ttlement,
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.

The Pole's first move was to ask the governor's permission to establish
a colony of exile farmers in the south of the peninsula. The request
was granted. This created a good excuse for the gathering of the
provisions that would be needed for the voyage on the Pacific; but when
the exiles further requested a fur-trading vessel to transport the
provisions to the new colony, their design was balked by the
unsuspecting governor granting them half a hundred row boats, too frail
to go a mile from the coast. There seemed no other course but to seize
a vessel by force and escape, but Benyowsky again played for time. The
governor's daughter discovered his plot through her servant planning to
follow one of the exiles to sea; but instead of betraying him to her
Russian father, she promised to send him red clippings of thread as
danger signals if the governor or his chancellor got wind of the
treason.

Their one aim was to get away from Asia before fresh orders could come
overland from Yakutsk. Ice still blocked the harbor in April, but the
_St. Peter and Paul_, the armed vessel that had brought the exiles
across the sea from the mainland, lay in port and was already enlisting
a crew for the summer voyage to America. The Pole sent twelve of his
men to enlist among the crew, and nightly store provisions in