with a rough subcurrent and a muddy bed--through
Germany. The Seine and the Thames--shallow--shallow--shallow. And
we--who live upon their banks!

The Volga--immense, stupendous, a great power, an influence two thousand
four hundred miles long. Some have seen the Danube, and think they have
seen a great river. So they have; but the Russian giant is seven hundred
miles longer. A vast yellow stream, moving on to the distant sea--slow,
gentle, inexorable, overwhelming.

All great things in nature have the power of crushing the human
intellect. Russians are thus crushed by the vastness of their country,
of their rivers. Man is but a small thing in a great country, and those
who live by Nile, or Guadalquivir, or Volga seem to hold their lives on
condition. They exist from day to day by the tolerance of their river.

Steinmetz and Paul paused for a moment on the wooden floating bridge and
looked at the great river. All who cross that bridge, or the railway
bridge higher up the stream, must do the same. They pause and draw a
deep breath, as if in the presence of something supernatural.

They rode on without speaking through the squalid town--the whilom rival
and the victim of brilliant Moscow. They rode straight to the station,
where they dined in, by the way, one of the best railway refreshment
rooms in the world. At one o'clock the night express from Moscow to St.
Petersburg, with its huge American locomotive, rumbled into the station.
Paul secured a chair in the long saloon car, and then returned to the
platform. The train waited twenty minutes for refreshments, and he still
had much to say to Steinmetz; for one of these men owned a principality
and the other governed it. They walked up and down the long platform,
smoking endless cigarettes, talking gravely.

Steinmetz stood on the platform and watched the train pass slowly away
into the night. Then he went toward a lamp, and taking a
pocket-handkerchief from his pocket, examined each corner of it in
succession. It was a small pocket-handkerchief of fine cambric. In one
corner were the initials S.S.B., worked neatly in white--such embroidery
as is done in St. Petersburg.

"Ach!" exclaimed Steinmetz shortly; "something told me that that was
he."

He turned the little piece of cambric over and over, examining it
slowly, with a heavy Germanic cunning. He had taken this handkerchief
from the body of the nameless rider who was now lying alone on the
steppe twelve miles a