s
far as any building can be cool in Central India. It was a first-class,
ideal powder-magazine, if useless as a granary; and the last new
conquerors of India had hastened to adopt it as a means of storing up
the explosive medicine with which they kept their foothold.

Naturally, none but White soldiers, and a very few of the more trusted
natives, had ever been allowed to go inside the powder-magazine.
The secret passages beneath it had never been intended for public
convenience or information. They had been designed as a means of rushing
defenders secretly into the granary, and they connected with a tunnel
underneath the palace that had just been burned. They also connected
with the outer wall in such a way that defenders from the ramparts might
be rushed there too, if wanted in a hurry. But, since there never had
been corn kept in the granary, and nobody had ever had the slightest
need to force an entrance, the knowledge even of the existence of the
passages had become barely a memory, and there was not a man living in
Jailpore who knew exactly where they began or where they ended. There
was a man outside who knew, but none inside.

The point about the powder-magazine which most appealed to Brown--next
after his knowledge of its contents, mineral and human--was the fact
that the little platform at its summit overlooked the city-wall, and
that the side of the granary actually touched the wall on the side of
the city farthest from where he sat and spied it out. Ten men on that
protected platform, he thought, might suffer from the sun, but they
could hold the building and command a good-sized section of the city
ramparts against all comers.

He noticed too, though that seemed immaterial at the time, that one
well-aimed shot from heavy ordnance might crash through the upper dome
and set off the powder underneath. There was no artillery that could
be brought against the place, either with the British force or with the
mutineers, but the thought set him to wondering how much powder there
might be stored on the huge round floor below, and what would happen
should it become ignited. It was a sanguinary, interesting, subtle kind
of thought, that suited the condition of his brain exactly! He climbed
down from the tree, feeling almost good-natured.

At the bottom he met Juggut Khan, waiting for him patiently.

"What have you seen, sahib?" he asked him. "Have you formed a plan?"

"I've been wishing I was Joshua!" said Brown