pring nearly to the ceiling. He
dropped his rope and clung to the door in a panic of dread, his
palpitating heart nearly suffocating him with its wild beating, staring
with affrighted eyes at the machine which had given such an unexpected
alarm. Slowly recovering command over himself, he turned his gaze on
the sleepers: neither had moved; both were breathing as heavily as
ever.

Pulling himself together, he turned his attention first to Picard, as
the more dangerous man of the two, should an awakening come before he
was ready for it. He bound Picard's wrists tightly together; then his
ankles, his knees, and his elbows. He next did the same for Lamoine.
With great effort he got Picard in a seated position on his chair,
tying him there with coil after coil of the cord. So anxious was he to
make everything secure, that he somewhat overdid the business, making
the two seem like seated mummies swathed in cord. The chairs he
fastened immovably to the floor, then he stood back and gazed with a
sigh at the two grim seated figures, with their heads drooping
helplessly forward on their corded breasts, looking like silent
effigies of the dead.

Mopping his perspiring brow, Adolph now turned his attention to the
machine that had startled him so when he first came in. He examined
minutely its mechanism to see that everything was right. Going to the
cupboard, he took up a false bottom and lifted carefully out a number
of dynamite cartridges that the two sleepers had stolen from a French
mine. These he arranged in a battery, tying them together. He raised
the hammer of the machine, and set the hand so that the blow would fall
in sixty minutes after the machinery was set in motion. The whole
deadly combination he placed on a small table, which he shoved close in
front of the two sleeping men. This done, he sat down on a chair
patiently to await the awakening. The room was situated at the back of
the house, and was almost painfully still, not a sound from the street
penetrating to it. The candle burnt low, guttered and went out, but
Adolph sat there and did not light another. The room was still only
half in darkness, for the moon shone brightly in at the window,
reminding Adolph that it was just a month since he had looked out on a
moonlit street in Paris, while his brother lay murdered in the room
below. The hours dragged along, and Adolph sat as immovable as the two
figures before him. The square of moonlight, slowly moving, at last