efore. Yet a long and somewhat intimate interest in the
underground diplomacy of the world will lead one thus engaged to piece
together stray bits of gossip that come from different sources to
check up the information that some others may possess. In this way
will the letter of an American who was held incommunicado at Geneva by
the Swiss Government in the latter part of 1919, be found exceedingly
persuasive in the process of reconstructing the tragic comedy which
struts around the vacant Russian throne. The American was en route to
Turkestan under proper credentials from the United States; yet there
were certain powerful combinations sufficiently interested in his
mission to cause his imprisonment for a time sufficiently lengthy to
enable their emissaries to precede him beyond the Caspian, where other
secret combinations were incubating that American foreign traders
would have given much to understand.

It was during this period of restraint that the American, whose name
we will call Fox, wrote to a friend in the United States: "You have
often heard me speak of my brother who was in Turkestan when the
Russian Revolution burst upon the world. He is now resting in Tasmania
after going through one of the most remarkable experiences ever given
to an ordinary _tea merchant_ intrusted with some secrets of _the
greatest land monopoly in the world_. You may call it a fairy tale;
and if you did not know me as a business man of ordinary sense, I
should hesitate to intimate that Nicholas R---- and all the family are
quite well, I thank you, not a million miles distant from my brother."

Fox had learned from his experience at Geneva that governments are
sometimes cajoled by diplomatic pressure to do undreamed-of things.
The dispatch of an expeditionary force to Siberia by the United States
without a declaration of war against the Revolutionists struck him
as an instance of this kind, and he knew his correspondent to be
sufficiently versed in the underground politics of Europe to look for
a connection between some member of that expedition and the subject
mentioned in the two foregoing letters. This connection was innocently
revealed by a newspaper report from a Western city concerning
a wounded soldier who had recently returned to an American Army
hospital. The particular name being given, it was easy enough for
Fox's correspondent to meet the soldier on some errand of mercy and to
obtain the revelations that are hereinafter made