was done by mobs having no official sanction--by mobs aroused to an uncontrolled fury, and momentarily conscious of no other passion than that of reprisal. Considering the unsettled condition of government, such instances of violence were not so frequent as to change the character of the Revolution into that of a Reign of Terror. CHAPTER XVII THE GREAT GRAY WOLF The great gray wolf has always been howling at the Russian door. When revolution was still only a vague dream of the future, an American traveler, finding his way into a peasant’s hut in a remote Siberian village, discovered an American flour-sack hanging beside the ikon on the wall. The peasant’s wife pointed to it, and with tears in her eyes explained that it was her most treasured possession. It came in the midst of the great famine, and brought the wheat that saved her babies’ lives. The March Revolution began with cries of “Bread! Bread! Give us bread!” Vera, who took her place in the bread line at three o’clock in the morning, saw the wolf skulking in the shadowy dawn. Ivan, who went without his lunch because, even at the cheap working-man’s restaurant in the Vyborg district, he must pay three rubles fifty for an insufficient meal, hears him growling. From February to February, the wolf howled; yet somehow each succeeding group of Russian administrators managed to keep him at bay. Always next week he was coming; but, somehow, miracles do happen in Russia, and he never quite arrived. It was not until he made an alliance with the human enemy of Russia that he finally broke through and brought death to the hungry people. Three days after the Bolshevik Revolution, a fatherly American official advised me to buy some sardines and retire for the next two weeks to the home of a woman friend. “The people will be dying of starvation on the streets within a week,” he said, “and there won’t be any _izvostchiks_ to carry you around, because the horses will all starve to death.”