ery."

Another interval of suspense followed, thickly scored with pricklings of
anxiety for the besieged. Then an attempt was made from the rear. Ford
saw a dodging shadow working its way from car to car in the yard and
signaled softly to Adair.

"Hold low on him," he cautioned, when the New Yorker was at his elbow,
"those cheap guns jump like a scared cow-pony." Then he added: "And pray
God you don't hit what he's carrying."

Adair held low and bided his time. There was another musket-like roar,
and an instant though harmless reply from two rifles on the other side
of the Nadia. But the dodging shadow was no longer advancing.

"I've stopped him for the time being, anyhow," said Adair, exulting like
a boy. "If we only had a decent weapon we could get them all, one at a
time."

"This was crude," Ford commented. "Eckstein will think up something
better for the next attempt."

It was a prophecy which found its fulfilment after another sweating
interval of watchfulness. This time it was Brissac who made the
discovery, from the forward end of the Nadia. The nearest of the
material cars was a box, lying broadside to the private car on the next
side-track but one. From behind the trucks of the box-car a slender
pole, headed with what appeared to be an empty oyster tin, and trailing
a black line of fuse, was projecting itself along the ground by slow
inchings, creeping across the lighted space between the two cars.
Brissac promptly gave the alarm.

"This is where we lose out, pointedly and definitely," predicted Adair,
still cheerful. "Anybody want to try a run for it?"

It was Ford who thought of the two negroes.

"Tell them, Roy," he said to Brissac. "Perhaps they would rather risk
the rifles."

Brissac crept back to the central compartment, and the two watchers
marked the progress of the inching pole, with its dynamite head and the
ominous black thread of communication trailing like a grotesque horn
behind it. At the crossing of the intervening track it paused, moving
back and forth along the steel like a living thing seeking a passage.
Finally the metallic head of it appeared above the rail, hesitated, and
came on slowly. At that moment there was a shout, and the two negroes,
hands held high, tumbled from the opposite step of the Nadia and ran
toward the commissary stables. Three shots bit into the silence, and the
fat cook ran on, stumbling and shrieking. But the man Williams stopped
short and fell on his face