been
torn from the ground and hurled in different directions outward from the
buildings, leaving only the contents of a sixth and seventh bag which
had been emptied in a heap connected with the long train before the
others had been laid upon it in a little pile.

They were none too soon, for the last bag had hardly been hurled away
with all the strength that the young officer could command, and while
the sergeant was yelling to him to run, before the hissing fiery serpent
was close upon them.

Fortunately the sergeant's crawling and the following trampling of the
excited pair had broken up and crushed in the regularly laid train,
scattering the powder in all directions, so that the rush of the hissing
fire came momentarily to an end and gave place to a sputtering and
sparkling here and there, giving Lennox and the sergeant time to rush a
few yards away in headlong flight. There was a terrific scorching
blast, and a tremendous push sent them staggering onward in a series of
bounds before they fell headlong upon their faces; while at intervals
explosion after explosion followed the fiery blast, the burning
fragments setting off three of the other bags, fortunately away from
where the pair had fallen.

The sergeant was the first to recover himself, and raising his face a
little from the ground, he shouted, "Don't move, sir! Don't move!
There's two or three more to go off yet."

Lennox said something, he did not know what, for he was half-stunned,
the shock having had a peculiar bewildering effect. But at the second
warning from his companion he began to grasp what it meant, and lay
still without speaking; but he raised his head a little, to see that
beneath the great canopy of foul-smelling smoke that overhung them the
earth was covered with little sputtering dots of fire, either of which,
if it came in contact, was sufficient to explode any powder that might
remain.

But two bags had escaped, the explosive blast rising upward; and the
danger being apparently at an end, the principal actors in the
catastrophe roused to find officers hurrying to meet them, and men
coming forward armed with pails of water to dash and scatter here and
there till every spark was extinct and the remaining powder had been
thoroughly drenched.

"Much hurt, old chap?" cried Dickenson, who was the first to reach his
friend, and he supplemented his question by eagerly feeling Lennox all
over.

"No! No: I think not," said Lennox, "excep