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“I think you should go at once,” said the clerk; “we can’t tell what may happen before to-morrow. Already twenty of the waiters and porters have been taken from the hotel to serve in the army.”

“There is one thing, Ray,” said Sidney; “we must first cable mother in New York what we are going to do. I don’t believe we had better tell about father, though, except to say that he has been detained here.”

“I am sorry,” said the clerk, “but it is not allowed to send any private telegrams out of the country.”

“Could letters be sent out?”

“Oh no; I am sure the German fleet in the Baltic will intercept all mail.”

“The only thing we can do apparently,” said Raymond, “is to get out ourselves, if we can do that.”

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The boys were not sure that they were really going to be allowed to leave Nizhni-Novgorod until the boat had actually started on its voyage down the river. Even then they feared that it might be stopped and they would be taken off and thrown into a Russian dungeon. When they found, however, that they were truly leaving the city where their father was held in some sort of mysterious restraint, his plight seemed more dreadful to them than it had before. The thought that they were deserting him when he might be in great danger made them so miserable that they almost determined to ask to be put ashore and then to make their way back to the hotel and stay quietly there until their father was released or they received a message from him.