And in all those days, Dugan never did make up his mind about "Stearns"' real origin; he was a spy, devoted but mediocre; he was a Communist; he was not an American. Only this much was certain.
When the fresh Communist troops arrived, the streets were full of shooting. The soldiers celebrated by getting drunk and firing off their rifles. The Communist Chinese behaved fairly well, but Koreans and Mongols among them were high-spirited.
In the second evening of their arrival, Dugan changed roles slightly — allowing himself a better command of Chinese than he had showed till then. He told of the horrors of Mukden under "American" occupation. The local people had been taught that Chiang K'ai-shek and the American President were almost identical fiends; they were in no position to doubt him.
At the psychological moment, Dugan led a raging, half-drunk lynching party against the police station. When the Chinese-Korean-Mongol mob caught the "American Fascist," the nameless spy who had been known as Stearns, the victim screamed out loud in Russian; but he was soon dead and silent.
Sarzhant Byelov came out and stopped the rioters; they turned ugly against him, too; but Wu and the other leaders pacified them. In the investigation which the Communist bosses conducted, they found that Andreanov was one of the ringleaders, but not necessarily the ringleader; and when they looked for him, they found him right out front, drunk in the gutter.
Dugan woke the next morning to find that he had been made Byelov's prisoner. Relations between the two of them were less cordial for a while but soon got back to normal. Dugan was not in a hurry. He had cleared an obstacle out of his way; he had obliterated a counter-spy; he had made Russians and Chinese a little more suspicious of each other; he was now sure to be deported.
And he was.
At the end of his third week at the local Chinese Communist headquarters, a Russian truck pulled up in front of the station. A new Russian sarzhant and a new "American flyer," this time dressed as a second lieutenant, got out; they did not speak to him or to Byelov. An officer in civilian clothes made all arrangements and put Dugan and Byelov in the truck. The old Studebaker roared through its broken and unrepaired muffler, and off they went toward the frontier.
Dugan was now a Soviet citizen and a Soviet prisoner. They were dragging him in the direction of Atomsk by main force. Captain "Stearns" was unmistakably buried, as anonymous in death as he had been in life. What more could Dugan ask?
He asked for it: cigarettes and vodka. He got no vodka but they gave him cigarettes and hot tea. The truck rolled on and when night came, with the truck stopping in a Chinese courtyard, he and Byelov slept in the back together, making up crude beds with filthy Chinese quilts.