come quick! Our water! The casks have burst!"

It was not until Jenks had torn the tarpaulin from off their stores,
and he was wildly striving with both hands to scoop up some precious
drops collected in the small hollows of the ledge, that he realized the
full magnitude of the disaster which had befallen them.

During the first rapid exchange of fire, before the enemy vacated the
cliff, several bullets had pierced the tarpaulin. By a stroke of
exceeding bad fortune two of them had struck each of the water-barrels
and started the staves. The contents quietly ebbed away beneath the
broad sheet, and flowing inwards by reason of the sharp slope of the
ledge, percolated through the fault. Iris and he, notwithstanding their
frenzied efforts, were not able to save more than a pint of gritty
discolored fluid. The rest, infinitely more valuable to them than all
the diamonds of De Beers, was now oozing through the natural channel
cut by centuries of storm, dripping upon the headless skeleton in the
cave, soaking down to the very heart of their buried treasure.

Jenks was so paralyzed by this catastrophe that Iris became alarmed. As
yet she did not grasp its awful significance. That he, her hero, so
brave, so confident in the face of many dangers, should betray such
sense of irredeemable loss, frightened her much more than the incident
itself.

Her lips whitened. Her words become incoherent.

"Tell me," she whispered. "I can bear anything but silence. Tell me, I
implore you. Is it so bad?"

The sight of her distress sobered him. He ground his teeth together as
a man does who submits to a painful operation and resolves not to
flinch beneath the knife.

"It is very bad," he said; "not quite the end, but near it."

"The end," she bravely answered, "is death! We are living and
uninjured. You must fight on. If the Lord wills it we shall not die."

He looked in her blue eyes and saw there the light of Heaven.

"God bless you, dear girl," he murmured brokenly. "You would cheer any
man through the Valley of the Shadow, were he Christian or
Faint-heart."

Her glance did not droop before his. In such moments heart speaks to
heart without concealment.

"We still have a little water," she cried. "Fortunately we are not
thirsty. You have not forgotten our supply of champagne and brandy?"

There was a species of mad humor in the suggestion. Oh for another
miracle that should change the wine into water!

He could only fall in