“We do not need weapons.  We are protected by our documents,” I answered, as though I did not understand.

“But no,” he interrupted, “you can change that rifle there into furs and gold.  I shall give you that rifle outright.”

“Ah, that’s it, is it?  But it’s very little for those trousers.  Nowhere in Russia can you now find trousers.  All Russia goes without trousers and for your rifle I should receive a sable and what use to me is one skin?”

Word by word I attained to my desire.  The militia-man got my trousers and I received a rifle with one hundred cartridges and two automatic pistols with forty cartridges each.  We were armed now so that we could defend ourselves.  Moreover, I persuaded the happy possessor of my trousers to give us a permit to carry the weapons.  Then the law and force were both on our side.

In a distant village we bought three horses, two for riding and one for packing, engaged a guide, purchased dried bread, meat, salt and butter and, after resting twenty-four hours, began our trip up the Amyl toward the Sayan Mountains on the border of Urianhai.  There we hoped not to meet Bolsheviki, either sly or silly.  In three days from the mouth of the Tuba we passed the last Russian village near the Mongolian-Urianhai border, three days of constant contact with a lawless population, of continuous danger and of the ever present possibility of fortuitous death.  Only iron will power, presence of mind and dogged tenacity brought us through all the dangers and saved us from rolling back down our precipice of adventure, at whose foot lay so many others who had failed to make this same climb to freedom which we had just accomplished.  Perhaps they lacked the persistence or the presence of mind, perhaps they had not the poetic ability to sing odes about “roads, bridges and gold mines” or perhaps they simply had no spare trousers.

CHAPTER IX

TO THE SAYANS AND SAFETY

Dense virgin wood surrounded us.  In the high, already yellow grass the trail wound hardly noticeable in among bushes and trees just beginning to drop their many colored leaves.  It is the old, already forgotten Amyl pass road.  Twenty-five years ago it carried the provisions, machinery and workers for the numerous, now abandoned, gold mines of the Amyl valley.  The road now wound along the wide and rapid Amyl, then penetrated into the deep forest, guiding us round the swampy ground filled with those dangerous Siberian quagmires, through the dense bushes, across mountains and wide meadows.  Our guide probably did not surmise our real intention and sometimes, apprehensively looking down at the ground, would say: 

“Three riders on horses with shoes on have passed here.  Perhaps they were soldiers.”

His anxiety was terminated when he discovered that the tracks led off to one side and then returned to the trail.

“They did not proceed farther,” he remarked, slyly smiling.