“Stoesst an!” said the rescuer, and chuckled something in dispraise of women.  “Is that not better?”

The rice-brandy was hot and potent; for of a sudden Rudolph found himself afoot and awake.  A dizzy warmth cleared his spirit.  He understood perfectly.  This man, for some strange reason, was Wutzler, a coolie and yet a brother from the fatherland.  He and his nauseous alien brandy had restored the future.  There was more to do.

“Come on.”  The forsaken lover was first man up the bank.  “See!” he cried, pointing to a new flare in the distance.  The whole region was now aglow like a furnace, and filled with smoke, with prolonged yells, and a continuity of explosions that ripped the night air like tearing silk.  “Her house is burning now.”

“You left in time.”  Wutzler shuffled before him, with the trot of a lean and exhausted laborer.  “I was with the men you fought, when you ran.  I followed to the house, and then here, to the river.  I was glad you did not jump on board.”  He glanced back, timidly, for approbation.  “I am a great coward, Herr Heywood told me so,—­but I also stay and help.”

He steered craftily among the longest and blackest shadows, now jogging in a path, now threading the boundary of a rice-field, or waiting behind trees; and all the time, though devious and artful as a deer-stalker, crept toward the centre of the noise and the leaping flames.  When the quaking shadows grew thin and spare, and the lighted clearings dangerously wide, he swerved to the right through a rolling bank of smoke.  They coughed as they ran.

Once Rudolph paused, with the heat of the fire on his cheeks.

“The nunnery is burning,” he said hopelessly.

His guide halted, peered shrewdly, and listened.

“No, they are still shooting,” he answered, and limped onward, skirting the uproar.

At last, when by pale stars above the smoke and flame and sparks, Rudolph judged that they were somewhere north of the nunnery, they came stumbling down into a hollow encumbered with round, swollen obstacles.  Like a patch of enormous melons, oil-jars lay scattered.

“Hide here, and wait,” commanded Wutzler.  “I will go see.”  And he flitted off through the smoke.

Smuggled among the oil-jars, Rudolph lay panting.  Shapes of men ran past, another empty jar rolled down beside him, and a stray bullet sang overhead like a vibrating wire.  Soon afterward, Wutzler came crawling through the huddled pottery.

“Lie still,” he whispered.  “Your friends are hemmed in.  You cannot get through.”

The smell of rancid oil choked them, yet they could breathe without coughing, and could rest their smarting eyes.  In the midst of tumult and combustion, the hollow lay dark as a pool.  Along its rim bristled a scrubby fringe of weeds, black against a rosy cloud.

After a time, something still blacker parted the weeds.  In silhouette, a man’s head, his hand grasping a staff or the muzzle of a gun, remained there as still as though, crawling to the verge, he lay petrified in the act of spying.