tely while searching were so great that the search was thorough.

It failed, though, for the very simple reason that nobody suspected that
the huge stone trap-door in the floor of the powder-magazine had ever
been opened, or ever could be opened. The magazine had been a white
man's watch. White men had kept guard over it for more than a hundred
years, and the natives had forgotten that a maze of tunnels and caverns
lay beneath it.

So, while bayonet-points and swords were pushed into crevices, while
smoke was sent down passages and tunnels and great, loose-limbed,
slobbering hounds were led on the leash and cast to find a trail, the
three women and the child lay still beneath the piled-up powder,
and doled out water, and biscuit in siege-time measures. They lay in
pitch-darkness, in a vault where not even a sound could reach them,
except the whispered echo of their own voices and the scampering of
the rats. They were growing nearly blind, and nearly crazed, with the
darkness and the silence and the fear.

Every second they expected to see daylight through the cracks above, as
rebels levered up the door, or to hear feet and voices coming through
the vaults below, for doubtless the vaults led somewhere. But for their
fear of snakes and rats and unknown horrors, they would have tried to
find a way through the vaults themselves. But as each movement that they
made, and each word that they spoke, sent echoes reverberating through
the gloom, they lay still and shuddered.

Once they heard footsteps on the stone flags overhead. But the footsteps
went away again, and then all was still. Soon they lost all count of
time. They were only aware of heat and discomfort and fear and utter
weariness.

One woman and an infant wept. One woman prayed aloud incessantly. The
third woman--the menial, the worst educated and least enlightened of
the three, according to the others' notion of it--stubbornly refused to
admit that there was not some human means of rescue.

"If Bill were here," she kept on grumbling, "Bill'd find a way!"

And in the darkness that surrounded her she felt that she could see
Bill's face, as she remembered it--red-cheeked and clean-shaven--six
years or more ago.

IX.

The blazing roof of the guardroom lit up even the crossroads for a
while, and Brown and his men could see that for the present there was a
good wide open space between them and the enemy. The firelight showed a
tree not far from the crossr