The Crimson Tide. Robert W. Chambers

      Estridge smiled: “It’s all quite true, Jim. And Palla Dumont escaped having her slender throat slit open only because a sotnia of Kaladines’ Cossacks cantered up, discovered what the Reds were up to in the cellar, and beat it with Palla and another girl just in the nick of time.”

      “Who handed you this cinema stuff?”

      “The other girl.”

      “You believe her?”

      “You can judge for yourself. This other girl was a young Swedish soldier who had served in the Battalion of Death. It’s really cinema stuff, as you say. But Russia, to-day, is just one hell after another in an endless and bloody drama. Such picturesque incidents,––the wildest episodes, the craziest coincidences––are occurring by thousands every day of the year in Russia. … And, Jim, it was due to one of those daily and crazy coincidences that my sleigh, in which I was beating it for Helsingfors, was held up by that same sotnia of the Wild Division on a bitter day, near the borders of a pine forest.