ike a volley, then
dwindled and passed. A weft of smoke went drifting across the taper, and
that too passed. The chapel fell quiet. There had been no visible
result.

At one side stood the white man, half crouching in the act, tense and
expectant; and by the doorway stood the headman of Apyodaw, planted in
the same position he had held throughout, with the rectangle of fading
daylight behind him--a little brown figure in neutral tinted silks....

"They do not strike the big bell until the last ray of the sun,"
explained Moung Poh Sin, without the least quiver of emotion, without
the least break of intonation. "We have yet some moments to wait."

* * * * *

Cloots glared at him, astonished, unable and unwilling to believe,
picturing the collapse, waiting from one tick of time to the next to see
the fellow crumple on the stones. But nothing happened, nothing came of
it, and he brought up his arm and the glittering, compact fistful of
steel, and this time he took deliberate aim.

Again the shot and smashing echo. Again the still pause.

"They will be making ready now," said Moung Poh Sin evenly. "They will
be swinging out the striker of the big bell."

All shadows about the pagoda had run long and black like spurts of jet
and its western edge was no more than lined with copper; only the
topmost peak caught a last radiance and spread and shed a faint ruddy
glow and a patch of that lay on the threshold of the chapel....

Cloots had fallen back to the wall with sagging jaw, with eyes fixed
and starting in their sockets. He was stricken; he was beaten. For he
had come to the end of things known and conceivable. He had reached the
end of the white man's resource and had made the ultimate appeal of the
white man's civilization--and had failed. Beyond lay the incredible and
the impossible. It was rather a galvanic impulse than any reasoned
operation by which he brought up his weapon in both shaking hands,
steadied an elbow against his side and fired a third and last despairing
shot.

From somewhere, from under their feet as it seemed, there issued a vast
booming vibration; the air fluttered to a single gigantic, metallic
stroke. And it was then and not until then that Moung Poh Sin moved at
last and drew from the silken folds at his waist a broad, short-shafted
knife and all with perfect precision and deliberation advanced to do
what he was there to do.

"The time has come," said Moung P