VI
Nathan and his friend Wiley sailed into the Golden Horn Bay at Vladivostok on a drizzly morning, the first day of the following July. The steamer was the perky little Pensa of the Russian Volunteer Fleet.
Against a great arch of murky sky on the three hills to the northward lay the bizarre city—huge, gaunt, towering, ponderous, mosque-domed—Siberia!
To meet the Pensa and tie it up along the wharf with maximum clumsiness and confusion were a mob of men who resembled the foreigners below the railroad yards back home in Paris, who once had beer delivered to them regularly on Saturday afternoons and got into fights Sundays.
Nathan and his friend had come into a nation of them, the land of Whiskers, Vodka and “Nichevo!” which translated into plain United States means “I should worry!” He was in a khaki uniform and a military cap. On his sleeve was a flaming scarlet triangle.
“Dick,” he cried, as he stood with his companion in the lee of a deck-house to escape the rain, “there’s adventure!” Nat made a gesture at Vladivostok and what lay in its mystic hills behind.
“You said a mouthful!” returned Wiley. “And us for it!”
Nat left the ship and went down among the vile-smelling crowd on the wharf. The crowd enveloped himself and Wiley.
Enveloped them, I say.
For one solid year, in so far as his relatives and friends back home were concerned, Nathan Forge vanished from the face of the earth.