Accordingly, when night came, Lieutenant Coleman and George Bromley, leaving Philip asleep in the hut, armed themselves with the ax and the two carbines, and took their way across the lower field to the deep gorge. They had not been there since the night they parted with the captain and Andy, the guide. It was very still in this secluded place--even stiller, they thought, for the ceaseless tinkling of the branch in the bottom of the gorge. They had grown quite used to the stillness and solitude of nature in that upper wilderness. Enough of moonlight fell through the branches overhead so that they could see the forms of the trees that grew in the gorge; and the moon itself was so low in the west that its rays slanted under the bridge and touched with a ghostly light the dead top of a great basswood which forked its giant limbs upward like beckoning arms. Then there was one ray of light that lanced its way to the very heart of the gorge, and touched a tiny patch of sparkling water alongside a shining rock. They had the smallest ends of the string-pieces to deal with, as the trees had fallen from the other side. Bromley wielded the ax, which fell at first with a muffled sound in the rotten log, and then, as he reached the tougher heart, rang out clear and sharp, and echoed back from down the gorge. Presently he felt a weakening in the old stick, and, stepping back, he wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his jacket. The stillness which followed the blows of the ax was almost startling; and the night wind which was rising on the mountain sounded like the rushing of wings in the tops of the pines on the opposite bank. After another moment's rest, Corporal Bromley laid his ax to the other string-piece. Lieutenant Coleman had taken position a few yards below the bridge, with his arm around a young chestnut, where he could detect the first movement of the swaying timbers. Fragments of bark and rotten wood were shaken from the crazy structure at every stroke of the ax, and a tiny chipmunk sprang out of his home in the stones, frightened at the chopping, and fled with light leaps across the doomed causeway. Now the blows fall more slowly, and after each stroke the ax-man steps back to listen. At last he hears a measured crackling in the resinous heart of the old log. He hears earth and small stones dropping from the abutment into the branches of the trees below. The structure lurches to one side; there is a sound like a dull explosion; a few loose sticks dance in the yellow cloud of dust that rises thick and stifling from the broken banks, and the toilsome work of thirty years before is undone in as many minutes.