“Give ’em this.”  Heywood skipped up the ladder, to return with a rifle.  “And this belt—­Kempner’s.  Poor chap, he’ll never ask you to return them.—­Anything else?”

“No,” answered Gilly, taking the dead man’s weapon, and moving off into the darkness.  “No, except “—­He halted.  “Except if we come to a pinch, and need a man for some tight place, then give me first chance.  Won’t you?  I could do better, now, than—­than you younger men.  Oh, and Hackh; your efforts to-night—­Well, few men would have dared, and I feel immensely grateful.”

He disappeared among the orange trees, leaving Rudolph to think about such gratitude.

“Now, then,” called Heywood, and stooped to the white bundle at their feet.  “Don’t stand looking.  Can’t be helped.  Trust old Gilly to take it like a man.  Come bear a hand.”

And between them the two friends carried to the nunnery a tiresome theorist, who had acted once, and now, himself tired and limp, would offend no more by speaking.

When the dawn filled the compound with a deep blue twilight, and this in turn grew pale, the night-long menace of noise gradually faded also, like an orgy of evil spirits dispersing before cockcrow.  To ears long deafened, the wide stillness had the effect of another sound, never heard before.  Even when disturbed by the flutter of birds darting from top to dense green top of the orange trees, the air seemed hushed by some unholy constraint.  Through the cool morning vapors, hot smoke from smouldering wreckage mounted thin and straight, toward where the pale disk of the moon dissolved in light.  The convex field stood bare, except for a few overthrown scarecrows in naked yellow or dusty blue, and for a jagged strip of earthwork torn from the crest, over which the Black Dog thrust his round muzzle.  In a truce of empty silence, the defenders slept by turns among the sand-bags.

The day came, and dragged by without incident.  The sun blazed in the compound, swinging overhead, and slanting down through the afternoon.  At the water gate, Rudolph, Heywood, and the padre, with a few forlorn Christians,—­driven in like sheep, at the last moment,—­were building a rough screen against the arrows that had flown in darkness, and that now lay scattered along the path.  One of these a workman suddenly caught at, and with a grunt, held up before the padre.

The head was blunt.  About the shaft, wound tightly with silk thread, ran a thin roll of Chinese paper.

Dr. Earle nodded, took the arrow, and slitting with a pocket-knife, freed and flattened out a painted scroll of complex characters.  His keen old eyes ran down the columns.  His face, always cloudy now, grew darker with perplexity.

“A message,” he declared slowly.  “I think a serious message.”  He sat down on a pile of sacks, and spread the paper on his knee.  “But the characters are so elaborate—­I can’t make head or tail.”

He beckoned Heywood, and together they scowled at the intricate and meaningless symbols.