In pre-war days in Siberia, traveling on the railway was easy; but as
soon as one left it, one was liable to meet with a certain amount of
adventures.
One night in the middle of winter, I landed at the station of Omsk. No
one was there to meet me and I did not know a word of Russian. I was
told that the town was at least six miles away and that to reach it one
had to travel through a wild, empty country of rolling plain and small
bush. Furthermore, quite a few Russians in Moscow and on the train had
entertained me in French with terrible stories of escaped convicts,
brigands, hold-ups and murders. In fact, only that week before my
arrival, a traveler was supposed to have been shot and robbed on the
same road that I had to take to go to town.
After a lot of trouble, I found a “troika” drawn by the usual three
horses and was able to make the driver understand where I wanted to go.
[Illustration: A Siberian rider]
I snuggled down under the fur robes and pulled out a revolver which I
kept in my hand ready for any emergency. We started slowly through very
bad roads. The cold was intense. In a little while, just as I was
thinking that I had never seen such a beautifully lonely country to
commit wholesale murder in, we heard a shout ahead of us. At that time
we were half way up a small hill and, on the top of it hardly one
hundred yards from us, plainly visible on the sky line, was a man on
horseback. I could distinguish his big shaggy fur cap and a rifle which
he held in his right hand with the stock resting on his thigh, the
barrel sticking up.
In a flash I thought of the Russians’ stories which I had disbelieved. I
was being held up after all. I jerked out my gun from under the furs. I
was desperate and had made up my mind to shoot first, trusting to luck.
Just then the solitary cavalier shouted something in Russian, which, of
course, I did not understand. My driver, with a yell to his horses,
swung them frantically to the right and, in a second, the sleigh was in
the deep snow out of the trail, half turned over on its side in a ditch.
I clutched the sides so as not to be pitched out. At the same moment a
tornado seemed to be upon us. I vaguely realized in the darkness that
there were wild looking men on horseback. Some had drawn swords, others
lances. There must have been one hundred of them. But instead of
stopping—they swept downhill, past us, in a mad gallop. Before I could
press the trigger everything was over. The road was empty, the night was
silent and my driver was coaxing his horse back on the trail.
As soon as I reached Omsk I told our man, there, what had happened and
asked for further information. “Why, that was his Imperial Majesty’s
mail going to the station to catch the midnight train for the east. It
is always surrounded by a squadron of cavalry with one or two scouts
ahead to clear the road.”
My brigands were the regular Cossacks of the Czar.
To this day, I feel a cold shudder at the thought of what would have
happened if I had fired my revolver in their midst. Talk of past murders
on that lonely Siberian road! Picnics compared to what mine would have
been!