“Do you know enough to time a fuse?” he whispered.  “Neither do I. Powder’s bad, anyhow.  We must guess at it.  Here, quick, lend me a knife.”  He slashed open one of the lower sacks in the bulkhead by the door, stuffed in some kind of twisted cord, and, edging away, sat for an instant with his knife-blade gleaming in the ruddy twilight.  “How long, Rudie, how long?” He smothered a groan.  “Too long, or too short, spoils everything.  Oh, well—­here goes.”

The blade moved.

“Now lie across,” he ordered, “and shield the tandstickor.”  With a sudden fuff, the match blazed up to show his gray eyes bright and dancing, his face glossy with sweat; below, on the golden clay, the twisted, lumpy tail of the fuse, like the end of a dusty vine.  Darkness followed, quick and blinding.  A rosy, fitful coal sputtered, darting out short capillary lines and needles of fire.

“Cut sticks—­go like the devil!  If it blows up, and caves the earth on us—­” Heywood ran on hands and knees, as if that were his natural way of going.  Rudolph scrambled after, now urged by an ecstasy of apprehension, now clogged as by the weight of all the hill above them.  If it should fall now, he thought, or now; and thus measuring as he crawled, found the tunnel endless.

When at last, however, they gained the bottom of the shaft, and were hoisted out among their coolies on the shelving mound, the evening stillness lay above and about them, undisturbed.  The fuse could never have lasted all these minutes.  Their whole enterprise was but labor lost.  They listened, breathing short.  No sound came.

“Gone out,” said Heywood, gloomily.  “Or else they saw it.”

He climbed the bamboo scaffold, and stood looking over the wall.  Rudolph perched beside him,—­by the same anxious, futile instinct of curiosity, for they could see nothing but the night and the burning stars.

“Gone out.  Underground again, Rudie, and try our first plan.”  Heywood turned to leap down.  “The Sword-Pen looks to set off his mine to-morrow morning.”

He clutched the wall in time to save himself, as the bamboo frame leapt underfoot.  Outside, the crest of the slope ran black against a single burst of flame.  The detonation came like the blow of a mallet on the ribs.

“Let him look!  Let him look!” Heywood jumped to the ground, and in a pelting shower of clods, exulted:—­

“He looked again, and saw it was
The middle of next week!”

“Come on, brother mole.  Spread the news!”

He ran off, laughing, in the wide hush of astonishment.

CHAPTER XX

THE HAKKA BOAT

“Pretty fair,” Captain Kneebone said.  “But that ain’t the end.”

This grudging praise—­in which, moreover, Heywood tamely acquiesced—­was his only comment.  On Rudolph it had singular effects:  at first filling him with resentment, and almost making him suspect the little captain of jealousy; then amusing him, as chance words of no weight; but in the unreal days that followed, recurring to convince him with all the force of prompt and subtle fore-knowledge.  It helped him to learn the cold, salutary lesson, that one exploit does not make a victory.