“Who are you?” brutally blurted out one of the soldiers, turning to us and raising his rifle.  We answered with Mausers and successfully, for 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 the wood.  Two of the officers slipped away to make an investigation.  For a long time they did not return and we, fearful lest something had happened, moved off carefully in the direction of the smoke, all ready for a fight if necessary.  We finally came near enough to hear the voices of many people and among them the loud laugh of one of our scouts.  In the middle of a meadow we made out a large tent with two tepees of branches and around these a crowd of fifty or sixty men.  When we broke out of the forest all of them rushed forward with a joyful welcome for us.  It appeared that it was a large camp of Russian officers and soldiers who, after their escape from Siberia, had lived in the houses of the Russian colonists and rich peasants in Urianhai.

“What are you doing here?” we asked with surprise.

“Oh, ho, you know nothing at all about what has been going on?” replied a fairly old man who called himself Colonel Ostrovsky.  “In Urianhai an order has been issued from the Military Commissioner to mobilize all men over twenty-eight years of age and everywhere toward the town of Belotzarsk are moving detachments of these Partisans.  They are robbing the colonists and peasants and killing everyone that falls into their hands.  We are hiding here from them.”