A contemptuous laugh from the fat man confirmed this statement.  This was his department.  In many men cunning takes the place of courage.

At this moment the steam-whistle of the iron-works farther up the river boomed out across the plain.  The bells of the city churches broke out into a clanging unanimity as to the time of day, and all the workers stirred reluctantly.  The dinner-hour was over.

Kosmaroff rose to his feet and stretched himself—­a long, lithe, wiry figure.

“Come,” he said.  “We must go back to work.”

He glanced from face to face, and any looking with understanding at his narrow countenance, his steady, dark eyes, and clean-cut nose must have realized that they stood in the presence of that rare and indefinable creation—­a strong man.

X

A WARNING

It is a matter of history that the division of Poland into three saved many families from complete ruin.  For some suffered confiscation in the kingdom of Poland and saved their property in Galicia; others, again in Posen had estates in Masovia, which even Russian justice could not lay hands upon—­that gay justice of 1832, which declared that, in protesting against the want of faith of their conquerors, the Poles had broken faith.  The Austrian government had sympathized with the discontent of those Poles who had fallen under Russian sway, while in Breslau it was permitted to print and publish plain words deemed criminal in Cracow and Warsaw.  The dogs, in a word, behaved as dogs do over their carrion, and, having secured a large portion, kept a jealous eye on their neighbor’s jaw.

The Bukatys had lost all in Poland except a house or two in Warsaw, but a few square miles of fertile land in Galicia brought in a sufficiency, while Wanda had some property in the neighborhood of Breslau bequeathed to her by her mother.  The grim years of 1860 and 1861 had worn out this lady, who found the peace that passeth man’s understanding while Poland was yet in the horrors of a hopeless guerilla warfare.

“Russia owes me twenty years of happiness and twenty million rubles,” the old prince was in the habit of saying, and each year on the anniversary of his wife’s death he reckoned up afresh this debt.  He mentioned it, moreover, to Russian and Pole alike, with that calm frankness which was somehow misunderstood, for the administration never placed him among the suspects.  Poland has always been a plain-speaking country, and the Poles, expressing themselves in the roughest of European tongues, a plain-spoken people.  They spoke so plainly to Henry of Valois when he was their king that one fine night he ran away to mincing France and gentler men.  When, under rough John Sobieski, they spoke with their enemy in the gate of Vienna, their meaning was quite clear to the Moslem understanding.

The Prince Bukaty had a touch of that rough manner which commands respect in this smooth age, and even Russian officials adopted a conciliatory attitude towards this man, who had known Poland without one of their kind within her boundaries.