CHAPTER II
They were a weary, half-starved and travel-stained quartette when the Red Guards stopped them for the last time in Russia and passed them through, warning them that the White Guards would surely do murder if they caught them.
The next day the White Guards halted them, but finally passed them through, counselling them to keep out of the way of the Red Guards if they wished to escape being shot at sight.
In the neat, shiny, carefully scrubbed little city of Helsingfors they avoided the huns by some miracle––one of Brisson’s customary miracles––but another little company of Americans and English was halted and detained, and one harmless Yankee among them was arrested and packed off to a hun prison.
Also, a large and nervous party of fugitives of mixed nationalities and professions––consuls, chargés, attachés, and innocent, agitated citizens––was summarily grabbed and ordered into indefinite limbo.
But Brisson’s daily miracles continued to materialise, even in the land of the Finn. By train, by sleigh, by boat, his quartette floundered along toward safety, and finally emerged from the white hell of the Red people into the sub-arctic sun––Estridge with painfully scanty luggage, Palla Dumont with none at all, 19 Ilse Westgard carrying only her Cossack saddle-bags, and Brisson with his damning papers still sewed inside his clothes, and owing Estridge ten dollars for not getting murdered.
They all had become excellent comrades during those anxious days of hunger, fatigue and common peril, but they were also a little tired of one another, as becomes all friends when subjected to compulsory companionship for an unreasonable period.
And even when one is beginning to fall in love, one can become surfeited with the beloved under such circumstances.
Besides, Estridge’s budding sentiment for Ilse Westgard, and her wholesome and girlish inclination for him, suffered an early chill. For the poor child had acquired trench pets from the Cossacks, and had passed on a few to Estridge, with whom she had been constantly seated on the front seat.
Being the frankest thing in Russia, she told him with tears in her blue eyes; and they had a most horrid time of it before they came finally to a sanitary plant erected to attend to such matters.