V
YELLOW RIVER

A DAY later we made our second start from Shihchia-
chuang. "They must be getting to know us pretty
well on this line," I remarked as we took the morning
train again for Taiyuan. Miao grinned cheerfully:
two nights' sleep had worked wonders with him.
"They think you are a very important person," he
said, "with much business to attend to. You are a
foreigner, you travel First-class. You have a secretary.
Very much 'face'.'* I hoped he was right. To the
simple Western mind, our movements in the last
three days must have looked definitely suspicious.
But we were not going to Taiyuan. A message had
come from Don the day before, saying that he had not
been able to get a place in the plane for Sian, so was
going on by train to Tungkwan, hoping to make his
way through the lines there. That was the last we
heard of him for nearly two months. I learnt when I
got back to Peking that he had been unable to make
any impression on the Nanking troops at the border,
had returned, and been ill for weeks with something
that sounded ominously like typhus. We were slower
off the mark; but we had better luck (as it proved)
than anyone else.
Our plan was to slip the train a couple of stations
before Taiyuan, which—discreet inquiries had con-
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