Good order and military discipline now having been restored aboard the schooner Tamerlane, he followed his subaltern into the cuddy, where the fair Xenia and the Turkoman naukhoda or skipper were already busy with the samovar tea that Private Bloggs had made ready.

Private Bloggs was a quaint little figure as he stood by the cuddy door in a service-dress jacket of khaki serge, its buttons brightly polished in spite of the sea air, neatly-creased trousers, and a jauntily-rolled Balaclava cap. On the jacket were the shoulder titles of a Fusilier regiment, and the ribbons of both the D.C.M. and the Military Medal.

Private Bloggs had a bit of a history. He was left an orphan at a tender age, and spent his youth in the care of an old and crabbed uncle. The uncle was a Punjabi Musalman, native to Rawalpindi, and an ex-colour havildar of the Duchess of Connaught's Own Zhob Rifles. He had left the Service on his microscopic pension to take over the business of a transport contractor and camel-owner in the town of Sandemanpur, the capital of the border province of Kakaristan, where he drove a flourishing trade towards the Durani city of Ghiljihar. The uncle thought very little of the orphan nephew, whom he considered weedy and unlikely to grow up a credit to him in the ranks of

The nephew resented this, and at last, in 1912, with a young companion, ran away to sea. Together they worked their way in a stokehold to Marseilles. Young Punjabis are no uncommon objects in the engine-rooms and stokeholds that ply between Marseilles and the East Indies, though, curiously enough, they never serve as deck-hands, these being always Indians. They landed at Marseilles, and decided for London. This meant a long journey on foot through the length and breadth of France. After weeks of trudging, helped by the kindly French peasantry, they reached a Channel port, and again worked their passages to England. More tramping found them in the great city, whose streets, as they well knew, were paved with gold.

They separated, and our young Odysseus found employment

a scullion in the Berkelton. In due course he was promoted to be a waiter in its famous grill-room, and one day he chanced to attend upon a lady who recognised him as a Punjabi. She spoke to him, and at length, being mindful of kindnesses and hospitality received from Punjabis, arranged that he should be sent to school in Shropshire. Next autumn the Great War broke out, and our young wanderer

rising seventeen. Fired with tales of fighting, he ran away from school to meet a recruiting-sergeant in Tra

falgar Square. That plump non-commissioned officer, having inquired his age, stated that seventeen was too young. Ten minutes later he met another. There were several about in London just then. He had become over eighteen.

Before many months had elapsed he found himself with his company in the front line in France, and he himself on sentry in a small listening-post close to the German wire. At midnight his corporal heard a shot. As he crawled up to inquire what it was about, the young Punjabi pointed out the corpse of a man he had just killed, five yards outside the sap. They brought in the dead body, and found it to be that of a British officer of another regiment. The Punjabi was immediately placed under arrest, and the matter reported to the company commander.

When the Punjabi was called upon to account for having shot this unidentified captain, he suggested searching the body. This was done, and resulted in the finding of papers which showed the dead man to have been a German disguised in the uniform of a deceased British officer. The youth was immediately released from arrest, and congratulated by the colonel himself. But how did you know he was a German, young man,' inquired that officer. "I saw his legs, sir, against the rising moon. No British officer ties his puttees like that," was the reply. Some

weeks afterwards the Punjabi was gazetted to a Military Medal. All flesh being grass at the Western Front in those days, our Punjabi rifleman, known by now as Bloggs, soon found himself in the bight of a canvas trough, and suffering from lead-poisoning with nickel attachment. When he came out of hospital the lad gradually awakened to the fact that, by some exploit of the AdjutantGeneral's branch, from having been a rifleman he was now a Fusilier, attached to the Machine-Gun Corps. He was long past the stage when any vagaries of a third echelon or a record office could upset him, so in due course returned to Picardy behind a Vickers gun in a limbered waggon. After Cambrai he was again wounded, and found himself the proud wearer of a D.C.M. as well. His third venture in search of the bubble reputation took him to Palestine, where he was employed on G.H.Q. intelligence police.

From here it was a short way to the army of the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and the little schooner aboard of which we make his acquaintance. Jehan, for such was his real name, had gravitated quite naturally into the position of orderly and bâtman to the subaltern. Besides his official duties, he had definitely decided that his officer needed a keeper, and appointed himself to that arduous task, mainly on the strength of his own seafaring experience. Every now and

then, his grey-green eyes filled with a worried look and his wavy brown hair rumpled with much cogitation, he would take the latest problem affecting the welfare of his officer to the old Risaldar for advice and solution.

The subaltern owed his selection for intelligence duty to a vacuous face, brushed-back hair, and an eye that reflected a mind engaged somewhere else. This infantile attitude had been the Waterloo of quite a number of swarthy middle-Eastern intriguers of all sorts, whose minds were too complex and ways too dark and involved to notice that officer's simple and obvious arrangements for their benefit. He himself called this his "idiot-boy" method.

The "idiot - boy" method, however, did not suit the ordinary humdrum routine of military, or rather departmentalised military, existence. This was where Jehan and the old Risaldar came in.

Having steered him through many clashes with the highly developed rituals of the supply, ordnance, and Adjutant-General's branches, they felt safer now that they had him afloat and out of reach of D.A.A. and Q.M.G.'s, Army Forms, and Returns in quadruplicate.

Our little ship's company were bound on a mission destined to gain touch not only with a Voisko of Cossacks, but with the remote Khanate of Khorasm, whose ruler had instinctively sided with the loyal commanders.

