"Frankly, I don't know, father," replied Jack. "I simply put that forward as the only means I can see of gaining a slight respite. Otherwise they will be among us and cut our throats in short order." "Or make us captives, which would be a long sight worse," said Mr. Haydon. "Well, Jack, we'll give ourselves an hour or two longer to look at the sun. Down goes the road!" The three men sprang to the task at once. First, with their hands, they scraped away the earth, which was very thin on the face of many of the beams. When this was removed, there was exposed to sight the flooring of small beams laid lengthways across the big beams which jutted from the rock. From this flooring each selected the soundest stick he could find. Jack was lucky in dropping across a bit of teak in capital preservation, a bar eight feet long, four inches square, and as hard as iron. With this he began to batter at the rotten patch of roadway where the angle of the cliff was turned, and a few strokes on the rotten timbers served to tumble them headlong into the raging torrent below. His father and Me Dain were hard at work beside him, and in a very few minutes they had broken away the softest part of the road, leaving a ragged gap fifteen feet wide, just at the turn. They made the last strokes at the outer side in the very face of their enemies. When they withdrew to the shelter of the inner angle, the racing Kachins were not a hundred yards away. In another moment the fugitives heard their pursuers gather close at hand. The little men in blue were now only a few yards away, clustered about the farther edge of the gap, and chattering to each other in a very excited fashion. Me Dain listened intently. "They make a bridge," he whispered. "Ay, ay," returned Mr. Haydon. "Drop a few sticks across and come at us." Jack gripped his stout bar of teak as a plan flashed into his mind. He crept forward inch by inch until he was on the verge of the gap they had torn in the road. Yet all the time a friendly rib of rock at the projecting angle of the precipice protected him from the long iron-barrelled muzzle-loaders carried by U Saw's retainers. The expert hands of the Kachins made short work of tearing up a number of small beams. Jack heard them dragging the timbers forward, and he poised his bar. A beam was flung across, and a second almost at once fell beside it. Out darted Jack's bar, and both were hurled into the chasm.