Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/79

 CHAPTER VI

TIGERS AND "RED-BEARDS"

N the meantime my Cossack, Rikoff, wandered day after day through the forest and always brought home with his game some interesting bits of news. He met suspicious-looking horsemen on Kentei Alin; he was fired at several times and once returned with a perforated hunting bag. For a long time I received no answers to my telegrams regarding these armed bands wandering through our forest, but finally a large detachment of Cossacks was sent us and their scouring expeditions on the slopes of Kentei Alin yielded some unexpected results.

The Cossacks had some engagements with small detachments of hungkutzes, during which they captured several wounded men. These small groups belonged to a bigger body which, according to the captives, made headquarters near the Korean frontier and which had as its leader a certain Chang Tso-lin, who was proven to be in the pay of the Japanese General Staff. After the Cossacks' initial operations the hungkutzes disappeared almost entirely from our neighbourhood; but one night the sound of crashing glass in my car wakened me with a start. I listened, but nothing further occurred. When I turned out in the morning, I found one of the windows shattered by a bullet which had lodged in the opposite wall of the car. It was a brass one from a carbine of 67