The prisoners realized that all must be risked in one desperate cast of the dice. "I and time against all men," says the proverb. No fresh caravan would be likely to come till spring. Meanwhile they must play against time. Burning the packet to ashes, they replaced it with a forged order instructing the commander on the Pacific to treat the exiles with all {113} freedom and liberality, and to forward them by the first boat outward bound for Kamchatka.
The governor at Okhotsk did precisely as the packet instructed. He allowed them out on parole. He supplied them with clothing and money. He forwarded them to Kamchatka on the first boat outward bound, the St. Peter and Paul, with forty-three of a crew and ten cannon, which had just come back from punishing American Indians for massacring the Russians.
A year less two days from the night they had been whisked out of St. Petersburg, the exiles reached their destination—the little log fort or ostrog of Bolcheresk, about twenty miles up from the sea on the inner side of Kamchatka, one hundred and fifty miles overland from the Pacific. The rowboat conducting the exiles up-stream met rafts of workmen gliding down the current. Rafts and rowboat paused within call. The raftsmen wanted news from Europe. Benyowsky answered that exiles had no news. "Who are you?" an officer demanded bluntly. Always and unconsciously playing the hero part of melodrama, Benyowsky replied—"Once a soldier and a general, now a slave." Shouts of laughter broke from the raftsmen. The enraged Pole was for leaping overboard and thrashing them to a man for their mockery; but they called out, "no offence had been meant": they, too, were exiles; their laughter was welcome; they had suffered enough in Kamchatka to know that when men must laugh or weep, better, much better, laugh! Even as they {114} laughed came the tears. With a rear sweep, the rafts headed about and escorted the newcomers to the fortress, where they were locked for the night. After all, a welcome to exile was a sardonic sort of mirth.
Kamchatka occupies very much the same position on the Pacific as Italy to the Mediterranean, or Norway to the North Sea. Its people were nomads, wild as American Indians, but Russia had established garrisons of Cossacks—collectors of tribute in furs—all over the peninsula, of whom four hundred were usually moving from place to place, three hundred stationed at Bolcheresk, the seat of government, on the inner coast of the peninsula.
The capital itself was a curious conglomeration of log huts stuck away at the back of beyond, with all the gold lace and court satins and regimental formalities of St. Petersburg in miniature. On one side of a deep ravine, was the fort or ostrog—a palisaded courtyard of some two or three hundred houses, joined together like the face of a street, with assembly rooms, living apartments, and mess rooms on one side of a passageway, kitchens, servants' quarters, and barracks for the Cossacks on the other side of the aisle. Two or three streets of these double-rowed houses made up the fort. Few of the houses contained more than three rooms, but the rooms were large as halls, one hundred by eighty feet, some of them, with whip-sawed floors, clay-chinked log walls, parchment {115} windows, and furniture hewed out of the green fir trees of the mountains. But the luxurious living made up for the bareness of furnishings. Shining samovars sung in every room. Rugs of priceless fur concealed the rough flooring. Chinese silks, Japanese damasks,—Oriental tapestries smuggled in by the fur traders,—covered the walls; and richest of silk attired the Russian officers and their ladies, compelled to beguile time here, where the only break in monotony was the arrival of fresh ships from America, or exiles from St. Petersburg, or gambling or drinking or dancing or feasting the long winter nights through, with, perhaps, a duel in the morning to settle midnight debts. Just across a deep ravine from the fort was another kind of settlement—ten or a dozen yurts, thatch-roofed, circular houses half underground like cellars, grouped about a square hall or barracks in the centre. In this village dwelt the exiles, earning their living by hunting or acting as servants for the officers of the Cossacks.
Here, then, came Benyowsky and his companions, well received because of forged letters sent on, but with no time to lose; for the first spring packet overland might reveal their conspiracy. The raftsmen, who had welcomed them, now turned hosts and housed the newcomers. The Pole was assigned to an educated Russian, who had been eight years in exile.
"How can you stand it? Do you fear death too much to dare one blow for liberty?" Benyowsky asked the other, as they sat over their tea that first night.
{116} But a spy might ask the same question. The Russian evaded answer, and a few hours later showed the Pole books of travel, among which were maps of the Philippines, where twenty or thirty exiles might go if they had a leader.
Leader? Benyowsky leaped to his feet with hands on pistol and cutlass with which he had been armed that morning when Governor Nilow liberated them to hunt on parole. Leader? Were they men? Was this settlement, too, ready to rise if they had a leader?
No time to lose! Within a month, cautious as a man living over a volcano, the Polish nobleman had enlisted twenty recruits from the exile settlement, bound to secrecy by oath, and a score more from a crew of sailor exiles back from America, mutinous over brutal treatment by their captain. In addition to secrecy, each conspirator bound himself to implicit and instant obedience to Benyowsky, their chief, and to slay each with his own hand any member of the band found guilty of betrayal. But what gave the Pole his greatest power was his relation to the governor. The coming of the young nobleman had caused a flutter in the social life of the dull little fort. He had been appointed secretary to Governor Nilow, and tutor to his children. The governor's lady was the widow of a Swedish exile; and it took the Pole but a few interviews to discover that wife and family favored the exiles rather than their Russian lord. In fact, the good woman suggested to the Pole that he {117} should prevent her sixteen-year-old daughter becoming wife to a Cossack by marrying her himself.