The mutineers made another and a more determined rush up the causeway, coming up it more than twenty strong, and at the double.  Brown let one volley loose in the midst of them, then led his men at the charge down on them and drove them over the edge of the causeway by dint of sheer impact and cold steel.  Not one of them reached the ground alive, and in the darkness it must have been impossible for the mutineers below to divine how many were the granary’s defenders.

“That’ll keep ’em quiet for a while, I’ll wager!  Now, quick, you men!  Get down below, and follow Juggut Khan, and don’t forget to shut the door tight on you.  These prisoners here are going to follow you—­they may as well go down with you for that matter.  No! that won’t do.  They could open the door below, couldn’t they?  They’ll have to stay up here.  Got any rope?  Then bind them, somebody.  Bind their hands and feet.  Now, off with you!”

Brown spent the next few minutes signaling with the lantern, and reading answering flashes that zig-zagged in the velvet blackness of the British lines.  Then, as a voice boomed up through the granary, “All’s well, sir!  I’m just about to shut the door!” he fixed his eyes on the fakir, and laughed at him.

“You and I are going to turn in our accounts of how we’ve worked out this `Hookum hai’ business, my friend!” he told him.  “You’ve given orders, and I’ve obeyed orders!  We’ve both accounted for a death or two, and we’ve both accepted responsibility.  We’re going to know in less than five minutes from now which of us two was justified.  There’s one thing I know, though, without asking.  There’s one person, and she a woman, who’ll weep for me.  Will anybody weep for you, I wonder?”

A lantern waved wildly from the British camp, and Brown seized his own lantern and signaled an answer.

“See that?  That’s to say, you glassy-eyed horror you, that our mutual friend Juggut Khan has been seen emerging like a rat from a hole in the wall.  I’ll give him and his party one more minute to get clear.  Then there’s going to be a holocaust, my friend!”

He cocked his rifle, and examined the breech-bolt and the foresight carefully.  The fakir shuddered, evidently thinking that the charge was intended for himself.

“No!  It won’t be that way.  I know a better!  I’m taking a leaf from your book and doing harm by wholesale!”

Brown leaned down into the opening of the dome, and brought the rifle to his shoulder.  There was a chorus of yells from the prisoners, and a noise like a wounded horse’s scream from the fakir.  The rest were bound, but the fakir rose and writhed toward him on his heels, with his sound arm stretched up in an attitude of despair beside the withered one.

A chorus of bugles burst out from the British camp, and a volley ripped through the blackness.

“All right!  Here goes!” said Brown.  And he aimed down into the shadowy powder-magazine, and pulled the trigger.