ood.

"Siege, like you read about." The captain lay flat again. "Wish a man
could smoke up here."

Heywood laughed, and turned his head:--

"How much do you know about sieges, old chap?"

"Nothing," Rudolph confessed.

"Nor I, worse luck. Outside of school--_testudine facia,_ that sort of
thing. However," he went on cheerfully, "we shall before long"--He broke
off with a start. "Rudie! By Jove, I forgot! Did you find them? Where's
Bertha Forrester?"

"Gone," said Rudolph, and struggling to explain, found his late
adventure shrunk into the compass of a few words, far too small and bare
to suggest the magnitude of his decision. "They went," he began, "in
a boat--"

He was saved the trouble; for suddenly Captain Kneebone cried in a voice
of keen satisfaction, "Here they come! I told ye!"--and fired his rifle.

Through a patch of firelight, down the gentle slope of the field, swept
a ragged cohort of men, some bare-headed, some in their scarlet
nightcaps, as though they had escaped from bed, and all yelling. One of
the foremost, who met the captain's bullet, was carried stumbling his
own length before he sank underfoot; as the Mausers flashed from between
the sand-bags, another and another man fell to his knees or toppled
sidelong, tripping his fellows into a little knot or windrow of kicking
arms and legs; but the main wave poured on, all the faster. Among and
above them, like wreckage in that surf, tossed the shapes of
scaling-ladders and notched bamboos. Two naked men, swinging between
them a long cylinder or log, flashed through the bonfire space and on
into the dark below the wall.

"Pung-dongs!" bawled the captain. "Look out for the pung-dong!"

His friends were too busy firing into the crowded gloom below. Rudolph,
fumbling at side-bolt and pulling trigger, felt the end of a ladder bump
his forehead, saw turban and mediaeval halberd heave above him, and
without time to think of firing, dashed the muzzle of his gun at the
climber's face. The shock was solid, the halberd rang on the platform,
but the man vanished like a shade.

"Very neat," growled Heywood, who in the same instant, with a great
shove, managed to fling down the ladder. "Perfectly silly attack. We'll
hold 'em."

While he spoke, however, something hurtled over their heads and thumped
the platform. The queer log, or cylinder, lay there with a red coal
sputtering at one end, a burning fuse. Heywood snatched at it and
missed. Some one else ca