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.

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!