As I have said, the camp was pitched in a small savanna or natural clearing on the right bank of the little river.  This clearing was hedged about by the forest on three sides, and backed by the densely wooded steeps and crags of the western cliff.  I guessed the compass of it to be something more than an acre; not greatly more, since the fire at the troop camp lighted all its boundaries.

On the left or opposite bank of the stream there was no intervale at all.  The ground rose sharply from the water’s edge in a rough hillside thickly studded and bestrewn with boulders great and small; fallen cleavings and hewings from the crags of the eastern cliff.  ’Twas at the foot of one of the boulders, a huge overhanging mass of weather-riven rock facing the camp, that the powder cargo was sheltered; so isolated to be out of danger from the camp-fires.

From the hillside just below this powder rock I could look back upon the camp en enfilade, as an artilleryman would say.  Nearest at hand was the half-moon of Indian lodges with the hollow of the crescent facing the stream, and a caldron fire burning in the midst.  Around the fire a ring of warriors naked to the breech-clout kept time in a slow shuffling dance to a monotonous chanting; and for onlookers there was an outer ring of squatting figures—­the visiting Tuckaseges, as I supposed.

Beyond the Indian lodges, and a little higher up the gentle slope of the savanna, were the troop shelters; and beyond these, half concealed in the fringing of the boundary forest, was the tepee-lodge of the women.

On the bare hillside beneath the powder magazine I made no doubt I was in plainest view from the great fire, and the proof of this conclusion came shortly in a bellowing hail from Falconnet.

“Ho, Jack Warden!” he called, making a speaking-trumpet of his hands to lift the hail above the chanting of the Indian dancers.  “Have a look at that shelter whilst you are over there and make sure ’twill shed rain if the weather shifts.”

Now some such long-range marking down as this was what I had been angling for.  So I came to attention and saluted in soldierly fashion, thereby raising a great laugh among my pseudo-comrades around the trooper fire—­a laugh that pointed shrewdly to the baronet-captain’s lack of proper discipline.  But that is neither here nor there.  Having my master’s order for it, I climbed to the foot of the powder rock.

Here the bare sight of all the stored-up devastation set me athirst with a fierce longing for leave to snap a pistol in the well-laid mine.  For if these enemies of ours had planned their own undoing they could never have given a desperate foeman a better chance.  To hold the pine boughs of the rude shelter in place they had piled a great loose wall of stones around and over the cargo; and the firing of the powder, heaped as it was against the backing cliff of the boulder, would hurl these weighting stones in a murderous broadside upon the camp across the stream.