h of November.

It came as follows: Colonel Hazelden, survivor of the disaster earlier
in the fall, as already related, had returned to command the
Kodish-Shred Makhrenga fronts, when Col. Gavin was sent to command the
railroad front where Colonel Sutherland had fizzled.

This gallant officer was on his way to the perilous front to see
Ballard. Just as he passed Gardner at the twelfth verst pole, he found
himself and the two detachments of Americans at last completely cut off
by a whole battalion of Red Guards fresh from the south of Russia, sent
up by Trotsky to brace his Northern Army. For half an hour there raged a
fight as intense as was the bitter reality of the emergency to the forty
Americans with Gardner in those dugouts. By almost miraculous luck in
directing their fire through the screen of trees that shielded the Reds
from view, Sgt. Cromberger's Vickers gun and Cpl. Wilkie's Lewis gun
inflicted terrible losses upon this fresh battalion just getting into
action against the Americanskis. It was massed preparatory to the final
dispositions of its commander to overwhelm the Americans. But with the
hail of bullets tearing through their heavy ranks, the Bolos were unable
long to stand it, and at last broke from control, yelling and screaming,
to suffer still more from the well-handled guns when they left their
cover and ran for the woods. And so the little force was saved. But so
loud and prolonged were the yells of the frightened and wounded Reds
that Captain Donoghue, a verst in the rear at his field headquarters, he
related afterwards, paced the floor of the log shack in an agony of
certainty that his brave men were all gone. He had been sure that the
howling of the scattered pack had been the fervent yells of a last
bayonet charge wiping out the Yankees.

The Reds could not get themselves together for another attack at this
point before dark but did drive Ballard back verst after verst that
afternoon. It was a grim handful of "M. G." and "K" men who looked at
their own losses and counted the huge enemy losses of that desperate day
and wondered how many such days would whittle them off to the point of
annihilation. Col. Hazelden had gone back to headquarters. Captain
Donoghue now acted with his usual decisiveness.

The Americanskis had slipped out of the bag before the Red string was
tied. And in the morning of the 9th of November the good old Vickers
guns and Lewis guns were peeking from their old concealed