He had scarcely heard the question.  He took a step forward, with head raised and shading his eyes.

“Not ours!  One of theirs!” he exclaimed.  “Theirs—­and any number of theirs!”

Driving toward the volcano’s centre were many Brown dirigibles, slowing down as they approached.  Greater eruptions than any from shells rose from the earth as they passed.

“So that’s what they’ve had their dirigibles in reserve for—­for the last desperate defence!” he said.  “The defence that can never win!  Not their dirigibles—­not any power known to man can stop my men.  I have sent in so many that enough must survive.  But where are our dirigibles?  A few are up—­why don’t they close in?  And our guns—­why don’t they fire at a target before their eyes as big as a house?  There they go, and they got one!”—­as a circle of flame brighter than the illumination of other explosions broke in the sky.  “And one of ours is closing in!  Look, both have blown up as they collided!  That shows that two can play at the game!  But what a swarm they have—­more than we knew!  Bouchard’s intelligence at fault again!  However, if they try to stop our fortifying the redoubt our guns will care for them.  That clever trick of Lanstron’s may have cost us a few extra casualties, but it will not change the result.  It’s time we had details over the wire,” he concluded, turning back to the house rather precipitately.  “Then there may be work for me.”

* * * * *

“After hell, more hell, and then still more hell!” was the way that Stransky expressed his thought when the engineers had taken the place of the 53d of the Browns in the redoubt.  They put their mines and connections deep enough not to be disturbed by shell fire.  After the survivors in the van of the Grays’ charge, spent of breath, reached their goal and threw themselves down, the earth under them, as the mine exploded, split and heaved heavenward.  But those in the rear, slapped in the face by the concussion, kept on, driven by the pressure of the mass at their backs, and, in turn, plunged forward on their stomachs in the seams and furrows of the mine’s havoc.  The mass thickened as the flood of bodies and legs banked up, in keeping with Westerling’s plan to have “enough to hold.”

Now the automatics and the rifles from the redoubt to which the Browns had fallen back opened fire.  So close together were these bullet-machines that the orbit of each one’s swing made a spray of only a few yards’ breadth over the old redoubt, where the Browns’ gun-fire had not for a moment ceased its persistent shelling, with increasingly large and solid targets of flesh for their practice.  The thing for these targets to do, they knew, was to intrench and begin to return the infantry and automatics’ fire.  Desperately, with the last effort of courage, they rose in the attempt—­rose into playing hose streams of bullets whose close hiss was a steady undertone between shell bursts.  In the garish, jumping light brave officers impulsively stood up to hearten their commands in their work, and dropped with half-uttered urgings, threats, and oaths on their lips.