Diplomats were inelegantly “beating it.” A kindly but futile Ambassador shook the snow of Petrograd from his galoshes and solemnly and laboriously vanished. Mixed bands of attachés, consular personnel, casuals, emissaries, newspaper men, and mission specialists scattered into unfeigned flight toward those several and distant sections of “God’s Country,” divided among civilised nations and lying far away somewhere in the outer sunshine.
Sometimes White Guards caught these fugitives; sometimes Red Guards; and sometimes the hun nabbed them on the general hunnish principle that whatever is running away is fair game for a pot shot.
Even the American Red Cross was “suspect”–treachery being alleged in its relations with Roumania; and hun and Bolshevik became very troublesome–so troublesome, in fact, that Estridge, for example, was having an impossible time of it, arrested every few days, wriggling out of it, only to be collared again and detained.
Sometimes they questioned him concerning gun-running into Roumania; sometimes in regard to his part in conducting the American girl, Miss Dumont, to the convent where the imperial family had been detained.
That the de facto government had requested him to undertake this mission and to employ an American Red Cross ambulance in the affair seemed to make no difference.
He continued to be dogged, spied on, arrested, detained, badgered, until one evening, leaving the Smolny, he encountered an American–a slim, short man who smiled amiably upon him through his glasses, removed a cigar from his lips, and asked Estridge what was the nature of his evident and visible trouble.
So they walked back to the hotel together and settled on a course of action during the long walk. What this friend in need did and how he did it, Estridge never learned; but that same evening he was instructed to pack up, take a train, and descend at a certain station a few hours later.
Estridge followed instructions, encountered no interference, got off at the station designated, and waited there all day, drinking boiling tea.
Toward evening a train from Petrograd stopped at the station, and from the open door of a compartment Estridge saw his chance acquaintance of the previous day making signs to him to get aboard.
Nobody interfered. They had a long, cold, unpleasant night journey, wedged in between two soldiers wearing arm-bands, who glowered at a Russian general officer opposite, and continued to mutter to each other about imperialists, bourgeoisie, and cadets.
At every stop they were inspected by lantern light, their papers examined, and sometimes their luggage opened. But these examinations seemed to be perfunctory, and nobody was detained.
In the grey of morning the train stopped and some soldiers with red arm-bands looked in and insulted the general officer, but offered no violence. The officer gave them a stony glance and closed his cold, puffy eyes in disdain. He was blond and looked like a German.
At the next stop Estridge received a careless nod from his chance acquaintance, gathered up his luggage and descended to the frosty platform.
Nobody bothered to open their bags; their papers were merely glanced at. They had some steaming tea and some sour bread together.
A little later a large sleigh drove up behind the station; their light baggage was stowed aboard, they climbed in under the furs.
“Now,” remarked his calm companion to Estridge, “we’re all right if the Reds, the Whites and the boches don’t shoot us up.”
“What are the chances?” inquired Estridge.
“Excellent, excellent,” said his companion cheerily, “I should say we have about one chance in ten to get out of this alive. I’ll take either end–ten to one we don’t get out–ten to two we’re shot up and not killed–ten to three we are arrested but not killed–one to ten we pull through with whole skins.”
Estridge smiled. They remained silent, probably preoccupied with the hazards of their respective fortunes. It grew colder toward noon.
The young man seated beside Estridge in the sleigh smoked continually.
He was attached to one of the American missions sent into Russia by an optimistic administration–a mission, as a whole, foredoomed to political failure.
In every detail, too, it had already failed, excepting only in that particular part played by this young man, whose name was Brisson.
He, however, had gone about his occult business in a most amazing manner–the manner of a Yankee who knows what he wants and what his country ought to want if it knew enough to know it wanted it.
He was the last American to leave Petrograd: he had taken his time; he left only when he was quite ready to leave.
And this was the man, now seated beside Estridge, who had coolly and cleverly taken his sporting chance in remaining till the eleventh hour and the fifty-ninth minute in the service of his country. Then, as the twelfth hour began to strike, he bluffed his way through.
During the first two or three days of sleigh travel, Brisson learned all he desired to know about Estridge, and Estridge learned almost nothing about Brisson except that he possessed a most unholy genius for wriggling out of trouble.
Nothing, nobody, seemed able to block this young man’s progress. He bluffed his way through White Guards and Red; he squirmed affably out of the clutches of wandering Cossacks; he jollied officials of all shades of political opinion; but he always continued his journey from one étape to the next. Also, he was continually lighting one large cigar after another. Buttoned snugly into his New York-made arctic clothing, and far more comfortable at thirty below zero than was Estridge in Russian costume, he smoked comfortably in the teeth of the icy gale or conversed soundly on any topic chosen. And the range was wide.
But about himself and his mission in Russia he never conversed except to remark, once, that he could buy better Russian clothing in New York than in Petrograd.
Indeed, his only concession to the customs of the country was in the fur cap he wore. But it was the galoshes of Manhattan that saved his feet from freezing. He had two pair and gave one to Estridge.
During several hundreds of miles in sleighs, Brisson’s constant regret was the absence of ferocious wolves. He desired to enjoy the whole show as depicted by the geographies. He complained to Estridge quite seriously concerning the lack of enterprise among the wolves.
But there seemed to be no wolves in Russia sufficiently polite to oblige him; so he comforted himself by patting his stomach where, sewed inside his outer underclothing, reposed documents destined to electrify the civilised world with proof infernal of the treachery of those three men who belong in history and in hell to the fraternity which includes Benedict Arnold and Judas.
One late afternoon, while smoking his large cigar and hopefully inspecting the neighbouring forest for wolves, this able young man beheld a sotnia of Ural Cossacks galloping across the snow toward the flying sleigh, where he and Estridge sat so snugly ensconced.
There was, of course, only one thing to do, and that was to halt. Kaledines had blown his brains out, but his riders rode as swiftly as ever. So the sleigh stopped.
And now these matchless horsemen of the Wild Division came galloping up around the sleigh. Brilliant little slanting eyes glittered under shaggy head-gear; broad, thick-lipped mouths split into grins at sight of the two little American flags fluttering so gaily on the sleigh.
Then two booted and furred riders climbed out of their saddles, and, under their sheepskin caps, Brisson saw the delicate features of two young women, one a big, superb, blue-eyed girl; the other slim, dark-eyed, and ivory-pale.
The latter said in English: “Could you help us? We saw the flags on your sleigh. We are trying to leave the country. I am American. My name is Palla Dumont. My friend is Swedish and her name is Ilse Westgard.”
“Get