lock and
went slowly to the barn, but even when he had led out his mare and stood
at the stirrup, something held him there with the spell of memory.

He was not coming back here until he had fulfilled the resolve long ago
made--and since in these days overseas journeys were less simple than in
other times, he could not be sure of coming back at all. So with his
bridle rein over his forearm, he stood for a while with the picture of
the log cabin and the sunset in his eyes.

Then he mounted and rode slowly away.

In a few days he was to hear the earnest voice of the President sounding
over the sober faces of his gathered colleagues: "Gentlemen of the
Congress:--I have called the Congress into extraordinary session because
there are serious, very serious, choices to be made, and made
immediately, which it was neither right nor constitutionally permissible
that I should assume the responsibility of making."

* * * * *

Though he came bearing no official mission, because he was a member of
the American Congress and because the United States Ambassador had
exerted himself to that end, Boone Wellver found it possible to leave
revolutionary Petrograd and make his way to the front where, after a
year of successful offensive, the armies of Brussilov lay drugged with
the insidious poison of anarchy.

Already, "Order Number One to Army" had with a pen-stroke abolished all
the requirements of discipline and all the striking power of unity.

The marvel was that the heart of the organization had not at once
stopped beating--but old traditions still held the fragments loosely
cemented, and the resolute hand of Brussilov still grasped and steadied
the brittle material left to him in the face of the enemy and disaster.

If guns still thundered on the eastern front, the men who had for a year
been launching successful assaults knew that their voices were hollow.
If his army groups still maintained a zone of activity between
themselves and the foe, he knew that it was only a screen behind which
he sought to shield the evaporating powers of his forces.

Yet even in these days the commander adhered to his custom and received
the correspondents, and when Boone came to his headquarters with the
credentials that had passed him that far, he was turned over to an
intelligence officer, whose instructions were to serve him in every way
compatible with military expediency until the general could grant him an