The farther the hunters wandered, the harder it was to obtain supplies from the cities. In each case--in New France, on the Missouri, in Siberia--this compelled resort to the same plan; a grand rallying place, a yearly rendezvous, a stamping-ground for hunters and traders. Here merchants brought their goods; {107} hunters, their furs; light-fingered gentry, offscourings from everywhere, horses to sell, or smuggled whiskey, or plunder that had been picked up in ways untold. The great meeting place for Russian fur traders was on a plain east of the Lena River, not far from Yakutsk, a thousand miles in a crow line from the Pacific. In the fall of 1770 there had gathered here as lawless birds of a feather as ever scoured earth for prey. Merchants from the inland cities had floated down supplies to the plain on white and black and lemon-painted river barges. Long caravans of pack horses and mules and tented wagons came rumbling dust-covered across the fields, bells ajingle, driven by Cossacks all the way from St. Petersburg, six thousand miles. Through snow-padded forests, over wind-swept plains, across the heaving mountains of two continents, along deserts and Siberian rivers, almost a year had the caravans travelled. These, for the most part, carried ship supplies--cordage, tackling, iron--for vessels to be built on the Pacific to sail for America. Then there rode in at furious pace, from the northern steppes of Siberia, the Cossack tribute collectors--four hundred of them centred here--who gathered one-tenth of the furs for the Czar, nine-tenths for themselves: drunken brawlers they were, lawless as Arabs; and the only law they knew was the law they wielded. Tartar hordes came with horses to sell, freebooters of the boundless desert, banditti in league with the Cossacks to smuggle across the {108} borders of the Chinese. And Chinese smugglers, splendid in silk attire, hobnobbed with exiles, who included every class from courtiers banished for political offences to criminals with ears cut off and faces slit open. What with drink and play and free fights--if the Czar did not hear, it was because he was far away. On this August night half a dozen new exiles had come in with the St. Petersburg cavalcade. The prisoners were set free on parole to see the sights, while their Cossack guard went on a spree. The new-comers seemed above the common run of criminals sent to Siberia, better clothed, of the air born to command, and in possession of money. The leading spirit among them was a young Pole, twenty-eight years or thereabouts, of noble rank, Mauritius Benyowsky, very lame from a battle wound, but plainly a soldier of fortune who could trump every trick fate played him, and give as good knocks as he got. Four others were officers of the army in St. Petersburg, exiled for political reasons. Only one, Hippolite Stephanow, was a criminal in the sense of having broken law.