To him the subaltern and his men carried rifles and ammunition. Five hundred of our old but trusty long LeeEnfields and a hundred thousand rounds lay in chests in the schooner's hold. Five-andtwenty camel-loads were these, and in such warfare five-andtwenty score stand-of-arms were no small accretion of strength. It was too much to hope that a convoy could be escorted by a dozen men across a thousand miles of desert to the Cossack Ataman. To him the subaltern was to carry a very secret résumé of the strategic plans of the White armies. This was bound in lead, like a naval signal-code, and interleaved with thin sheets of celluloid. Whether by land or by sea, it could be destroyed in a twinkling if capture threatened.

These plans were to be translated in secret to the Khan, so that both he and the Ataman could fall in with the big forward move of all the White forces, and time their attacks to the best advantage to the general strategy.

If any of the rifles or ammunition could be got across to the Cossack Voisko, so much the better. At any rate for them, the plan was the main thing.

Wireless plant that could signal over the thousand miles that hindered their efforts, was clearly too much for such a tiny desperate forlorn hope to carry. It must be borne in mind that not only were there

vast spaces of almost untrodden desert before them, whose salt sandhills changed their contour with every day's wind, but it was known that the infrequent brackish water-holes were held by enemy posts. There were at least two lines of these to be penetrated.

Instead of wireless, a young N.C.O. of the party, Havildar Atti Afzal, carried a basket of carrier-pigeons. Afzal was a Yusafzai, a cheery race who can do wonders in the training of their little feathered friends, whether fighting partridge, quail, gamecock, or dove.

It is nothing uncommon for a young Yusafzai to carry a quail under his arm through long days of marching without any one suspecting that the bird is there.

The carrier- pigeons were somewhat of a forlorn hope in themselves, a slender reliance; but the whole venture was a desperate one, much more likely to lead to the destruction of every man than to achieve its object. The game was worth the candle, the subaltern thought. Better take a ten to one chance of losing a dozen lives from thirst in the desert or from the enemy's fire, than incur the certain loss of the efforts of several thousand rifles and sabres.

By a piece of real good-fortune, he had fallen in with a portion of his own corps. From it he had picked his men, and he knew that they were of the kidney that would stand by their leader closer than a brother.

The fair Xenia Dimitrievna, pouring out the many glasses of lemon-tinged tea, maintained a steady fire of lively raillery with her three companions.

A quip in Persian to the Risaldar followed a pretty little speech in her quaint Kurdified Turkish to the skipper, and mingled with these were admonitions and threats in Russian or French to the subaltern.

Life was never dull when Xenia was about. She thought nothing of livening up a dinnerparty with a snap-shot at a lamp or a window from the long-barrelled 380 she affected, hung in a black Mexican slip studded with tiny silver roses.

Her presence in the little party was explained by an intimate knowledge of the Russified city of Beshkent and its surroundings, where she had been a High School girl. Beshkent is the capital of Tataristan, the scene of this yarn.

She knew, of course, many of the ci-devant inhabitants of the country-officers, merchants, officials, and owners of estates in the beautiful foothills to the east and southeast. She knew the ins-andouts of local politics and officialism. The subaltern's Russian, acquired in acquired in a pre-war biggame shoot in the remoter parts of Tataristan, was pretty

fluent but ungrammatical, and far from adequate to engage in bluffing matches, or the higher diplomacy, with Red Commissars. Her value as an interpreter was beyond price, since in addition to the phrases of the salon and the ballroom, several years of camps had acquainted her with soldiers' jargon in French and Turkish, as well as her own native Little Russian. She could describe an Austin armoured-car or a synchronised aeroplane Vickers gun in any of these languages with an ease that told of an intricate history, and a soupçon of profanity that made it clear to the dullest.

This history only came to the subaltern's ears in jerky little anecdotes or disjointed allusions to Sarykamish or to fighting on the Stokhod. He never pressed for more details: a certain intuition told him that he might ask too much. He realised little by little that some of her war experience, the more sedate portion, was acquired in aid-posts on the Erzeroum front. The Russian V.A.D. was not restrained from the trenches as in our own more prosaic armies, and Xenia Dimitrievna had made an early acquaintance with first-hand bloodshed. In fact once, in a fit of confidence, she had opened her khaki rubashka and shown the subaltern the scar of a Kurdish kinjal on the swell of a milk-white breast.

Her battle experiences had not ended there. When ordered fronts broke up and armies

disrupted under the gangrene from the back areas, she had found herself in a high-peaked Cossack saddle on a shaggy Kalmuk pony following a column of the famous Savage Division. In that unkempt array of sheep-skinned men of Kuban, Terek, the Don, the steppes of Krim and the hills of Daghestan, "Part Two " orders, and many - columned daily states were not considered indispensable for defeating the enemy.

Before long, then, Xenia's adventurous spirit took her away from the ragged mounted ambulance party to a hardly less rough-and-ready machine-gun Otryad. Here, besides a band of volcanic Georgians and Mingrelians and other coteries from Abkhasia, Circassia and Oset, she forgathered with a large mess of compatriots from Mazeppa's country. In time her quick wits and deft fingers brought her into the proud position of No. 1 of her gun, and fortune brought her several promising targets, dealt with, it is understood, not unjustly. She was happy here, wearing the red, white, and blue chevron of the volunteer army on her left sleeve and the machine-gunner's kinjal at her belt.