The shots from the marsh, though trivial and scattering, were like a signal; for all about the nunnery, from a ring of hiding-places, the noise of last night broke out afresh.  The sun lowered through a brown, burnt haze, the night sped up from the ocean, covering the sky with sudden darkness, in which stars appeared, many and cool, above the torrid earth and the insensate turmoil.  So, without change but from pause to outbreak, outbreak to pause, nights and days went by in the siege.

Nothing happened.  One morning, indeed, the fragments of another blunt arrow came to light, broken underfoot and trampled into the dust.  The paper scroll, in tatters, held only a few marks legible through dirt and heel-prints:  “Listen—­work fast—­many bags—­watch closely.”  And still nothing happened to explain the warning.

That night Heywood even made a sortie, and stealing from the main gate with four coolies, removed to the river certain relics that lay close under the wall, and would soon become intolerable.  He had returned safely, with an ancient musket, a bag of bullets, a petroleum squirt, and a small bundle of pole-axes, and was making his tour of the defenses, when he stumbled over Rudolph, who knelt on the ground under what in old days had been the chapel, and near what now was Kempner’s grave.

He was not kneeling in devotion, for he took Heywood by the arm, and made him stoop.

“I was coming,” he said, “to find you.  The first night, I saw coolies working in the clay-pit.  Bend, a moment over.  Put now the ear close.”

Heywood laid his cheek in the dust.

“They’re keeping such a racket outside,” he muttered; and then, half to himself:  “It certainly is.  Rudie, it’s—­it’s as if poor Kempner were—­waking up.”  He listened again.  “You’re right.  They are digging.”

The two friends sat up, and eyed each other in the starlight.

CHAPTER XIX

BROTHER MOLES

This new danger, working below in the solid earth, had thrown Rudolph into a state of sullen resignation.  What was the use now, he thought indignantly, of all their watching and fighting?  The ground, at any moment, might heave, break, and spring up underfoot.  He waited for his friend to speak out, and put the same thought roundly into words.  Instead, to his surprise, he heard something quite contrary.

“Now we know!” said Heywood, in lively satisfaction.  “Now we know what the beasts have up their sleeve.  That’s a comfort.  Rather!”

He sat thinking, a white figure in the starlight, cross-legged like a Buddha.

“That’s why they’ve all been lying doggo,” he continued.  “And then their bad marksmanship, with all this sniping—­they don’t care, you see, whether they pot us or not.  They’d rather make one clean sweep, and ‘blow us at the moon.’  Eh?  Cheer up, Rudie:  so long as they’re digging, they’re not blowing.  Are they?”