In a few days they came, two hundred warlike Chahar brigands under the command of a former Chinese hunghutze.

He was a tall, skinny man with hands that reached almost to his knees, a face blackened by wind and sun and mutilated with two long scars down over his forehead and cheek, the making of one of which had also closed one of his hawklike eyes, topped off with a shaggy coonskin cap--such was the commander of the detachment of Chahars.

A personage very dark and stern, with whom a night meeting on a lonely street could not be considered a pleasure by any bent of the imagination.
The detachment made camp within the destroyed fortress, near to the single Chinese building that had not been razed and which was now serving as headquarters for the Chinese Commissioner.

On the very day of their arrival the Chahars pillaged a Chinese dugun or trading house not half a mile from the fortress and also offended the wife of the Chinese Commissioner by calling her a "traitor." The Chahars, like the Mongols, were quite right in their stand, because the Chinese Commissioner Wang Tsao-tsun had on his arrival in Uliassutai followed the Chinese custom of demanding a Mongolian wife.

The servile new Sait had given orders that a beautiful and suitable Mongolian girl be found for him.