While he spoke, however, something hurtled over their heads and thumped the platform.  The queer log, or cylinder, lay there with a red coal sputtering at one end, a burning fuse.  Heywood snatched at it and missed.  Some one else caught up the long bulk, and springing to his feet, swung it aloft.  Firelight showed the bristling moustache of Kempner, his long, thin arms poising a great bamboo case bound with rings of leather or metal.  He threw it out with his utmost force, staggered as though to follow it; then, leaping back, straightened his tall body with a jerk, flung out one arm in a gesture of surprise, no sooner rigid than drooping; and even while he seemed inflated for another of his speeches, turned half-round and dove into the garden and the night.  By the ending of it, he had redeemed a somewhat rancid life.

Before, the angle was alive with swarming heads.  As he fell, it was empty, and the assault finished; for below, the bamboo tube burst with a sound that shook the wall; liquid flame, the Greek fire of stink-pot chemicals, squirted in jets that revealed a crowd torn asunder, saffron faces contorted in shouting, and men who leapt away with clothes afire and powder-horns bursting at their sides.  Dim figures scampered off, up the rising ground.

“That’s over,” panted Heywood.  “Thundering good lesson,—­Here, count noses.  Rudie?  Right-oh.  Sturgeon, Teppich, Padre, Captain?  Good! but look sharp, while I go inspect.”  He whispered to Rudolph.  “Come down, won’t you, and help me with—­you know.”

At the foot of the ladder, they met a man in white, with a white face in what might be the dawn, or the pallor of the late-risen moon.

“Is Hackh there?” He hailed them in a dry voice, and cleared his throat, “Where is she?  Where’s my wife?”

It was here, accordingly, while Heywood stooped over a tumbled object on the ground, that Rudolph told her husband what Bertha Forrester had chosen.  The words came harder than before, but at last he got rid of them.  His questioner stood very still.  It was like telling the news of an absent ghost to another present.

“This town was never a place,” said Gilly, with all his former steadiness,—­“never a place to bring a woman.  And—­and of her age.”

All three men listened to the conflict of gongs and crackers, and to the shouting, now muffled and distant behind the knoll.  All three, as it seemed to Rudolph, had consented to ignore something vile.

“That’s all I wanted to know,” said the older man, slowly.  “I must get back to my post.  You didn’t say, but—­She made no attempt to come here?  Well, that’s—­that’s lucky.  I’ll go back.”

For some time again they stood as though listening, till Heywood spoke:—­

“Holding your own, are you, by the water gate?”

“Oh, yes,” replied Forrester, rousing slightly.  “All quiet there.  No more arrows.  Converts behaving splendidly.  Two or three have begged for guns.”