Crake!

The other three remain and mutter.  Now they start on their rounds.  “What is that?” mutters one.

“I’ll go and see.”  Click.

“Well!”

“Oh, it is only that brown donkey that cruises about here.  She will break her neck in one of the pits some day.”

“Not she.  She is not such an ass.”

These three melted into the night, going their rounds; and now nothing is left in sight but a thousand cones of snow, and the donkey paddling carefully among the pits.

Craake!

Now the donkey stands a moment still in the moonlight—­now he paddles slowly away and disappears on the dark side the captain’s tent.  What is he doing?  He stoops—­he lies down—­he takes off his head and skin and lays them down.

It is a man!  He draws his knife and puts it between his teeth.  A pistol is in his hand—­he crawls on his stomach—­the tent is between him and the patrol.  His hand is inside the tent—­he finds the opening and winds like a serpent into the tent.

Craake!

CHAPTER LXV.

BLACK WILL no sooner found himself inside the tent than he took out a dark lantern and opened the slide cautiously.  There lay in one corner the two men fast asleep side by side.  Casting the glare around he saw at his feet a dog with a chain round him.  It startled him for a moment—­but only for a moment.  He knew that dog was dead. mephistopheles had told him within an hour after the feat was performed.  Close to his very hand was a pair of miner’s boots.  He detached them from the canvas and passed them out of the tent; and now looking closely at the ground he observed a place where the soil seemed loose.  His eye flashed with triumph at this.  He turned up the openings of the tent behind him to make his retreat clear if necessary.  He made at once for the loose soil, and the moment he moved forward Robinson’s gut-lines twisted his feet from under him.  He fell headlong in the middle, and half a dozen little bells rang furiously at the sleepers’ heads.

Up jumped Tom and George, weapons in hand, but not before Black Will had wrenched himself clear and bounded back to the door.  At the door, in his rage at being balked, he turned like lightning and leveled his pistol at Robinson, who was coming at him cutlass in hand.  The ex-thief dropped on his knees and made a furious upward cut at his arm.  At one and the same moment the pistol exploded and the cutlass struck it and knocked it against the other side of the tent.  The bullet passed over Robinson’s head.  Black Will gave a yell so frightful that for a moment it paralyzed the men, and even with this yell he burst backward through the opening, and with a violent wrench of his left hand brought the whole tent down and fled, leaving George and Robinson struggling in the canvas like cats in an empty flour-sack.