The dead might try to make their way out of the grave itself with as good hope of success as there was for the imprisoned Freibergers to force a passage through the mass of débris that covered them; indeed, they could never have done it had not many stout arms and willing hearts aided in their desperate toil.
'Thirteen men and four beasts of burden!' sorrowfully exclaimed Roller, who had himself escaped destruction as though by a miracle. 'And my brave old comrade, the miller of Erbisdorf, gone at last. We two were carrying the very same cask of water, yet here am I, while he is gone. Ah, it is indeed true, "The one shall be taken and the other left."'
'I say, neighbour Roller!' cried a muffled voice that seemed to come from the depths of the earth, 'help me on to my legs again, for mercy's sake. Here are clods, and stones, and bits of wood jamming me in on all sides; and here's a donkey's head, and I declare he's trying to prick his ears!'
With Roller's help the worthy miller was soon landed once more on terra firma. He found himself severely shaken and bruised, but not otherwise injured, and begged his comrade to see him safe home. Although his body was in pain, his spirit was by no means cast down. When he learned that besides killing three men and severely wounding five others, the exploded mine had cost the lives of two of his donkeys, he remarked: 'Ah, ha! Then they too have died for their fatherland, and will sleep in the temple of fame. I can tell you one thing, though; if the flour does choke us millers up a bit, I'd ten times rather have to do with that than with your Freiberg earth. There's something so big and massive about everything belonging to war, you very soon get enough of it. What will my Anna Maria say when she sees her husband brought home like a flattened pancake?'
As soon as Roller had seen his friend safely housed, and had made himself presentable, he hastened back to the Peter Gate, which seemed, as he approached it, to be all in flames. The wood and twigs the Swedes had piled against the defensive works before the bastion, had been set on fire. The rising flames cast a dreadful glare around, destroyed several of the works in question, and set fire to parts of the tower above the gate, which, falling into the covered gallery in rear of the bastion, threatened to set that too in a blaze. The besieged were able to avert this last calamity by the steady use of water, though the enemy pressed them hard all the time with artillery-fire and hand-grenades.
'The Swedes have set all the elements to work against us,' said Roller to himself. 'They have cut off our water supply, made war on us under the earth, tried to blow us up into the air, and now they turn against us the might of fire. And side by side with these great powers of nature stalks the pale phantom of death.'
CHAPTER IX.
DIVERSE HUMAN HEARTS.
'The miner Roller waits without, respected Herr Burgomaster!' announced Jüchziger, the town servant.