rough scarlet
cloth. This, while they shuffled toward it, grew higher and broader,
until they lay prone in the very door of the hill,--a large, square-cut
portal, deeply overhung by the edge of the clay-pit, and flanked with
what seemed a bulkhead of sand-bags piled in orderly tiers. Between
shadowy mounds of loose earth flickered the light of a fire, small and
distant, round which wavered the inky silhouettes of men, and beyond
which dimly shone a yellow face or two, a yellow fist clutched full of
boiled rice like a snowball. Beyond these, in turn, gleamed other little
fires, where other coolies were squatting at their supper.

"Rudie, look!" Heywood's voice trembled with joyful excitement. "Look,
these bags; not sand-bags at all! It's powder, old chap, powder! Their
whole supply. Wait a bit--oh, by Jove, wait a bit!"

He scurried back into the hill like a great rat, returned as quickly and
swiftly, and with eager hands began to uncoil something on the clay
threshold.

"Do you know enough to time a fuse?" he whispered. "Neither do I.
Powder's bad, anyhow. We must guess at it. Here, quick, lend me a
knife." He slashed open one of the lower sacks in the bulkhead by the
door, stuffed in some kind of twisted cord, and, edging away, sat for an
instant with his knife-blade gleaming in the ruddy twilight. "How long,
Rudie, how long?" He smothered a groan. "Too long, or too short, spoils
everything. Oh, well--here goes."

The blade moved.

"Now lie across," he ordered, "and shield the tandstickor." With a
sudden fuff, the match blazed up to show his gray eyes bright and
dancing, his face glossy with sweat; below, on the golden clay, the
twisted, lumpy tail of the fuse, like the end of a dusty vine. Darkness
followed, quick and blinding. A rosy, fitful coal sputtered, darting out
short capillary lines and needles of fire.

"Cut sticks--go like the devil! If it blows up, and caves the earth on
us--" Heywood ran on hands and knees, as if that were his natural way of
going. Rudolph scrambled after, now urged by an ecstasy of apprehension,
now clogged as by the weight of all the hill above them. If it should
fall now, he thought, or now; and thus measuring as he crawled, found
the tunnel endless.

When at last, however, they gained the bottom of the shaft, and were
hoisted out among their coolies on the shelving mound, the evening
stillness lay above and about them, undisturbed. The fuse could never
have lasted all these m