“Uh-uh!  They’re not that kind,” Grim answered.  “They’ll fight for their skins.  Have your gun ready, sir.  They’ve laid their plans for a time-fuse and a quick getaway.  They’ll figure the going may be good still if they can once get past us.  Look out for a rush!”

But when the door went down at last in a mess of splinters there was no rush—­nothing but silence—­a dark, square, stone room containing two cots and a table, and fruit scattered all over the floor amid gray dust and fragments of cement.  Grim laughed curtly.

“Look, sir!”

The fruit-baskets were on the floor by one of the cots, and the TNT containers were still in them.  They had tipped out the fruit, and then run at the sound of the battering ram.

Goodenough stepped into the room, and we followed him.  Beyond the table, half-hidden by a great stone slab, was a dark hole in the floor.  Evidently the last man through had tried to cover up the hole, but had found the stone too heavy.  The Sikhs dragged it clear and disclosed the mouth of a tunnel, rather less than a man’s height, sloping sharply downward.

“What we need now is mustard gas.  Smoke ’em out,” said Goodenough.

“Might kill ’em,” Grim objected.

“That’d be too bad, wouldn’t it!”

“We could starve ’em out, for that matter,” said Grim.  “But they’ve probably got water down there, and perhaps food.  Every hour of delay adds to the risk of rioting.  We’ve got to get this hole sealed up permanently, and deny that it was ever opened.”

“We could do that at once!  But I won’t be a party to sealing ’em up alive.”

“Besides, sir, they’ve certainly got firearms, and they might just possible have one can of TNT down there.”

“All right,” said Goodenough.  “I’ll lead the way down.”

“I’ve a plan,” said Grim.

He took one of the fruit-baskets and began breaking it up.

“Who has a white shirt?” he asked.

I was the haberdasher.  The others, Sikhs included, were all clothed in khaki from coat to skin.  Grim’s Bedouin array was dark-brown.  I peeled the shirt off, and Grim rigged it on a frame of basket-work, with a clumsy pitch-forked arrangement of withes at the bottom.  The idea was not obvious until he twisted the withes about his waist; then, when he bent down, the shirt stood up erect above him.

“If you don’t mind, sir, we’ll have two or three Sikhs go first.  Have them take their boots off and crawl quietly as flat down as they can keep.  I’ll follow ’em with this contraption.  They’ll be able to see the white shirt dimly against the tunnel, and if they do any shooting they’ll aim at that.  Then if the rest of you keep low behind me we’ve a good chance to rush them before they can do any damage.”

I never met a commanding officer more free from personal conceit than Goodenough, and as I came to know more of him later on that characteristic stood out increasingly.  He was not so much a man of ideas as one who could recognize them.  That done, he made use of his authority to back up his subordinates, claiming no credit for himself but always seeing to it that they got theirs.