At the officers’ mess that evening Gordon overheard a conversation in which the necessity of sending an Intelligence officer to Irkutsk was discussed. And Gordon was on the alert at once. He said nothing, but he watched the Chief of Intelligence up at the head of the table and followed him from the mess-room to his desk upstairs. “Sir,” began Gordon, “I understand that an officer will be sent up toward Lake Baikal—Irkutsk—to look into the situation there.” The colonel looked at Gordon wonderingly. It struck the chief that this new arrival was dipping into things rather hastily. There was enough to learn around Vladivostok for a stranger, thought the colonel. “Yes, it has been mentioned,” said the colonel. “We need an observing officer up there. That country is controlled now by Zorogoff, the Ataman of the Cossacks, and we don’t know any too much about Zorogoff. What do you know about him?” “Nothing, sir. But I would like to—see the country.” “You ought to have a little more time to get acquainted with the situation here before you go into the interior. The Baikal region is a long way from here.” “Yes, sir,” said Gordon. “I don’t want to appear too confident of my own abilities, but it strikes me, sir, that the back country explains what is going on here, rather than what you see here explains the country.” The colonel smiled. “You like to travel, young man.” “Yes, sir. Frankly, I’d like to see all I can.” “Have you been assigned to any duty here yet?” “No, sir. Perhaps when I got back from the Baikal region I’d be more valuable—have a better understanding of the situation as a whole.” “I’ll think it over,” said the colonel, and reached for his ringing telephone. And the colonel evidently did think it over, for within an hour Lieutenant Gordon was handed his orders to leave at once for Irkutsk in a train carrying Czech soldiers and supplies toward Omsk and that place known so vaguely as “the front.” And an American soldier who was a native of Russia was detailed to accompany Lieutenant Gordon as an orderly and interpreter. Gordon did not delay. He went at once to the Trans-Siberian station to find his train, leaving the Russian orderly to bring on baggage and bedding-roll. Gordon found the station filled to overflowing with refugees from the interior—sick and well, women and children, lame and blind, hungry and unclean. They lay on the floors, cooking and eating, begging and filching food wherever they could find it. They were like a dirty froth thrown up on a beach after a tidal wave, a pitiful human wreckage fighting for existence after having survived a typhoon which had destroyed a nation. The sights, the smells, the misery were appalling. It almost made Gordon ill. He longed to find some one person who could be blamed for it. A wrath began to grow in his soul.