only one soldier in the rear by the door escaped, and that merely to
fall into the hands of a workman in the courtyard who strangled him.
The fight had begun. The soldiers called on their comrades for help.
The Reds were strung along in the ditch at the side of the road, three
hundred paces from the house, returning the fire of the surrounding
Tartars. Several soldiers ran to the house to help their comrades but
this time we heard the regular volley of the workmen of our host. They
fired as though in a manoeuvre calmly and accurately. Five Red soldiers
lay on the road, while the rest now kept to their ditch. Before long we
discovered that they began crouching and crawling out toward the end of
the ditch nearest the wood where they had left their horses. The sounds
of shots became more and more distant and soon we saw fifty or sixty
Tartars pursuing the Reds across the meadow.

Two days we rested here on the Seybi. The workmen of our host, eight in
number, turned out to be officers hiding from the Bolsheviks. They asked
permission to go on with us, to which we agreed.

When my friend and I continued our trip we had a guard of eight armed
officers and three horses with packs. We crossed a beautiful valley
between the Rivers Seybi and Ut. Everywhere we saw splendid grazing
lands with numerous herds upon them, but in two or three houses along
the road we did not find anyone living. All had hidden away in fear
after hearing the sounds of the fight with the Reds. The following day
we went up over the high chain of mountains called Daban and, traversing
a great area of burned timber where our trail lay among the fallen
trees, we began to descend into a valley hidden from us by the
intervening foothills. There behind these hills flowed the Little
Yenisei, the last large river before reaching Mongolia proper. About ten
kilometers from the river we spied a column of smoke rising up out of