Prodded into action, the man stirred limply, and crawled past them toward the mine, while Heywood, at his heels, growled orders in the vernacular with a voice of dismal ferocity.  In this order they gained the shaft, and wriggled up like ferrets into the night air.  Rudolph, standing as in a well, heard a volley of questions and a few timid answers, before the returning legs of his comrade warned him to dodge back into the tunnel.

Again the two men crept forward on their expedition; and this time the leader talked without lowering his voice.

“That chap,” he declared, “was fairly chattering with fright.  Coolie, it seems, who came back to find his betel-box.  The rest are all outside eating their rice.  We have a clear track.”

They stumbled on their powder-sacks, caught hold, and dragged them, at first easily down the incline, then over a short level, then arduously up a rising grade, till the work grew heavy and hot, and breath came hard in the stifled burrow.

“Far enough,” said Heywood, puffing.  “Pile yours here.”

Rudolph, however, was not only drenched with sweat, but fired by a new spirit, a spirit of daring.  He would try, down here in the bowels of the earth, to emulate his friend.

“But let us reconnoitre,” he objected.  “It will bring us to the clay-pit where I saw them digging.  Let us go out to the end, and look.”

“Well said, old mole!” Heywood snapped his fingers with delight.  “I never thought of that.”  By his tone, he was proud of the amendment.  “Come on, by all means.  I say, I didn’t really—­I didn’t want poor old Gilly down here, you know.”

They crawled on, with more speed but no less caution, up the strait little gallery, which now rose between smooth, soft walls of clay.  Suddenly, as the incline once more became a level, they saw a glimmering square of dusky red, like the fluttering of a weak flame through scarlet cloth.  This, while they shuffled toward it, grew higher and broader, until they lay prone in the very door of the hill,—­a large, square-cut portal, deeply overhung by the edge of the clay-pit, and flanked with what seemed a bulkhead of sand-bags piled in orderly tiers.  Between shadowy mounds of loose earth flickered the light of a fire, small and distant, round which wavered the inky silhouettes of men, and beyond which dimly shone a yellow face or two, a yellow fist clutched full of boiled rice like a snowball.  Beyond these, in turn, gleamed other little fires, where other coolies were squatting at their supper.

“Rudie, look!” Heywood’s voice trembled with joyful excitement.  “Look, these bags; not sand-bags at all!  It’s powder, old chap, powder!  Their whole supply.  Wait a bit—­oh, by Jove, wait a bit!”

He scurried back into the hill like a great rat, returned as quickly and swiftly, and with eager hands began to uncoil something on the clay threshold.