'll have to stay up here.
Got any rope? Then bind them, somebody. Bind their hands and feet. Now,
off with you!"

Brown spent the next few minutes signaling with the lantern, and reading
answering flashes that zig-zagged in the velvet blackness of the British
lines. Then, as a voice boomed up through the granary, "All's well, sir!
I'm just about to shut the door!" he fixed his eyes on the fakir, and
laughed at him.

"You and I are going to turn in our accounts of how we've worked out
this 'Hookum hai' business, my friend!" he told him. "You've given
orders, and I've obeyed orders! We've both accounted for a death or two,
and we've both accepted responsibility. We're going to know in less than
five minutes from now which of us two was justified. There's one thing
I know, though, without asking. There's one person, and she a woman,
who'll weep for me. Will anybody weep for you, I wonder?"

A lantern waved wildly from the British camp, and Brown seized his own
lantern and signaled an answer.

"See that? That's to say, you glassy-eyed horror you, that our mutual
friend Juggut Khan has been seen emerging like a rat from a hole in the
wall. I'll give him and his party one more minute to get clear. Then
there's going to be a holocaust, my friend!"

He cocked his rifle, and examined the breech-bolt and the foresight
carefully. The fakir shuddered, evidently thinking that the charge was
intended for himself.

"No! It won't be that way. I know a better! I'm taking a leaf from your
book and doing harm by wholesale!"

Brown leaned down into the opening of the dome, and brought the rifle
to his shoulder. There was a chorus of yells from the prisoners, and a
noise like a wounded horse's scream from the fakir. The rest were bound,
but the fakir rose and writhed toward him on his heels, with his sound
arm stretched up in an attitude of despair beside the withered one.

A chorus of bugles burst out from the British camp, and a volley ripped
through the blackness.

"All right! Here goes!" said Brown. And he aimed down into the shadowy
powder-magazine, and pulled the trigger.

Ten minutes later, an army three thousand and five hundred strong
marched in through the gap made in the outer wall by a granary that had
spread itself through--and not over--what was in its way. There were
seventeen tons of powder that responded to the invitation of Brown's
bullet.

XIV.

Explosions are among the few things--or the many things