The story of three young Russsian adventurers against the background of post-revolutionary skirmishes in the Ukraine. The boys get mixed up with a wounded commissar and a marauding White Russian officer. They find themselves in all sorts of predicaments before the Reds arrive to save the day, and become the mascots of a troop of Bolshevik cavalry.

Zhamin, a member of a geological expedition and a former criminal, receives a strange letter, after which he quits his job and hurries through the taiga to a nearby station. In the city it is necessary to leave and his main enemy Legostaev, whom Zhamin has long threatened to kill. Zhamin comes to the station alone. He‘s found to have a bloody knife and a large sum of money with him.