“Do you hear anything, sir?” asked a subaltern of the Sappers who was attached to the force.

“Hush!” said Luffe.

He listened, and he heard quite clearly underneath the ground below him the dull shock of a pickaxe.  The noise came almost from beneath his feet; so near the mine had been already driven to the walls.  The strokes fell with the regularity of the ticking of a clock.  But at times the sound changed in character.  The muffled thud of the pick upon earth became a clang as it struck upon stone.

“Do you listen!” said Luffe, giving way to Dewes, and Dewes in his turn leaned his ear against the loophole.

“What do you think?” asked Luffe.

Dewes stood up straight again.

“I’ll tell you what I am thinking.  I am thinking it sounds like the beating of a clock in a room where a man lies dying,” he said.

Luffe nodded his head.  But images and romantic sayings struck no response from him.  He turned to the young Sapper.

“Can we countermine?”

The young Engineer took the place of Major Dewes.

“We can try, but we are late,” said he.

“It must be a sortie then,” said Luffe.

“Yes,” exclaimed Lynes eagerly.  “Let me go, Sir Charles!”

Luffe smiled at his enthusiasm.

“How many men will you require?” he asked.  “Sixty?”

“A hundred,” replied Dewes promptly.

All that night Luffe superintended the digging of the countermine, while Dewes made ready for the sortie.  By daybreak the arrangements were completed.  The gunpowder bags, with their fuses attached, were distributed, the gates were suddenly flung open, and Lynes raced out with a hundred Ghurkhas and Sikhs across the fifty yards of open ground to the sangar behind which the mine shaft had been opened.  The work of the hundred men was quick and complete.  Within half an hour, Lynes, himself wounded, had brought back his force, and left the mine destroyed.  But during that half-hour disaster had fallen upon the garrison.  Luffe had dropped as he was walking back across the courtyard to his office.  For a few minutes he lay unnoticed in the empty square, his face upturned to the sky, and then a clamorous sound of lamentation was heard and an orderly came running through the alleys of the Fort, crying out that the Colonel Sahib was dead.

He was not dead, however.  He recovered conciousness that night, and early in the morning Dewes was roused from his sleep.  He woke to find the Doctor shaking him by the shoulder.

“Luffe wants you.  He has not got very long now.  He has something to say.”

Dewes slipped on his clothes, and hurried down the stairs.  He followed the Doctor through the little winding alleys which gave to the Fort the appearance of a tiny village.  It was broad daylight, but the fortress was strangely silent.  The people whom he passed either spoke not at all or spoke only in low tones.  They sat huddled in groups, waiting.  Fear was abroad that morning.  It was known that the brain of the defence was dying.  It was known, too, what cruel fate awaited those within the Fort, if those without ever forced the gates and burst in upon their victims.