Kuzya and Kolya find a corpse in a flooded tractor, but it turns out that the supposed "drowned man" is alive, and this is all part of an old scam involving missing machinery. Meanwhile, Zoya Ivanovna's attempt to seduce Kuzya leads to confusion, and the main mystery of whose corpse it was remains unsolved.

Kuzya and Herman decide to trick Kruglov: they pretend that the collective farm is about to come under his control, in order to use his greed and force him to pay off his multimillion-dollar debt. While Kruglov is convinced that he has won and is preparing the deal, Kuzya publicly presents him as the "savior of the collective farm," but in the end, everything falls apart when Dasha discovers the truth about the fraud, her father, and leaves Kuzya.