e bare back three hundred strokes.

He was still roaring with rage and pain and fear when a coureur came
thundering over the path from Yakutsk with word that Hoffman had died
suddenly, leaving certain papers suspected of conspiracy, which were
being forwarded for examination to the commander on the Pacific. The
coureur handed the paper to the officer of the guards. Not a man of
the Cossacks could read German. What the papers were the terrified
exiles knew. If word of the plot reached the Pacific, they might
expect knouting, perhaps mutilation, or lifelong, hopeless servitude in
the chain-gangs of the mines.

One chance of frustrating detection remained--the Cossack officer
looked to the exiles for protection against his men. For a week the
cavalcade moved sullenly on, the soldiers jeering in open revolt at the
officer, the officer in terror for his life, the exiles quaking with
fear. The road led to a swift, somewhat {112} dangerous river. The
Cossacks were ordered to swim the elk teams across. The officer went
on the raft to guard the prisoners, on whose safe delivery his own life
depended. With hoots of laughter, that could not be reported as
disobedience, the Cossacks hustled the snorting elk teams against the
raft. A deft hoist from the pole of some unseen diver below, and the
raft load was turned helter-skelter upside down in the middle of the
river, the commander going under heels up! When officer and exiles
came scrambling up the bank wet as water-rats, they were welcomed with
shouts by the Cossacks. Officer and prisoners lighted a fire to dry
clothes. Soldiers rummaged out the brandy casks, and were presently so
deep in drunken sleep not a man of the guard was on his feet.
Benyowsky waited till the commander, too, slept. Then the Pole limped,
careful as a cat over cut glass, to the coat drying before the fire,
drew out the packet of documents, and found what the exiles had
feared--Hoffman's papers in German, with orders to the commander on the
Pacific to keep the conspirators fettered till instructions came the
next year from St. Petersburg.

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