Two sharp reports of a rifle from without, interrupted the discourse, and Brown, entering, reloaded his rifle and sat down to table.

“The cook’s dead,” he said.  “Fever.  A rather sudden attack.”

“I was just telling Mr. Arkwright that there are no antidotes for native poisons——­”

“Except gin,” said Brown.

Harriwell called himself an absent-minded idiot and rushed for the gin bottle.

“Neat, man, neat,” he warned Bertie, who gulped down a tumbler two-thirds full of the raw spirits, and coughed and choked from the angry bite of it till the tears ran down his cheeks.

Harriwell took his pulse and temperature, made a show of looking out for him, and doubted that the omelet had been poisoned.  Brown and McTavish also doubted; but Bertie discerned an insincere ring in their voices.  His appetite had left him, and he took his own pulse stealthily under the table.  There was no question but what it was increasing, but he failed to ascribe it to the gin he had taken.  McTavish, rifle in hand, went out on the veranda to reconnoitre.

“They’re massing up at the cook-house,” was his report.  “And they’ve no end of Sniders.  My idea is to sneak around on the other side and take them in flank.  Strike the first blow, you know.  Will you come along, Brown?”

Harriwell ate on steadily, while Bertie discovered that his pulse had leaped up five beats.  Nevertheless, he could not help jumping when the rifles began to go off.  Above the scattering of Sniders could be heard the pumping of Brown’s and McTavish’s Winchesters—­all against a background of demoniacal screeching and yelling.

“They’ve got them on the run,” Harriwell remarked, as voices and gunshots faded away in the distance.

Scarcely were Brown and McTavish back at the table when the latter reconnoitred.

“They’ve got dynamite,” he said.

“Then let’s charge them with dynamite,” Harriwell proposed.

Thrusting half a dozen sticks each into their pockets and equipping themselves with lighted cigars, they started for the door.  And just then it happened.  They blamed McTavish for it afterward, and he admitted that the charge had been a trifle excessive.  But at any rate it went off under the house, which lifted up corner-wise and settled back on its foundations.  Half the china on the table was shattered, while the eight-day clock stopped.  Yelling for vengeance, the three men rushed out into the night, and the bombardment began.

When they returned, there was no Bertie.  He had dragged himself away to the office, barricaded himself in, and sunk upon the floor in a gin-soaked nightmare, wherein he died a thousand deaths while the valorous fight went on around him.  In the morning, sick and headachy from the gin, he crawled out to find the sun still in the sky and God presumably in heaven, for his hosts were alive and uninjured.