He took out of the boat a large varnish-can, which he had filled with gunpowder, and wrapped tightly round with wire, and also with a sash-line; this can was perforated at the side, and a strong tube screwed tightly into it; the tube protruded twelve inches from the can in shape of an S:  by means of this a slow-burning fuse was connected with the powder; some yards of this fuse were wrapt loosely round the can.

Cole crept softly to the engine-chimney, and, groping about for the right place, laid the can in the engine bottom and uncoiled the fuse.  He took out of his pocket some small pieces of tile, and laid the fuse dry on these.

Then he gave a sigh of relief, and crept back to the boat.

Horrible as the action was, he had done all this without much fear, and with no remorse, for he was used to this sort of work; but now he had to commit a new crime, and with new and terrible materials, which he had never handled in the way of crime before.

He had in his boat a substance so dangerous that he had made a nest of soft cotton for the receptacle which held it; and when the boat touched the shore, light as the contact was, he quaked lest his imprisoned giant-devil should go off and blow him to atoms.

He put off touching it till the last moment.  He got his jointed ladder, set it very softly underneath the window where the feeble gas-light was, and felt about with his hands for the grating he had observed when he first reconnoitered the premises from the river.  He found it, but it was so high that he had to reach a little, and the position was awkward for working.

The problem was how to remove one of those bars, and so admit his infernal machine; it was about the shape and size of an ostrich’s egg.

It must be done without noise, for the room above him was Little’s, and Little, he knew, had a wire by means of which he could summon Ransome and the police in the turn of a hand.

The cold of the night, and the now present danger, made Cole shiver all over, and he paused.

But he began again, and, taking out a fine steel saw highly tempered, proceeded to saw the iron slowly and gently, ready at the first alarm to spring from his ladder and run away.

With all his caution, steel grated against steel, and made too much noise in the stilly night.  He desisted.  He felt about, and found the grating was let into wood, not stone; he oiled the saw, and it cut the wood like butter; he made two cuts like a capital V, and a bar of the grating came loose; he did the same thing above, and the bar came out.

Cole now descended the ladder, and prepared for the greatest danger of all.  He took from its receptacle the little metal box lined with glazed paper, which contained the fulminating silver and its fuse; and, holding it as gently as possible, went and mounted the ladder again, putting his foot down as softly as a cat.

But he was getting colder and colder, and at this unfortunate moment he remembered that, when he was a lad, a man had been destroyed by fulminating silver—­quite a small quantity—­in a plate over which he was leaning; yet the poor wretch’s limbs had been found in different places, and he himself had seen the head; it had been torn from the trunk and hurled to an incredible distance.