This vision in turn also disappeared and before the gazing Mongols stood only the mysterious Kalmuck with his hand upraised.

“To battle and return not without victory!  I am with you in the fight.”

The attack began.  The Mongols fought furiously, perished by the hundreds but not before they had rushed into the heart of Kobdo.  Then was re-enacted the long forgotten picture of Tartar hordes destroying European towns.  Hun Baldon ordered carried over him a triangle of lances with brilliant red streamers, a sign that he gave up the town to the soldiers for three days.  Murder and pillage began.  All the Chinese met their death there.  The town was burned and the walls of the fortress destroyed.  Afterwards Hun Baldon came to Uliassutai and also destroyed the Chinese fortress there.  The ruins of it still stand with the broken embattlements and towers, the useless gates and the remnants of the burned official quarters and soldiers’ barracks.

CHAPTER XIX

WILD CHAHARS

After our return to Uliassutai we heard that disquieting news had been received by the Mongol Sait from Muren Kure.  The letter stated that Red Troops were 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.