Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/82

70 we dared not leave the ovens for a moment without protection and consequently had to keep a Cossack guard over them day and night. But the serious question always occurred to me: what could this handful of soldiers surrounded by the Chinese mob really do, if the hungkutzes wished to seize our establishment?

One Sunday I went out along the railroad track to inspect the work in an outlying section and was carrying with me my Henel carbine fitted with a telescope. It was noon, hot and clear, with no one around. The forest shut in the track with its two walls, silent and motionless. Suddenly I noticed a movement in the bushes about one hundred yards ahead of me and saw that it was a wild boar, trying to extricate himself from a tangle of Virginia creepers and make his way to the track. As he finally broke through the brush, he scrambled up on the roadbed and headed right for me between the rails. The instant he sensed me and wheeled to make for cover again, presenting his whole flank for a target, I took advantage of the opportunity and rolled him down the ballast. When I came cautiously up to him, he was already dead. He was a beautiful specimen and weighed, as we found when we transported him to camp that evening, nearly five hundred pounds. He carried fine, large tusks, curving like two sickles high up over his snout.

It was that identical Sunday, when I had had such unusual luck, that Rikoff saddled his horse and went off for a very different kind of a hunt. I had not seen him before he left and only learned that he had gone into the mountains when Sergeant Lisvienko came and reported to me that Rikoff's horse had come in from the forest riderless, with broken reins and covered with foam. As something serious had evidently befallen the Cossack, we at once started out to search for him. When we did not