od eating. When the meal was over
Godfrey filled the kettle again and gave it to Alexis, and then, taking
his gun, started down the valley. He was away three hours, and brought
back twenty birds of various sorts, but for the most part small.

"No very great sport," he said as he emptied his haversack. "However,
they will do for breakfast, and I may have better luck to-morrow. There
are some fish in the pools, but I do not see how we are to get them. I
saw one spring out of the water; it must have weighed a couple of
pounds."

"You might shoot them, Godfrey, if you could find a place where the bank
is pretty high so as to look down on the water."

"So I could; I did not think of that. I must try to-morrow."

"If it hadn't been for my feet," Alexis said, "we should have been down
on the Selenga to-morrow, and we had calculated on being able to buy
food at one of the villages there."

"We shall be able to hold on here," Godfrey said, "for a few days, and I
expect that one day's good tramp, when your feet are better, will take
us there. After that we ought to have no great difficulty till we get
down near the desert."

CHAPTER VII.

THE BURIAT'S CHILD.

After three days' rest the Russian's feet were so much better that he
said he should be able to make a start the next morning. Godfrey,
however, would not listen to the proposal.

"We are getting on all right," he said. "I am not much of a shot, but at
any rate I am able to bag enough birds to keep us going, and though I
have only succeeded in shooting one fish as yet, it was a good big one
and was a real help to us. It is no use going on till your feet get
really hard, for you would only be laming yourself again. It will be
quite time enough to talk about making a start in three days' time."

The next morning Godfrey was roughly awakened by a violent kick.
Starting up he saw a group of six Buriats standing round them. Three of
them had guns, which were pointed at the prisoners, the others were
armed with spears. Resistance was evidently useless; their guns had been
removed to a distance and the knives taken from their belts before they
were roused. Godfrey held out his hands to show that he surrendered, and
addressed the usual Russian salutation to them. The men were short,
square-built figures, with large skulls, low foreheads, flat noses, and
long eyes like those of the Chinese. Their cheek-bones were high and
wide apart, the complexion a yellow-brown,