“‘Diable!’ said he. ‘I heard you relieve the sentries! I was close under the wall. It was funny! Have you found where they have put little Jacob?’
“‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Follow me.’
“I led him along the angle of the wall until we came to the casemates where the sentry had said that the prisoners were confined, and then, as we paused before the first of these, the utter stillness was again broken by a paroxysm of coughing; and this time, although no less violent than before, it struck me that there was in it an accent of exhaustion—an extreme exhaustion as of muscles too fatigued to respond even to a reflex.
“‘Sacré!’ growled Rosenthal, and gripped my arm. ‘Do you hear that? It is the little Jacob.’ He flew to the door of the casemate; the port on the other side opened on the sea, and was, of course, heavily barred. Rosenthal smote the heavy door several times with the ball of his hand.
“‘Jacob!’ he called, softly. ‘Jacob, Jacob, my dear little Jacob!’ He leaped back and raised his pick; it seemed as if the sounds of his sick brother’s distress had robbed him of his senses.
“I seized the pick, and he whirled on me with a snarl. Indeed, Doctor, the Jew was like a tigress who hears the wail of a captured cub.
“‘Idiot!’ I whispered, ‘do you want to rouse the garrison?’
“‘Listen!’ said he, and raised his hand suddenly. I listened, and in a lull of the surf there reached our ears a series of pathetic sounds. You know the sound, Doctor; the feeble strangling of a pulmonary patient when too weak to cough, something between a cough and a rattle—and then it suddenly ceased and there came to our ears, in a voice as thin as a wafer’s edge: ‘Isidore!’
“And then Rosenthal went mad. He knew, we both knew, that Jacob was dying; there was no mistaking that. It would be a matter of at least two hours’ hard work to liberate him without noise, and we both felt that by that time he would be already liberated; and Rosenthal, the Jew, whose habit and training and every instinct was that of weighing cost and gain, decided that he could not afford to wait, garrison or no garrison. Apparently life held nothing which could compensate him for the privilege of holding his crippled brother in his powerful arms while the struggling soul was fighting its way to the God of his fathers. Before I could interfere—and, indeed, I did not try very hard to interfere, Doctor, for was I not paid to carry out the man’s orders?—he had raised the pick and assailed the heavy door with a fury that filled the silent fortress with thundering reverberations.
“Lights began to flash out in the barracks; at a distance a sentry fired his piece for an alarm. I heard shouts and cries and orders, and through it all Rosenthal, the Jew, stood and hewed away at the door, till all at once, even as I saw a squad of men running toward us, it fell away, and Rosenthal, throwing aside his pick, leaped into the casemate, and from the blackness within I heard a fierce sob as he gathered his dying brother to his breast.