The car bumped away up the street with a group of officers. Gordon was silent, while the others chattered. The water-front streets were muddy and unpaved. Squalid buildings with crude signs in Russian announced that within many of the buildings might be had tea and food and liquors. Pigs were loose in the streets, scratching themselves amiably on house-corners. Old Russian songs were being bawled from lusty throats of roisterers inside the _kabaks_. Russians wandered about aimlessly, staring at all the strange things which had come to Siberia—the American army mules, the motor cycles whizzing about among the pigs and wagons, and the honking car with the party of American officers. Everybody seemed on holiday but the Chinese. They trotted about with burdens on their backs, working like ants, apparently unaware that freedom had come to Russia and that no one need work. Military motors were shooting about in all directions, dilapidated trolley cars packed with humanity creaked over bad rails, droshkies careened crazily among the burden-bearing Chinese coolies. The car carrying Gordon rolled into the Svetlanskaya, the main street of Vladivostok, and began to climb one of the many hills. There was a great stream of confused traffic, and mixed in it were strange men in uniforms—black Annamites in French blue, yellow Japanese in buff, bronzed Czechs in brown, Cossacks in natural gray; Canadians in brown short coats, and Americans in snuff-colored khaki. On them all were the musty odors and the ancient dust of Asia. The city was a place of swarming tangles of people—beggars and princes, vagabonds and viceroys, generals and stragglers, friends and enemies, conquerors and conquered, all whirling about in mad antics and hurrying as if they expected the end of the world to come with sundown. Refugees from the interior carrying their few poor possessions in old blankets mingled with nobles of the old régime who still tried to keep up a semblance of importance; poor women in rags with frightened red eyes and crying children clustered about them stood on the curbs and stared at foreign-looking ladies lolling in carriages and clad in suspicious grandeur. The human parasites had gathered from all the ports of the Orient to this land where people were starving in the streets. Adventurers seeking command and harpies hoping to get their fingers into stolen jewels, pushed aside blind beggars to get into the cafés.