stage in
our journey.

The passports had arrived next morning, as Frau von Einem had promised,
and with them a plan of our journey. More, one of the Companions, who
spoke a little English, was detailed to accompany us--a wise
precaution, for no one of us had a word of Turkish. These were the sum
of our instructions. I heard nothing more of Sandy or Greenmantle or
the lady. We were meant to travel in our own party.

We had the railway to Angora, a very comfortable German _Schlafwagen_,
tacked to the end of a troop-train. There wasn't much to be seen of
the country, for after we left the Bosporus we ran into scuds of snow,
and except that we seemed to be climbing on to a big plateau I had no
notion of the landscape. It was a marvel that we made such good time,
for that line was congested beyond anything I have ever seen. The
place was crawling with the Gallipoli troops, and every siding was
packed with supply trucks. When we stopped--which we did on an average
about once an hour--you could see vast camps on both sides of the line,
and often we struck regiments on the march along the railway track.
They looked a fine, hardy lot of ruffians, but many were deplorably
ragged, and I didn't think much of their boots. I wondered how they
would do the five hundred miles of road to Erzerum.

Blenkiron played Patience, and Peter and I took a hand at picquet, but
mostly we smoked and yarned. Getting away from that infernal city had
cheered us up wonderfully. Now we were out on the open road, moving to
the sound of the guns. At the worst, we should not perish like rats in
a sewer. We would be all together, too, and that was a comfort. I
think we felt the relief which a man who has been on a lonely outpost
feels when he is brought back to his battalion. Besides, the thing had
gone clean beyond our power to direct. It was no good planning and
scheming, for none of us had a notion what the next step might be. We
were fatalists now, believing in Kismet, and that is a comfortable
faith.

All but Blenkiron. The coming of Hilda von Einem into the business had
put a very ugly complexion on it for him. It was curious to see how
she affected the different members of our gang. Peter did not care a
rush: man, woman, and hippogriff were the same to him; he met it all as
calmly as if he were making plans to round up an old lion in a patch of
bush, taking the facts as they came and working at them as if they were
a sum in ari