an. Once or twice the
fakir tried to shout an alarm to passing villagers, but the quick and
energetic application of a cleaning-rod by Brown stopped him always
in the nick of time, and they came within sight of the battlements of
Jailpore without an accident.

Then, though, their problem became really serious, and it was a series
of circumstances altogether out of their control and not connected
with them that made their entry possible. The mutineers in Jailpore had
learned that Kendrick sahib was coming down on them from the north by
forced marches with thirty-five hundred men or more. They were putting
the place into a state of siege, and getting ready by all means in their
power to oppose him.

Little attention was being paid to small parties of arrivals from no man
knew or cared where. And, in a final effort to find the four who were
the lure that was bringing Kendrick down on them, the city was once
more being turned upside down and inside out, and men were even being
tortured who were thought to know of hiding-places.

With purely Eastern logic, the leaders of the rebels had decided that
the sight of the bodies of the four, writhing in their last agony on the
sun-scorched outer wall, would mightily discourage the British when they
came. So no efforts were being spared and no stones left unturned to
find them. The hooks on the wall were sharp and ready, so that they
might be impaled without loss of time in full view of their would-be
rescuers.

Almost every secret passage of the thousand odd had been explored. In
the hurry to run through them and explore the next one, doors had been
left open here and there that had been kept closed in some instances for
centuries.

One door in particular, placed cornerwise in a buttress of the outer
wall, was spotted by Juggut Khan as he circled round the city on his
charger at dusk on the day following their arrival. He brought his
charger back to where the others lay concealed, and then went on an
exploring-expedition on foot--to discover that the outer city wall
was like a sponge, a nest of honey-combed cells and passages wandering
interminably in the fifty-foot-thick brick and rubble rampart.

And while he searched amid the mazy windings of the wall, Bill Brown sat
in the forked top of a tree and studied out the ground-plan of the city.
He was imprinting landmarks in his memory for future reference, and
trying--with a brain that ached from the apparent hopelessness of t