who was a couple of yards behind, sprang forward, unfastening the cover of his pistol-holster and catching his companion by the arm, while all around now was intensely dark.
“Enemy coming?” he whispered.
“Dunno yet, sir,” panted the sergeant, whose voice sounded broken and strange. “Something awfully wrong, sir.”
“Speak out, man! What do you mean?” whispered Lennox, whose heart now began to beat heavily.
“I’ve come upon something down here, sir.”
“Ah! The thief – asleep?”
“No, sir,” said the sergeant, and his fingers were heard fumbling with the fastening of the lantern.
“What are you doing, man? Why don’t you speak?”
“Making sure the light’s quite out, sir. Can’t speak for a moment – feel choking.”
“Then you hear the enemy approaching?”
“No, sir. – Ha! It’s quite out! Now, sir, just you go down on one knee and feel.”
“I don’t understand you, sergeant,” whispered Lennox; but all the same he bent down on one knee and felt about with his right hand, fully expecting to touch a heap of the stolen grain.
“No corn,” he said at the end of a few seconds; “but what’s this – sand?”
“Take a pinch up, and taste it, sir. I hope it is.”
“Taste it?” said Lennox half-angrily.
“Yes, sir,” said the sergeant out of the darkness, and the faint rustle he made and then a peculiar sound from his lips indicated that he was setting the example.
The young officer hesitated no longer, but gathering up a pinch of the dry sand from the ground, he just held it to the tip of his tongue.
“Why, sergeant,” he whispered excitedly, “it’s powder!”
“That’s right, sir,” replied the man. “Gunpowder – a train; a heavy train running right and left.”
“Nonsense!”
“Truth, sir. I had the lantern close to it, and might have fired it if I’d dropped the lantern, as I nearly did.”
“But what does it mean? Here, sergeant, that’s what we have to see.”
“Yes, sir,” replied the sergeant in a hoarse whisper, “and don’t you grasp it? One way it goes off towards the veldt – ”
“And the other way towards the colonel’s quarters,” whispered Lennox. “Here, sergeant, there must be some desperate plot – a mine, perhaps, close up to that hut. Quick! Follow me.”
The sergeant did not need the order, for he was already moving in the direction of the cluster of huts, but going upon his hands and knees, leaving the lantern behind and feeling his way, guiding himself by his fingers so as to keep in touch with the coarse, sand-like powder, which went on in an easily followed line towards the back of the colonel’s hut.
It seemed long, but it was only a matter of a few seconds before they were both close up, feeling in the darkness for some trace of that which imagination had already supplied; and there it was in the darkness.
“Here’s a bag, sergeant,” whispered Lennox.
“A bag, sir? Here’s five or six, and one emptied out, and – Run, sir, for your life! Look at that!”
For there was a flash of light from somewhere behind them, and as, with a bag of powder which he had caught up in his hand, Lennox turned round, he could see what appeared to be a fiery serpent speeding at a rapid rate towards where, half-paralysed, he stood.
Chapter Nine.
Guy Fawkes Work
The light of the fired train had hardly flashed before the first sentry who saw it, fired, to be followed by one after another, till the bugles rang out, first one and then another, whose notes were still ringing when there was a muffled roar, then another, and another, till six had shaken the earth and a series of peculiar metallic clashes deafened all around.
But before the first sentry had raised his piece to his shoulder and drawn, the sergeant, seen in the brilliant light of the running train, seemed to have gone frantically mad.
“Chuck, sir, chuck!” he yelled, though Lennox needed no telling. The light which suddenly shone on the back of the cluster of sheet-iron huts had shown him what was necessary, and after raising the bag he had picked up with both hands high above his head, and hurling it as far as he could, he dashed at the others he could see packed close up against the colonel’s hut, so that between him and the sergeant five had been torn from the ground and hurled in different directions outward from the buildings, leaving only the contents of a sixth and seventh bag which had been emptied in a heap connected with the long train before the others had been laid upon it in a little pile.
They were none too soon, for the last bag had hardly been hurled away with all the strength that the young officer could command, and while the sergeant was yelling to him to run, before the hissing fiery serpent was close upon them.
Fortunately the sergeant’s crawling and the following trampling of the excited pair had broken up and crushed in the regularly laid train, scattering the powder in all directions, so that the rush of the hissing fire came momentarily to an end and gave place to a sputtering and sparkling here and there, giving Lennox and the sergeant time to rush a few yards away in headlong flight. There was a terrific scorching blast, and a tremendous push sent them staggering onward in a series of bounds before they fell headlong upon their faces; while at intervals explosion after explosion followed the fiery blast, the burning fragments setting off three of the other bags, fortunately away from where the pair had fallen.
The sergeant was the first to recover himself, and raising his face a little from the ground, he shouted, “Don’t move, sir! Don’t move! There’s two or three more to go off yet.”
Lennox said something, he did not know what, for he was half-stunned, the shock having had a peculiar bewildering effect. But at the second warning from his companion he began to grasp what it meant, and lay still without speaking; but he raised his head a little, to see that beneath the great canopy of foul-smelling smoke that overhung them the earth was covered with little sputtering dots of fire, either of which, if it came in contact, was sufficient to explode any powder that might remain.
But two bags had escaped, the explosive blast rising upward; and the danger being apparently at an end, the principal actors in the catastrophe roused to find officers hurrying to meet them, and men coming forward armed with pails of water to dash and scatter here and there till every spark was extinct and the remaining powder had been thoroughly drenched.
“Much hurt, old chap?” cried Dickenson, who was the first to reach his friend, and he supplemented his question by eagerly feeling Lennox all over.
“No! No: I think not,” said Lennox, “except my head, and that feels hot and scorched. Can you see anything wrong?”
“Not yet; it’s so dark. Here, let’s take you to the doctor.”
“No, no!” cried Lennox. “Not so bad as that. But
