“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.
He stumbled down the railroad yards in the growing dark, seeking the train among a labyrinth of box cars. Though he was already in his furs and his sheepskin-lined coat against the wolf of winter which was howling across the landscape, the wind from the bay chilled him to his bones.
Candles gleaming through the windows of an old fourth-class car drew him. He found soldiers within—Czechs cooking their supper of stew over crude heating stoves amid clouds of yellow sulphurous smoke from the awful Manchurian coal.
The interior of the car was so jammed with men that there seemed to be no more room. The shelves were full of soldiers, and the floor was littered with coal and wood and boxes and bundles. It was like a pen on wheels, that car. It was filthy, battered, and broken. But it belonged to the train leaving for the front, and Gordon was content.
Presently the orderly came, laden with baggage. He explained to the Czechs that the American officer was to travel in that car by order of the Czech commandant. The soldiers smiled and provided two shelves. And in a few minutes the train began to grind slowly away from Vladivostok, to carry Lieutenant Gordon and his orderly some two thousand versts away.
They reached Nikolsk-Ussurisk the next morning. An American captain came to the train. His orderly had been sent back to Vladivostok, ill. The captain was without an interpreter.
“Look here,” said Gordon. “You can’t go on here without an interpreter—and I’ll not need mine till I get to Irkutsk. You’ll have a new interpreter sent up to you by that time. I’m all right on this train—for a week or two. Send mine along to me when I telegraph where I am.”
“Well, that’s an idea!” said the captain. “A most pious idea! Perhaps I can send your man along after you in a couple of days. He can catch this train all right, on a passenger train.”