The rifleman nodded.  ’Poor little devil!  He’ll soon be out of his pain, though.’

’Why, there’s heaps of time!  The fire won’t take hold for another half-hour.  What’s the best way in? . . .  You an’ me can go shares, if that’s what you’re hangin’ back for,’ added Corporal Sam, seeing that the man eyed him without stirring.

‘Hi!  Bill!’ the rifleman whistled to a comrade, who came slouching out of a doorway close by, with a clock in one hand, and in the other a lantern by help of which he had been examining the inside of this piece of plunder.  ’Here’s a boiled lobster in a old woman’s cloak, wants to teach us the way into the house yonder.’

‘Tell him to go home,’ said Bill, still peering into the works of the clock.  ‘Tell him we’ve been there.’  He chuckled a moment, looked up, and addressed himself to Corporal Sam.  ‘What regiment?’

‘The Royals.’

The two burst out laughing scornfully.  ’Don’t wonder you cover it up,’ said the first rifleman.

Corporal Sam pulled off his poncho.  ’I’d offer to fight the both of you,’ he said, ’but ’tis time wasted with a couple of white-livers that don’t dare fetch a poor child across a roadway.  Let me go by; you’ll keep, anyway.’

‘Now look here, sonny—­’ The first rifleman blocked his road.  ’I don’t bear no malice for a word spoken in anger:  so stand quiet and take my advice.  That house isn’t goin’ to take fire.  ’Cos why?  ’Cos as Bill says, we’ve been there—­there and in the next house, now burnin’—­and we know.  ’Cos before leavin’—­the night before last it was—­some of our boys set two barrels o’ powder somewheres in the next house, on the ground floor, with a slow match.  That’s why we left; though, as it happened, the match missed fire.  But the powder’s there, and if you’ll wait a few minutes now you’ll not be disapp’inted.’

‘You left the child behind!’

’Well, we left in a hurry, as I tell you, and somehow in the hurry nobody brought him along.  I’m sorry for the poor little devil, too.’  The fellow swung about.  ’See him there at the window, now!  If you want him put out of his pain—­’

He lifted his rifle.  Corporal Sam made a clutch at his arm to drag it down, and in the scuffle both men swayed out upon the roadway.  And with that, or a moment later, he felt the rifleman slip down between his arms, and saw the blood gush from his mouth as he collapsed on the cobbles.

Corporal Sam heard the man Bill shout a furious oath, cast one puzzled look up the roadway towards the convent, saw the flashes jetting from its high wall, and raced across unscathed.  A bullet sang past his ear as he found the gate and hurled himself into the garden.  It was almost dark here, but dark only for a moment. . . .  For as he caught sight of a flight of steps leading to a narrow doorway, and ran for them—­and even as he set foot on the lowest—­of a sudden the earth heaved under him, seemed to catch him up in a sheet of flame, and flung him backwards—­backwards and flat on his back, into a clump of laurels.