e pressing Colonel Kazagrandi very hard in the region of Lake
Kosogol. The Sait feared the advance of the Red troops southward to
Uliassutai. Both the American firms liquidated their affairs and all
our friends were prepared for a quick exit, though they hesitated at
the thought of leaving the town, as they were afraid of meeting the
detachment of Chahars sent from the east. We decided to await the
arrival of this detachment, as their coming could change the whole
course of events. In a few days they came, two hundred warlike Chahar
brigands under the command of a former Chinese hunghutze. He was a tall,
skinny man with hands that reached almost to his knees, a face blackened
by wind and sun and mutilated with two long scars down over his forehead
and cheek, the making of one of which had also closed one of his
hawklike eyes, topped off with a shaggy coonskin cap--such was the
commander of the detachment of Chahars. A personage very dark and stern,
with whom a night meeting on a lonely street could not be considered a
pleasure by any bent of the imagination.

The detachment made camp within the destroyed fortress, near to the
single Chinese building that had not been razed and which was now
serving as headquarters for the Chinese Commissioner. On the very day of
their arrival the Chahars pillaged a Chinese dugun or trading house not
half a mile from the fortress and also offended the wife of the Chinese
Commissioner by calling her a "traitor." The Chahars, like the Mongols,
were quite right in their stand, because the Chinese Commissioner Wang
Tsao-tsun had on his arrival in Uliassutai followed the Chinese custom
of demanding a Mongolian wife. The servile new Sait had given orders
that a beautiful and suitable Mongolian girl be found for him. One was
so run down and placed in his yamen, together with her big wrestling
Mongol brother who was to be a guard for the Commissioner but who
developed into the nurse for the little white Pekingese pug which the
official presented to his new wife.

Burglaries, squabbles and drunken orgies of the Chahars followed, so
that Wang Tsoa-tsun exerted all his efforts to hurry the detachment
westward to Kobdo and farther into Urianhai.

One cold morning the inhabitants of Uliassutai rose to witness a very
stern picture. Along the main street of the town the detachment was
passing. They were riding on small, shaggy ponies, three abreast; were
dressed in warm blue coats with sheepskin over