At his wife's insistence, Eibenschutz leaves his job as an artilleryman in the Austrian army for a job as Weights and Measures Inspector in a remote part of the Empire near the Russian border. Attempting to exercise some rectitude in his duties, he is at sea in a world of smugglers, profiteers and small-time crooks. When he discovers that his wife has become pregnant by his own clerk, he spends less and less time at home, preferring to frequent a tavern on the border. Here, he becomes hopelessly drawn to a gypsy woman; she, however, is prepared to share the bed of the landlord Jadlowker, Eibenschutz's enemy, an unprincipled profiteer who has made the tavern a beacon for smuggling activity.