How had it got there?

It would be something to remember him by, anyhow.

At each of the adjacent holes stood a little group with a lantern on the
ground shining up the hole, and with one man kneeling and aiming at the
round void before him, waiting for anything that might emerge.

There was an interminable suspense.

Then they heard Cossar's first shot, like an explosion in a mine....

Every one's nerves and muscles tightened at that, and bang! bang! bang!
the rats had tried a bolt, and two more were dead. Then the man who held
the ball of twine reported a twitching. "He's killed one in there," said
Bensington, "and he wants the rope."

He watched the rope creep into the hole, and it seemed as though it had
become animated by a serpentine intelligence--for the darkness made the
twine invisible. At last it stopped crawling, and there was a long
pause. Then what seemed to Bensington the queerest monster of all crept
slowly from the hole, and resolved itself into the little engineer
emerging backwards. After him, and ploughing deep furrows, Cossar's
boots thrust out, and then came his lantern-illuminated back....

Only one rat was left alive now, and this poor, doomed wretch cowered in
the inmost recesses until Cossar and the lantern went in again and slew
it, and finally Cossar, that human ferret, went through all the runs to
make sure.

"We got 'em," he said to his nearly awe-stricken company at last. "And
if I hadn't been a mud-headed mucker I should have stripped to the
waist. Obviously. Feel my sleeves, Bensington! I'm wet through with
perspiration. Jolly hard to think of everything. Only a halfway-up of
whisky can save me from a cold."

VII.

There were moments during that wonderful night when it seemed to
Bensington that he was planned by nature for a life of fantastic
adventure. This was particularly the case for an hour or so after he had
taken a stiff whisky. "Shan't go back to Sloane Street," he confided to
the tall, fair, dirty engineer.

"You won't, eh?"

"No fear," said Bensington, nodding darkly.

The exertion of dragging the seven dead rats to the funeral pyre by the
nettle grove left him bathed in perspiration, and Cossar pointed out the
obvious physical reaction of whisky to save him from the otherwise
inevitable chill. There was a sort of brigand's supper in the old
bricked kitchen, with the row of dead rats lying in the moonlight
against the hen-runs outside, and after thirty minute