The man set about his murder swiftly and stealthily. He had already driven a heavy staple into the door of the Case House, and now, without a sound, he fastened his victim firmly in, using some lengths of brass rabbit wire for the purpose. Then he crept down below the level of the building, scratched away the turf and fern and moved the loosened bricks. He felt the powder dry under his hand, brought a large lump of rotten wood from his breast pocket, where he had long carried it, and struck a match. Soon the touchwood glowed, and he set it down, leapt from his work and hastened away along the path by which Jane must presently approach. Thus he designed to intercept her progress, and, upon some pretence or excuse, draw her from the zone of danger. As to that last point, however, he was doubtful. The amount of the powder he could not accurately tell, and the extent of the explosion remained to be seen. Richard calculated that three minutes, if not a longer period, must elapse before fire would gnaw up the dead wood and reach the powder; and now, as he moved hastily away, the seconds lengthened into minutes, and the minutes most horribly dragged. An infinite abyss of time widened out between the deed and its effect. He lived his life again; and still he peered through the darkness with his eyes, and strained upon the silence with his ears, that he might not let Jane Stanberry pass him and go ignorantly to destruction.
He was a quarter of a mile from the Case House, when it seemed as though the heavens were opened and Doomsday suddenly loosed upon the world. An awful and withering explosion swept the glen like a storm. First there leapt aloft a pillar of pale fire, that rose and spread as the eruption of a volcano spreads. The terrific glare painted long miles of the Moor, and like the hand of lightning, revealed the shaggy crowns of the tors on many a distant hill; while, long before its livid sheaf of flame had sunk, came such a crash and bellow of sound as might burst from the upheaval of a world in earthquake. Upon this appalling detonation a wave of air swept in sudden tempest. Richard was blown off his feet and dashed to the ground; and as he fell, the hills echoed back the explosion in crashing reverberations that rolled out of the darkness, rose and fell, and rose again, until, after a hundred repetitions flung hither and thither over the peaks of the land, they sank through a growling diminuendo into silence. And the silence was terrific by contrast with the awful clamour it succeeded, even as the darkness was intense that followed upon such an unwonted and far-flung glare of light.
Richard Daccombe got upon his feet, and the tinkle of broken glass was in his ears, with the murmur of affrighted voices; for the concussion had shattered nearly every pane at Cross Ways, and mightily alarmed the dwellers there.
When he reached home the young keeper found his parents already out-of-doors, with the whole household assembled about them.
Mary Daccombe praised God at sight of her son uninjured.
“’Tis the end of the world, by the sound of it,” she said. “Where be Davey to?”
His father questioned Richard, and the man declared his ignorance of all particulars.
“An explosion at the old powder-mills, or else a bolt from heaven,” he answered. “I must have passed by the very place, I reckon, not five minutes before the upstore.”
“A thunder-planet, for sartain,” declared an ancient soul, whose few teeth chattered between his words. “I can call home when a com-com-comet was reigning fifty years an’ more agone, an’ ’twas just such open weather as us have had o’ late.”
Mr. Daccombe felt anxious for his stock in certain byres and cow-houses that lay to the west of the powder-mills. But first he held up a lantern and counted the company.