: Civil War. The merchant’s daughter becomes a fighter of the cavalry squadron, heroically fights with the “whites”, but cannot fit into peaceful life and acts with a rival according to the laws of wartime.

Olga Vyacheslavovna Zotova, the daughter of an Old Believer, a merchant of the second guild, lived in Kazan.

One night, robbers entered the Zotovs, killed their parents, set fire to the house. They managed to save the wounded Olga. She remembered that one of the murderers of her parents was a former high school student, Valka Brykin.

Olga was sent to the hospital, where she lay with the wounded Red Army soldiers. She met the red commander Yemelyanov.

Soon, the city was captured by whites, Olga was sent to prison by the denunciation of Valka. She was held in prison for two months. When the Reds approached the city, all the prisoners were shot, Valka himself shot Olga. “Olga Vyacheslavovna was really tenacious like an adder,” the cavalryman Emelyanov found her, half dead, among the dead and saved, finding the “old-regime professor” of medicine.

Olga fell in love with Emelyanov and went after him to the war. She was enlisted as a soldier in the cavalry squadron in his regiment. None of the fighters would have believed, having learned that Zotova is a girl.

And how the hell she was beautiful: the young cavalrymen twisted their noses, thoughtful, when Zotova, thin and tall, with a dark hair in her right cap, ‹...› ringing her spurs, passed through the barren smoke of the barracks.

Soon, the regiment went on a daring raid on the Wrangel rear, when leaving the raid Emelyanov and several communists went to certain death to remove the fence from the bridge.

A further breakthrough was led by Olga and was wounded. Having left the infirmary, she again went to war, wandered throughout the country, until the war ended. During this time, she lost all female features, became "skinny and evil, like an adder."

After the war, Olga became a “stationery” in the institution and at age 22 she tried to start a “third life”. The neighbors in the communal apartment and colleagues in every possible way scoffed at her and nicknamed the "viper."

One way or another, Olga Vyacheslavovna was the subject of daily gossip, small passions began to boil among the tenants, and if she hadn’t, it would have become completely boring in the apartment.

Olga fell in love with the director of the Plot of Trust, but he abruptly rejected her because of the slander of envious people and married a pretty secretary, her neighbor. She, outraged by Olga's interest in her new husband, came to scandal and showed evidence from the registry office.

Olga could not stand it and grabbed the revolver. She shot a rival "and - continued to shoot at this white face swept over her."