es, 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 se