"These gutter scrapings of a hundred ports and a thousand prisons" was what he called "the new lot" who had supplanted Keller Bey.
I think he secretly rejoiced. For, so long as it was a matter of fighting the elected Commune with Keller Bey at its head, he knew that the Chief had been lukewarm about extreme measures. He had even negotiated in the early time, which Jack Jaikes called "a burning shame. The best way to negotiate wi' a rattlesnake is to break his back wi' a stick!" He recognised, however, it was no use holding back when the Chief said "March!"
"But noo, lad," he confided to me, "they are coming for what they will get. They are going to harry and burn and kill. There are four women yonder, and Dennis kens as well as me that if they win in on us, it will be death and hell following after. So he will let us turn on the fire-hose from the first, and let off no volleys in the air. That suits Jack Jaikes. This is no Sunday-school treat wi' tugs-o'-war and shying at Aunt Sally for coco-nits! Aye, a-richt, you below—haud a wee, I'm comin'!"
He had hardly remained five minutes with me, but he had put some iron into my blood. We were no longer fighting against theorists like Keller Bey, or broad-beamed, first-class mechanicians like the Père Félix.
And then the women—they would not bear thinking about, and indeed I had not time, for prompt, as if answering to a call, Rhoda Polly plumped down beside me in the sand-bag niche.
"I met Jack Jaikes," she explained. "He said he knew I was coming and had made all snug for me. How did he know? You did not?"
"He must have guessed, Rhoda Polly—perhaps it was something you said."
"Nonsense, he is altogether too previous, that Jack Jaikes, but all the same these sand-bags are comfy, and I can see as from an upper box."
"There is not much to see." I was saying the very words when with a crash a wall on the opposite side of the Cours seemed to crumble in upon itself. There was a jet of flame, a rain of stones, which reached half-way to the defences of the works, and then a gap, dark and vague in the veiled moonlight.
"That was dynamite," said Rhoda Polly, "though the report was not loud. There is, quarrymen say, a silent zone in which the explosion is not heard. We must be just on the verge of that. I wonder if there is more to come."