“Yes,” she said, “quite a long flight; but won’t you please——­”

He cut her short, speaking kindly, but with authority.

“You mustn’t ask questions, there isn’t time.  I may as well tell you our lives are in danger.  He’s going to set fire to this wood and——­”

“Oh!” she cried, her eyes starting with terror.

“See here,” he said sharply.  “You’ve got to help me.  We have a chance yet.  The fire will start in this big chamber and—­I want to cut it off by blocking the passageway.  Let’s see!” He searched through his pockets.  “He has taken my knife.  Ah, this will do!” and lifting a plate from the table he broke it against the wall.  “There!  Take one of these pieces and see if you can saw through the rope.  Use the jagged edge—­like this.  That cuts it.  Try over there.”

Alice fell to work eagerly, and in a few moments they had freed a section of the wood piled in the smaller chamber from the restraining ropes and stakes.

“Now then,” directed Coquenil, “you carry the logs to me and I’ll make a barricade in the passageway.”

The word passageway is somewhat misleading—­there was really a distance of only three feet between the two chambers, this being the thickness of the massive stone wall that separated them.  Half of this opening was already filled by the wood pile, and Coquenil proceeded to fill up the other half, laying logs on the floor, lengthwise, in the open part of the passage from chamber to chamber, and then laying other logs on top of these, and so on as rapidly as the girl brought wood.

They worked with all speed, Alice carrying the logs bravely, in spite of splintered hands and weary back, and soon the passageway was solidly walled with closely fitted logs to the height of six feet.  Above this, in the arched part, Coquenil worked more slowly, selecting logs of such shape and size as would fill the curve with the fewest number of cracks between them.  There was danger in cracks between the obstructing logs, for cracks meant a draught, and a draught meant the spreading of the fire.

“Now,” said M. Paul, surveying the blocked passageway, “that is the best we can do—­with wood.  We must stop these cracks with something else.  What did you wear?” He glanced at the chair where Alice had thrown her things.  “A white cloak and a straw hat with a white veil and a black velvet ribbon.  Tear off the ribbon and—­we can’t stand on ceremony.  Here are my coat and vest.  Rip them into strips and—­Great God!  There’s the smoke now!”

As he spoke, a thin grayish feather curled out between two of the upper logs and floated away, another came below it, then another, each widening and strengthening as it came.  Somewhere, perhaps in his sumptuous library, De Heidelmann-Bruck had pressed an electric button and, under the logs piled in the large chamber, deadly sparks had jumped in the waiting tinder; the crisis had come, the fire was burning, they were prisoners in a huge, slowly heating oven stacked with tons of dry wood.