They rode hard until they met the carts, and turned them back.  So far as these were concerned, there was little danger in going away empty from the city.

Then the two horsemen rode on in silence.  They were far out in the marsh-lands before Kosmaroff spoke.

“I am sure,” he then said, “that I was seen as I climbed back over the wall.  I heard a stir among the rifles.  But they could not recognize me.  It is just possible that I may not be suspected.  For you it is different.  If they knew where the arms were stored, they must also know who procured them.  You will never be able to show yourself in Warsaw again.”

“I may be able to make myself more dangerous elsewhere,” said Martin, with a laugh.

“I do not know,” went on Kosmaroff, “if they will have arrested your father and sister; but I am quite sure that they will be in the palace now awaiting your return there.  We must get away to-night.”

“Oh,” answered Martin gayly, “it does not matter much about that.  What I am thinking of are these four thousand men waiting out here in the rain.  How are we to get them to their homes in Warsaw?”

And Kosmaroff had no answer to this question.

Beneath the trees on the low, wet land inside the fortifications they found their men drawn up in a double line.  There were evidences of military organization and training in their bearing and formation.  If the arms had been forthcoming, these would have been dangerous soldiers; for they were desperate men, and had each in his heart a grievance to be wiped out.  They were only the nucleus of a great rising, organized carefully and systematically—­the brand to be thrown amid the straw.  They were to surprise and hold the two strongholds in Warsaw, while the whole country was set in a blaze, while the foreign powers and the parties to the treaty which Russia had systematically broken were appealed to and urged to assist.  It was a wild scheme, but not half so wild as many that have succeeded.

The four thousand heroically waiting the word that was to send them on their forlorn hope heard the news in silence, and all silently moved away.

“It is for another time—­it is for another time!” said Kosmaroff and Martin repeatedly and confidently, as the men moved past them in the darkness.

In Warsaw there was a queer silence, and every door was shut.  The streets had been quite deserted, and they were now full of soldiers, who, at a given word, had moved out from the barracks to line the streets.

At midnight they were still at their posts, when the first stragglers came in from the south, silent, mud-bespattered, bedraggled men, who shuffled along in their dripping clothes in the middle of the street in groups of two and three.  They hung their heads and crept to their houses.  And the conquerors watched them without sympathy, without anger.

It was a miserable fiasco.

XXXV