While he spoke, the din outside the walls wavered and sank, at last giving place to a shrill, tiny interlude of insect voices.  In this diluted silence came now and then a tinkle of glass from the dark hospital room where Miss Drake was groping among her vials.  Heywood listened.

“If it weren’t for that,” he said quietly, “I shouldn’t much care.  Except for the women, this would really be great larks.”  Then, as a shadow flitted past the orange grove, he roused himself to hail:  “Ah Pat!  Go catchee four piecee coolie-man!”

“Can do.”  The shadow passed, and after a time returned with four other shadows.  They stood waiting, till Heywood raised his head from the dust.

“Those noises have stopped, down there,” he said to Rudolph; and rising, gave his orders briefly.  The coolies were to dig, strike into the sappers’ tunnel, and report at once:  “Chop-chop.—­Meantime, Rudie, let’s take a holiday.  We can smoke in the courtyard.”

A solitary candle burned in the far corner of the inclosure, and cast faint streamers of reflection along the wet flags, which, sluiced with water from the well, exhaled a slight but grateful coolness.  Heywood stooped above the quivering flame, lighted a cigar, and sinking loosely into a chair, blew the smoke upward in slow content.

“Luxury!” he yawned.  “Nothing to do, nothing to fret about, till the compradore reports.  Wonderful—­too good to be true.”

For a long time, lying side by side, they might have been asleep.  Through the dim light on the white walls dipped and swerved the drunken shadow of a bat, who now whirled as a flake of blackness across the stars, now swooped and set the humbler flame reeling.  The flutter of his leathern wings, and the plash of water in the dark, where a coolie still drenched the flags, marked the sleepy, soothing measures in a nocturne, broken at strangely regular intervals by a shot, and the crack of a bullet somewhere above in the deserted chambers.

“Queer,” mused Heywood, drowsily studying his watch.  “The beggar puts one shot every five minutes through the same window.—­I wonder what he’s thinking about?  Lying out there, firing at the Red-Bristled Ghosts.  Odd!  Wonder what they’re all”—­He put back his cigar, mumbling.  “Handful of poor blackguards, all upset in their minds, and sweating round.  And all the rest tranquil as ever, eh?—­the whole country jogging on the same old way, or asleep and dreaming dreams, perhaps, same kind of dreams they had in Marco Polo’s day.”

The end of his cigar burned red again; and again, except for that, he might have been asleep.  Rudolph made no answer, but lay thinking.  This brief moment of rest in the cool, dim courtyard—­merely to lie there and wait—­seemed precious above all other gain or knowledge.  Some quiet influence, a subtle and profound conviction, slowly was at work in him.  It was patience, wonder, steady confidence,—­all three, and more.  He had felt it but this once, obscurely; might die without knowing it in clearer fashion; and yet could never lose it, or forget, or come to any later harm.  With it the stars, above the dim vagaries of the bat, were brightly interwoven.  For the present he had only to lie ready, and wait, a single comrade in a happy army.