"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 minutes. Their whole enterprise was but labor lost. They listened, breathing short. No sound came.
"Gone out," said Heywood, gloomily. "Or else they saw it."
He climbed the bamboo scaffold, and stood looking over the wall. Rudolph perched beside him,--by the same anxious, futile instinct of curiosity, for they could see nothing but the night and the burning stars.
"Gone out. Underground again, Rudie, and try our first plan." Heywood turned to leap down. "The Sword-Pen looks to set off his mine to-morrow morning."
He clutched the wall in time to save himself, as the bamboo frame leapt underfoot. Outside, the crest of the slope ran black against a single burst of flame. The detonation came like the blow of a mallet on the ribs.
"Let him look! Let him look!" Heywood jumped to the ground, and in a pelting shower of clods, exulted:--
"He looked again, and saw it was The middle of next week!"
"Come on, brother mole. Spread the news!"
He ran off, laughing, in the wide hush of astonishment.
"Pretty fair," Captain Kneebone said. "But that ain't the end."
This grudging praise--in which, moreover, Heywood tamely acquiesced--was his only comment. On Rudolph it had singular effects: at first filling him with resentment, and almost making him suspect the little captain of jealousy; then amusing him, as chance words of no weight; but in the unreal days that followed, recurring to convince him with all the force of prompt and subtle fore-knowledge. It helped him to learn the cold, salutary lesson, that one exploit does not make a victory.
The springing of their countermine, he found, was no deliverance. It had two plain results, and no more: the crest of the high field, without, had changed its contour next morning as though a monster had bitten it; and when the day had burnt itself out in sullen darkness, there burst on all sides an attack of prolonged and furious exasperation. The fusillade now came not only from the landward sides, but from a long flotilla of boats in the river; and although these vanished at dawn, the fire never slackened, either from above the field, or from a distant wall, newly spotted with loopholes, beyond the ashes of the go-down. On the night following, the boats crept closer, and suddenly both gates resounded with the blows of battering-rams. These and later assaults were beaten off. By daylight, the nunnery walls were pitted as with small-pox; yet the little company remained untouched, except for Teppich, whose shaven head was trimmed still closer and redder by a bullet, and for Gilbert Forrester, who showed--with the grave smile of a man when fates are playful--two shots through his loose jacket.