ied. "Brissac: go and break the glass in the
accident tool-case and bring me the ax, quickly!" And when he had it;
"Now get me a piece of that telegraph wire and bend a hook on the end
of it--jump for it; you'll have to twist it off with your fingers!"

With an energy that made no account of the lamed arm, Ford tore up the
carpet and fell to work fiercely, cutting a hole through the car floor;
while Brissac broke a piece from the wire and bent a finger-shaped hook
on the end of it. Adair, with his eye at a hole in a window shade, gave
his attention to the attack.

"They are getting it here, slowly but surely," he reported. "It is going
to roll under us just about where you are.... Now it has gone past my
line of sight." And a moment later, in the same drawling monotone: "They
have lighted the fuse, but there is a good long string of it to burn
through. Take your time--" then, with a sudden failure in the monotone:
"No, by Jove! you can't take your time! The fire is jumping across the
road to beat the band!"

The hole was opened through the floor, and Ford was on his stomach with
his face and an arm in the aperture, fishing desperately for the loop in
the fuse. It was his success, his sudden drawing of the loop up into the
car, that had shocked Adair out of his pose. Brissac was ready with the
ax, and the instant the loop appeared it was severed, the burning end
cast off, and the other end, with the bomb attached, was safely drawn up
into the car.

The perspiration was running from Ford's face in streams when he had
the engine of death securely in his hands.

"Take it, Roy," he gasped. "Drop it into the water-cooler. That will be
the safest place for it if they fall back on the gun-play."

As if his word had evoked it, a storm of rifle bullets swept through the
car, smashing windows, breaking the remaining gas globes and splintering
the wood-work. Again and again the flashes leaped out of the surrounding
shadows and the air was sibilant with whining missiles.

Brissac had the infernal machine: at first he fell upon it and covered
it with his body; afterward he crawled with it into the nearest
state-room and muffled it in a roll of berth mattresses.

When the storm ceased, as suddenly as it had begun, they crept together
in the vestibule farthest from the commissary lead-hurling volcano to
count the casualties.

There was none; not even a bullet score or a splinter-wound to show for
the hot bombardment, though t