The word “gunpowder” seemed to have brought soldiers to the spot in a sort of natural sequence.  There was more quick saluting and short orders, and then all disappeared but one bronzed-looking sergeant, who followed the engineer stripling up and down as he jerked his head, and pulled his moustache, and seemed to have some design upon the gutters of the house-eaves, which took a good deal of explaining and saluting.  Then we heard wheels and running footsteps, and I became sensible of great relief from the pressure of the crowd.  The soldiers had come back again, running a hand-cart with four barrels of gunpowder, and the public made way for them even more respectfully than for the governor.  As they set it down and wiped their faces, the sergeant began to give orders rather more authoritatively than his superior, and he also pointed to the gutters; on which the soldiers vanished as before.

“Can’t we help, I wonder?” said I.

“That’s just what I’m thinking,” said Dennis, and he strode up to the officer.  But he was busy with his subordinate.

“Well, sergeant?”

“Not a fuse in the place, sir.”

“Pretty state of things!  Get a hatchet.”

“They sent one, sir.”

“All right.  This is the house.”

“The roof ’as caught, you know, sir?”

“The less time to waste,” was the reply, and the young man took up a barrel in his hands and walked in with it, kicking the door open with his foot.  The sergeant must almost have trodden on his officer’s heels, as he followed with the second, and before I could speak Dennis had shouldered the third.

“Here’s diversion!” said he, and away he went.

There was the fourth barrel and there was I. I confess that I felt a twinge, but I followed the rest, and my barrel behaved as well as if it had been a cask of molasses, though the burning wood fell thickly over us all.  As I groped my way in, the sergeant and Dennis came out, and by the time that they and some soldiers returned, dragging pieces of house-gutters after them, the fantastic young officer was pouring the gunpowder into a heap in the middle of the floor, by the light of a corner of the ceiling which was now on fire, and I was holding up a shutter, under his orders, to protect it from premature sparks.  When he set down the barrel he shook some dirt from his fingers, and then pushing back his white shirt-sleeves from his wrists; he filled his joined hands as full with gunpowder as they would hold, and separating them very slightly let a tiny stream run out on to the floor as he walked backwards; and, as fast as this train was laid, the thin line was covered from falling embers by the gutters turned over it upside down.  Through the room, down along a passage between two houses, and so into the street, where the crowd had more or less assembled again.  Then the officer emptied his hands, dusted them together, and said, “Clear everybody out.”