t the sun. Down goes the road!"

The three men sprang to the task at once. First, with their hands,
they scraped away the earth, which was very thin on the face of many
of the beams. When this was removed, there was exposed to sight the
flooring of small beams laid lengthways across the big beams which
jutted from the rock. From this flooring each selected the soundest
stick he could find.

Jack was lucky in dropping across a bit of teak in capital
preservation, a bar eight feet long, four inches square, and as hard
as iron. With this he began to batter at the rotten patch of roadway
where the angle of the cliff was turned, and a few strokes on the
rotten timbers served to tumble them headlong into the raging torrent
below. His father and Me Dain were hard at work beside him, and in a
very few minutes they had broken away the softest part of the road,
leaving a ragged gap fifteen feet wide, just at the turn.

They made the last strokes at the outer side in the very face of their
enemies. When they withdrew to the shelter of the inner angle, the
racing Kachins were not a hundred yards away. In another moment the
fugitives heard their pursuers gather close at hand. The little men in
blue were now only a few yards away, clustered about the farther edge
of the gap, and chattering to each other in a very excited fashion.

Me Dain listened intently. "They make a bridge," he whispered.

"Ay, ay," returned Mr. Haydon. "Drop a few sticks across and come at
us."

Jack gripped his stout bar of teak as a plan flashed into his mind. He
crept forward inch by inch until he was on the verge of the gap they
had torn in the road. Yet all the time a friendly rib of rock at the
projecting angle of the precipice protected him from the long
iron-barrelled muzzle-loaders carried by U Saw's retainers.

The expert hands of the Kachins made short work of tearing up a number
of small beams. Jack heard them dragging the timbers forward, and he
poised his bar. A beam was flung across, and a second almost at once
fell beside it. Out darted Jack's bar, and both were hurled into the
chasm.

The Kachins gave a yell of anger, and threw the next beam across at
the outer angle, as far as possible from the face of the cliff. But
Jack could just reach it, and that, too, he thrust into space. Again
and again they tried to make for themselves a footbridge by which the
gap could be crossed, but every time Jack's ready bar foiled their
purpose complet