her place, so I could go and investigate why S-y did not start.  At ten I called up, but the ’phone was dead.  While I was waiting for some movement about the house, Philip himself came and said that S-y had ordered him to remove the trucks away out of the city.  Philip refused to do so, and tried to reach me by ’phone but it was out of order, so he left Syvorotka in charge and came to ask me personally.  While we were trying to digest what all of this meant and what should be done, a movement began in the house; lights flickered in the windows and shortly afterwards, we distinctly heard the report of a revolver.  As this looked bad we both left and ran across the place, but the Reds would not let anybody in.  Already there were about fifteen men trying to break down the fence.  The inside guards resisted and some shots were exchanged.  The assailants were Reds, asking for “a treasury,” and some of them were asking for the Family as it was rumored that they had already been killed.

Seeing that nothing could be done from this side I went to the rear and squeezed in, for Ch. was there and he let me do so; but he said that he had heard shots inside and that he thought all was finished, and said also that Leinst and three others went to search in Syvorotka’s home—­they evidently don’t know that all was taken out yesterday.  In the house I found complete commotion.  The family had disappeared, and no one knew where or how.  Pytkan was shot in the stomach and in the throat and I saw him lying on the floor in the room.  Khokhriakov and his men were shaking the rest of his life out of him, asking where the E. and the jewelry were, but all that Pytkan could say was “they were taken away.”  No one could make out what really had happened and who had shot him; some said that they went away in trucks, yet, in the evening, some that a detachment sent by the Soviet took them secretly out, some said aeroplanes.  All were wrong, for Philip had just come back and the trucks were in place, no one came into the Ipatiev’s house as I was on guard, and there had been no aeroplanes since six o’clock.  Pytkan was almost dead when Khokhriakov finally got from him that the family had been shot and taken away—­and then he began to expire.  Later the German appeared and chased us all away,—­he sent for his assistant, but they could not find him.

The family disappeared,—­it is true; there was no trace of them.  I continued to look everywhere up to the time that the Soviet representatives arrived, having been ordered to arrest all people who were with the family, and commenced searching for the bodies.  The whole place was surrounded by Reds, and all were ordered out, but nothing was there.  Then a resolution was made that the prisoners had been taken away and shot, and they sent a wire to Moscow.  I only know that inside the house they killed two people and nobody else, anyhow.  Pytkan and Kramer were dead; Kramer probably had been shot from a distance—­the