Anonymous threatening letters to the merchant Nikodim Kretov, the arson of his barge, the looting of supply convoys, and the uprising at the factory in the taiga town of Tyesinsk—all indicates that someone very much wants to set the Kretov brothers against each other. After all, suspicion immediately falls on the younger brother, Mikhail Kretov: during the arson of the steamboat “Amur” and the factory warehouses, they allegedly saw him. But Mikhail has an ironclad alibi. And an agent of the police investigative department Aleksei Polyakov, arriving in Tyesinsk under the guise of a mining engineer, can confirm this alibi. During the burning of the warehouses, he was in the merchant’s house with the local teacher and his niece Masha, who was wounded by a crossbow arrow—clearly intended for Mikhail… Besides, earlier Aleksei himself got caught in a landslide—apparently arranged by someone. In all of this you can see someone’s skilled hand…