So, stealthily, they were on the bridge in the rear of the tower.
'Like a thief in the night, sir,' whispered Jân-Ali-shân approvingly. 'Of that day an' hour, as it say in 'Oly Writ--that's the ticket. An' you lay a holt on somethin' 'andy, sir; even a broken brick's better nor trustin' to Providence--there's a biggish bit on the track, sir. An'--an' don't waste time killin'; it's the bridge we want, not the butchers. Now for it!'
Were there four or five of them, or fifty, in the almost pitch darkness of the little inner room? Chris never knew. It was a confused struggle, short, sharp, silent; till, suddenly, John Ellison's voice called--
'That'll do, sir! I've bagged three on 'em, and can't find no more. Now to business!'
He was out as he spoke in the dim light to lay his ear to the rails. And as he listened, he smiled to see a couple of figures scudding for bare life along the single rails as only coolies can do, in hope of shelter from the coming train in the safety, half-way across the bridge.
''Ave to be nippy, my sons,' he remarked affably as he rose, more leisurely, and, from habit, dusted the knees of his trousers as he turned to look stationwards.
But what he saw there made him stop the dusting and swear under his breath.
A little crowd had gathered on the farther side of the gap; a hostile crowd armed with sticks and stones. And with more!
For a bullet whizzed past between him and Chris, who had followed him out, and the sharp report of a rifle roused the echoes of the city wall; and roused, also, a sudden sense of strain, of anxiety, in thousands within the wall; thousands till then ignorant that disturbance was in the air, or at least that it could come so soon!
Even on the turret, amid the schemers and plotters ready--perhaps inevitably--to fall in with any quarrel, this was so; for something else had been in the air, absorbing the attention. Some of those there had remarked, it is true, on the raising of the drawbridge, but others had been ready to tell of the day, not long ago, when it had been so raised and lowered many times without cause, and without result.