Ten minutes later, an army three thousand and five hundred strong marched in through the gap made in the outer wall by a granary that had spread itself through—­and not over—­what was in its way.  There were seventeen tons of powder that responded to the invitation of Brown’s bullet.

XIV.

Explosions are among the few things—­or the many things, whichever way you like to look at it!—­that science can not undertake to harness or account for.  When a gun blows up, or a powder-magazine, the shock kills whom it kills, as when a shell bursts in a dense-packed firing-line.  You can not kill any man before his time comes, even if a thousand tons of solid masonry combine with you to whelm him, and go hurtling through the air with him to absolutely obvious destruction.

The fakir’s time had come, and the prisoners’ time had come.  But Sergeant William Brown’s had not.

They found him, blackened by powder, and with every stitch of clothing blown from him, clinging to a bunch of lotus-stems in a temple-pond.  There was a piece of fakir in the water with him, and about a ton of broken granary, besides the remnants of a rifle and other proof that he had come belched out of a holocaust.  The men who came on him had given their officer the slip, and were bent on a private looting-expedition of their own.  But by the time that they had dragged him from the water, and he had looted them of wherewithal to clothe himself, their thoughts of plunder had departed from them.  Brown had a way of quite monopolizing people’s thoughts!

There were twenty of them, and he led them all that night, and all through the morning and the afternoon that followed.  He held them together and worked them and wheeled them and coached and cheered and compelled them through the hell-tumult of the ghastliest thing there is beneath the dome of heaven—­house-to-house fighting in an Eastern city.  And at the end of it, when the bugles blew at last “Cease fire,” and many of the men were marched away by companies to put out the conflagrations that were blazing here and there, he led them outside the city-wall, stood them at ease in their own line and saluted their commanding-officer.

“Twenty men of yours, sir.  Present and correct.”

“Which twenty?”

“Of Mr. Blair’s half-company.”

“Where’s Mr. Blair?”

“Dunno, sir!”

“Since when have you had charge of them?”

“Since they broke into the city yesterday, sir.”

“And you haven’t lost a man?”

“Had lots of luck, sir!”

“Who are you, anyway?”

“I’m Sergeant Brown, sir.”

“Of the Rifles?”

“Of the Rifles, sir.”

“Were you the man who signaled to us from the magazine and blew it up and made the breach in the wall for us to enter by?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you alive, or dead?  Man or ghost?”