“This is where we lose out, pointedly and definitely,” predicted Adair, still cheerful.  “Anybody want to try a run for it?”

It was Ford who thought of the two negroes.

“Tell them, Roy,” he said to Brissac.  “Perhaps they would rather risk the rifles.”

Brissac crept back to the central compartment, and the two watchers marked the progress of the inching pole, with its dynamite head and the ominous black thread of communication trailing like a grotesque horn behind it.  At the crossing of the intervening track it paused, moving back and forth along the steel like a living thing seeking a passage.  Finally the metallic head of it appeared above the rail, hesitated, and came on slowly.  At that moment there was a shout, and the two negroes, hands held high, tumbled from the opposite step of the Nadia and ran toward the commissary stables.  Three shots bit into the silence, and the fat cook ran on, stumbling and shrieking.  But the man Williams stopped short and fell on his face, rolling over a moment later to lie with arms and legs outspread.

“God!” said Ford, between his set teeth; “they saw who they were—­they couldn’t help seeing!  And there was no excuse for killing those poor devils!”

But there was no time for reprisals, if any could have been made.  When Brissac rejoined the two in the forward vestibule, the stiff-bodied snake with its tin head and trailing horn was crossing the second rail of the intervening siding.

“We’ve got to think pretty swiftly,” suggested Adair, still cool and unruffled.  “I might be able to hit that tin thing at this short distance, but I suppose that would only precipitate matters.  What do you say?”

Ford could not say, and Brissac seemed to have become suddenly petrified with horror.  He was staring at the lettering on the box-car opposite—­the one under whose trucks the dynamiters were hiding.

“Look!” he gasped; “it’s the car of explosives, and they don’t know it!” Then he darted back into the Nadia’s kitchen, returning quickly with a huge carving-knife rummaged from the pantry shelves.  “Stand back and give me room,” he begged; and they saw him lean out to send the carving-knife whistling through the air:  saw it sever the head from the stiff-bodied snake—­the head and the trailing horn as well.

“Good man!” applauded Adair, dragging the assistant engineer back to safety before any of the sharpshooters had marked him down.  “Where did you learn that trick?”

“It is my one little accomplishment,” confessed the Louisianian.  “An old Chickasaw chief taught me when I was a boy in the bayou country.”

The peril was over for the moment.  The severed pole was withdrawn, and for what seemed like an endless interval the attack paused.  The three besieged men kept watch as they might, creeping from window to window.  Out under the blue glare of the commissary arc-light the body of the negro porter lay as it had fallen.  Once, Ford thought he heard groans from the black shadow where the fat cook had disappeared, but he could not be sure.  On the other side of the private car, and half-way between it and the forty-thousand-pound load of high explosives, the petard oyster-tin lay undisturbed, with the carving-knife sticking in the sand beside it.