“They are piling explosives beneath the main gate, sir.”
“We shall go to our Maker with a better speed, then.”
“Is there nothing we can do?”
“Nothing, if the relief is not in time. We have still our prayers and a generous supply of these excellent cigarettes.”
Kitterson (at the window): “Ah! they are lighting the fuse. They move away from it. It burns slowly—Guv’nor—sir!”
Almost with a single impulse the entire audience clapped hands over his ears, and, by a caprice of fortune, some thousands of rounds of best smokeless cartridges detonated with a hollow, paralysing roar.
The whole building shook. The long line of the back-cloth snapped, and it swung down from a single tether. Several women went into hysterics, and a quantity of plaster mouldings fell from the roof and splattered among the audience.
Then there was silence—no sound but the soothing hiss of water on red-hot beams.
Eliphalet Cardomay, with arms folded, stood in the middle of the stage, a queer smile playing about his lips; Kitterson had dropped his head in his hands and was crouching beside a table; and then the door burst open, and little Violet O’Neal, “the Colonel’s daughter,” followed by two men in officers’ uniforms, burst upon the stage.
“It’s all right,” she gasped. “The danger—the worst is over.”