Ford snipped out his call for help in the fewest possible words: 

     Arm M’Grath’s gang and bring it by train to Horse Creek, quick. 
     MacMorroghs are trying to dynamite us in the Nadia.  FORD.

Almost without a break in the insect-like tickings the reply came: 

     Stand them off; help coming.

The thing done, the master workman in Ford snatched at the helm.

     Did you catch and hold the pick-and-shovel men from this camp?

he clicked anxiously.

     Got them all herded here and ready to go back to work—­for more
     pay,

answered Frisbie; and Ford ticked one more word, “Hurry,” and closed the key with a sigh of relief.  Then, and not until then, Adair said:  “Is that all, for the present?  If it is, I’m sorry to have to report that the beggars outside have hit upon your gas-pipe scheme.  They are rolling a round, black thing with a string attached down upon us from the commissary.  The slant of the hill is just enough to keep it coming where the ground is smooth.”

From sheer force of habit, Ford disconnected his field telegraph, cased and pocketed it.  Then there was an instant adjournment to the rear windows on the camp side.  Happily, the rolling bomb was as yet only on the way.  Pebbles and roughnesses intervened here and there to stop or to turn it aside, and since it was out of reach of their longest pole, the dynamiters would start it on again by throwing stones at it.

Hereupon ensued a struggle which, under other conditions, would have figured as horse-play.  One after another the three men in the car heaved cushions, pillows, obstructions of any sort, in the path of the rolling menace.  And behind the commissary barricade the dynamiters patiently twitched the bomb by the firmly fastened fuse this way and that to avoid the obstacles, or sent it forward under the impact of well-directed missiles.

Ford was the first of the three to recognize the futility of the cushion barricades.

“They’ll beat us—­they’ll drop it in the ditch right here under us in spite of fate!” he juried.  “Brissac:  go and break the glass in the accident tool-case and bring me the ax, quickly!” And when he had it; “Now get me a piece of that telegraph wire and bend a hook on the end of it—­jump for it; you’ll have to twist it off with your fingers!”

With an energy that made no account of the lamed arm, Ford tore up the carpet and fell to work fiercely, cutting a hole through the car floor; while Brissac broke a piece from the wire and bent a finger-shaped hook on the end of it.  Adair, with his eye at a hole in a window shade, gave his attention to the attack.

“They are getting it here, slowly but surely,” he reported.  “It is going to roll under us just about where you are....  Now it has gone past my line of sight.”  And a moment later, in the same drawling monotone:  “They have lighted the fuse, but there is a good long string of it to burn through.  Take your time—­” then, with a sudden failure in the monotone:  “No, by Jove! you can’t take your time!  The fire is jumping across the road to beat the band!”