m up if you like,"
he said. "He's your man."

Von Wetten and the Baron laughed at that, the Baron civilly and
perfunctorily, as one laughs at the minor jests of one's host, and
Von Wetten as though the joke were a good one. Herr Haase smiled
deferentially, and eased himself into the background by the parapet.

"And now," said the Baron, "to our fireworks!"

Herr Bettermann answered with the scowl-like contraction of the brows
which he used in place of a nod.

"All right," he said. "Stand away from the front of the thing, will
you? You know yourselves the kind of stuff you've buried yes? Also,
los!"

The old baron had stepped back to Herr Haase's side; as the young man
put his hands to the apparatus, he crisped himself with a sharp
intake of breath for the explosion. A switch clicked under the young
man's thumb, and he began to move the machine upon its pivot
mounting, traversing it like a telescope on a stand. It came round
towards the fresh yellow mounds of earth which marked Herr Haase's
excavations; they had an instant in which to note, faint as the
whirring of a fly upon a pane, the buzz of some small mechanism
within the thing. Then, not louder than a heavy stroke upon a drum,
came the detonation of the buried cartridges in the first hole, and
the earth above them suddenly ballooned and burst like an
over-inflated paper-bag and let through a spit of brief fire and a
jet of smoke.

"Ach, du lieber" began the Baron, and had the words chopped off short
by the second explosion. A stone the size of a tennis-ball soared
slowly over them and plopped into the water a score of yards away.
The Baron raised an arm as if to guard his face, and kept it raised;
Von Wetten let his eyeglass fall, lifted it in his hand and held it
there; only Herr Haase, preserving his formal attitude of obedient
waiting, his large bland face inert, stood unmoved, passively
watching this incident of his trade.

The rest of the holes blew up nobly; the last was applauded by a
crash of glass as one of the upper windows of the house broke and
came raining down in splinters. The lean young man swore tersely.
"Another window!" he snarled. The Baron lowered his arm and let his
breath go in a sigh of relief. "That is all, is it not?" he demanded.
"Gott sei Dank I hate things that explode. But I am glad that I saw
it, now that it is over, very glad indeed!"

There was a touch of added color in the even pink of his face, and
something of restles