es danced to their piping, and
many paid for the music.

But though White Guards and Red now operated in respectively hostile
gangs everywhere throughout the land, and the treacherous hun armies
were now in full tide of their Baltic invasion, there still remained
ways and means of escape--inconspicuous highways and unguarded roads
still open that led out of that white hell to the icy but friendly
seas clashing against the northward coasts.

Diplomats were inelegantly "beating it." A kindly but futile
Ambassador shook the snow of Petrograd from his galoshes and solemnly
and laboriously vanished. Mixed bands of attaches, consular personnel,
casuals, emissaries, newspaper men, and mission specialists scattered
into unfeigned flight toward those several and distant sections of
"God's Country," divided among civilised nations and lying far away
somewhere in the outer sunshine.

Sometimes White Guards caught these fugitives; sometimes Red Guards;
and sometimes the hun nabbed them on the general hunnish principle
that whatever is running away is fair game for a pot shot.

Even the American Red Cross was "suspect"--treachery being alleged in
its relations with Roumania; and hun and Bolshevik became very
troublesome--so troublesome, in fact, that Estridge, for example, was
having an impossible time of it, arrested every few days, wriggling
out of it, only to be collared again and detained.

Sometimes they questioned him concerning gun-running into Roumania;
sometimes in regard to his part in conducting the American girl, Miss
Dumont, to the convent where the imperial family had been detained.

That the de facto government had requested him to undertake this
mission and to employ an American Red Cross ambulance in the affair
seemed to make no difference.

He continued to be dogged, spied on, arrested, detained, badgered,
until one evening, leaving the Smolny, he encountered an American--a
slim, short man who smiled amiably upon him through his glasses,
removed a cigar from his lips, and asked Estridge what was the nature
of his evident and visible trouble.

So they walked back to the hotel together and settled on a course of
action during the long walk. What this friend in need did and how he
did it, Estridge never learned; but that same evening he was
instructed to pack up, take a train, and descend at a certain station
a few hours later.

Estridge followed instructions, encountered no interference, got off
at the st