“You have killed him?” quavered the dry little voice.  “You are very brave!”

“No, no,” cried Rudolph, earnestly.  “He was, already.”

By the scarlet headgear, and a white symbol on the back of his jacket, the man at their feet was one of the musketeers.  He had left the firing-line, crawled away in the dark, and found a quiet spot to die in.

“So!  This is good luck!” Wutzler doffed his coolie hat, slid out of his jacket, tossed both down among the oil-jars, and stooping over the dead man, began to untwist the scarlet turban.  In the dim light his lean arms and frail body, coated with black hair, gave him the look of a puny ape robbing a sleeper.  He wriggled into the dead man’s jacket, wound the blood-red cloth about his own temples, and caught up musket, ramrod, powder-horn, and bag of bullets.—­“Now I am all safe,” he chuckled.  “Now I can go anywhere, to-night.”

He shouldered arms and stood grinning as though all their troubles were ended.

“So!  I am rebel soldier.  We try again; come.—­Not too close behind me; and if I speak, run back.”

In this order they began once more to scout through the smoke.  No one met them, though distant shapes rushed athwart the gloom, yelping to each other, and near by, legs of runners moved under a rolling cloud of smoke as if their bodies were embedded and swept along in the wrack:—­all confused, hurried, and meaningless, like the uproar of gongs, horns, conches, whistling bullets, crackers, and squibs that sputtering, string upon string, flower upon rising flower of misty red gold explosion, ripped all other noise to tatters.

Where and how he followed, Rudolph never could have told; but once, as they ran slinking through the heaviest smoke and, as it seemed, the heart of the turmoil, he recognized the yawning rim of a clay-pit, not a stone’s throw from his own gate.  It was amazing to feel that safety lay so close; still more amazing to catch a glimpse of many coolies digging in the pit by torchlight, peacefully, as though they had heard of no disturbance that evening.  Hardly had the picture flashed past, than he wondered whether he had seen or imagined it, whose men they were, and why, even at any time, they should swarm so busy, thick as ants, merely to dig clay.

He had worry enough, however, to keep in view the white cross-barred hieroglyphic on his guide’s jacket.  Suddenly it vanished, and next instant the muzzle of the gun jolted against his ribs.

“Run, quick,” panted Wutzler, pushing him aside.  “To the left, into the go-down.  Here they are!—­To your left!” And with the words, he bounded off to the right, firing his gun to confuse the chase.