XXVI FAREWELL THE morning was cold and foggy. Through the gray and frozen haze came the sounds of voices, the creaking of boots, the jangle of a distant bell from the horses of a troika—a ghostly world filled with ghostly shapes, hidden, yet full of unseen life. It was just such a morning as that one in the past when Peter Petrovitch waited for the Czar’s mail, and the column of unfortunates went clanking out into the wilderness to cut wood under a guard of Cossack soldiers. And he who had been Peter Petrovitch sat this morning by the window of his room in the Dauria Hotel and gazed out over the world of floating mists—Lieutenant Peter Gordon of the United States Army. In the hall, outside his door, were two tall Cossack soldiers with their rifles, on guard. A week had passed since the killing of the Ataman Zorogoff and the death of Kirsakoff. There had been a mutiny and an attempt by partisans of Zorogoff to kill Shimilin, the new Ataman. But the Cossacks were behind Shimilin, and the Mongols and other bandits who had stood with Zorogoff found their power broken, their intrigues betrayed and their leaders dead after firing squads. The survivors fled up and down the railroad. The régime of Zorogoff was at an end, with its looting, its terrorism, its mailed fist which demanded tribute in exchange for protection. The body of Zorogoff was not buried in Chita. The second day after his death, there appeared in the city, from down Urga way, a lama from Outer Mongolia with frosty whiskers, a pinnacle cap and a greatcoat of fine fur with sleeves which reached to the ground. He came with a retinue mounted on camels, and the leading man held aloft a small purple banner which caused many men to submit their necks when they saw it pass. For somewhere down in the mountains to the south in the khanates of the Kalkas tribes, there was a Prince, and when he spoke, it was an order—an order to be obeyed. And this lama of grave face and the tall cap summoned the Ataman Shimilin and bartered for the body of Zorogoff, who was half Mongol by blood, and that half of interest to the holy men of Forbidden Tibet. Shimilin, being wise in such things, knew how much he could ask to the ultimate jewel—and got it. And as the lama traded with Shimilin, there were hints of many more men from Mongolia lurking outside the city, hidden by the fog. A line of tiny fires gleamed at the edge of the plain, the Cossack outposts heard the grunting of baggage camels, and the murmur of countless voices drifted in through the fog. So Zorogoff’s body was slung up between the humps of a Bactrian camel, and the animal went swaying off through the mist, with Zorogoff’s head nodding at the ground of ancient Tartary in his last farewell.