General Graves was making a tour of inspection. He visited our kitchen-car, with a dozen or more officers. He was puzzled because he had just visited a station where the commanding officer had not heard of my presence in that part of the country. He was very wroth because he had found some commanding officers away from their commands on hunting excursions, and as it turned out, one of these officers had talked to me on the up trip, and later left in command one of his subalterns who had recently joined from Vladivostok, and naturally could not know I was prowling about in that part of Siberia.
I preferred to leave General Graves puzzled as to ignorance at that place about me, for if I had made too full an explanation, the officer concerned, already in the bad graces of his Commanding General, might have been disciplined. And General Graves, travelling in a special train with right of way over everything, appeared to have no appreciation of the difficulty of travel on intermittent passenger trains. And some members of the personal staff, accustomed to travel in such special trains, persisted in regarding the trans-Siberian line as if it were part of, say, the New York Central system. Being a Commanding General has its disadvantages under such circumstances.
General Graves suggested that I go back to Bira. As I had lost considerable sleep and worn out several time-tables figuring out how I could go back to Bira, I was in hearty accord with the General’s wishes on the subject. And I eventually carried them out. And certain officers, fully aware of what had happened, told the General some time later that trains on the trans-Siberian line could not be trusted to make the time between different points which the time-tables promised.
And up to the time I left Siberia, those in the know generally greeted me at mess, with: “Go back to Bira,” which always gave us a good laugh—at my expense.
And by going back to Bira, I lost the trail of Red Sweater, for the last sight I had of him, was from that kitchen-car at Popperoffka. He was evidently trailing General Graves’s special train.
X
OVER THE AMUR RIVER ON HORSEBACK
When I left Bira for Khabarovsk, I was without an interpreter, for my soldier had gone on to Khabarovsk from Popperoffka, ill. The train was so crowded that there was no room for me in any of the cars, and all I could do was load my heavy bedding-roll and grip on between the cars, and then stand outside with it.
The trip took all day, and till two the next morning. The weather was too cold for comfort, despite my heavy sheepskin coat. But a provodnik insisted that I share his compartment.
Except for a little Russian, our conversation was limited, but all through the day and night we entertained each other, exchanging English and Russian lessons. He claimed to be a Pole from Warsaw, spoke German, Polish and Russian, and his eagerness to learn English was pathetic. He asserted that his one ambition was to get to America, and said he had almost enough rubles to pay his passage, although it developed that he did not know the price of a ticket from Vladivostok to Japan, and thence to San Francisco. He probably had more than enough money to pay his passage, for the lowly provodnik absorbs much money and smuggles many commodities, from sugar to opium. And many provodniks are German or Bolshevist agents—they make an admirable system for “underground” lines of communication.
The fact that I had to watch my baggage kept me from getting meals from the stations along the line. But the provodnik filled his tea-kettle with hot water, we brewed tea, and he came in with a monstrous loaf of bread and big consignment of reddish salmon-roe. I never intended to eat the latter stuff, for I had no gas-mask, but when my hospitable provodnik plastered an inch of the stuff on a slice of bread and handed it to me, I ate the eekrah to get the bread. I enjoyed it quite as much as the baked sheep’s eyes once served me by an Arab in the desert.