“Climb down the broken brickwork and drop.” He drew off his boots. “I shall take him by surprise. Don’t let any one fire, whatever you do. It would explode the powder at once. Be off.” Winlock obeyed, and hurried to alarm the Colonel, after hastily calling down the sentries, the noise of whose own footsteps effectually prevented their noticing any suspicious sound. Richard St George Keeling had just received his name, and was accepting the congratulations of the representatives of the regiment on the auspicious event with his usual composure, when Winlock came into the courtyard and drew Colonel Graham aside. Before he could utter a word, however, there was an explosion which seemed to shake the very foundations of the fort, followed by the collapse of various portions of the newly-repaired defences. “I’m afraid the wall’s gone, sir,” gasped Winlock, when he recovered himself. “Not a bit of it,” said the Colonel, pointing to the dark line above the roofs; but before anything more could be said, the sentry on the north-west tower gave the alarm. There was no time for anything but a rush to the walls, which were only reached just as a hurrying mob of men, some carrying torches, others scaling-ladders, advanced in wild confusion, shouting and singing, from the shelter of the plane trees. A couple of volleys sent them flying back in headlong rout, and beyond a shot or two from General Keeling’s house there was no semblance of an attack on any other side of the fort. The officers gathered on the rampart looked at one another in complete mystification. “I never remember a worse-planned attack,” said Colonel Graham. “In fact there was no plan about it. And yet the explosion----” “Yes, but how came it to do so little damage?” said Dick. Some additional masses of brickwork had been torn from the tower, and the sand-bags were flung about, but the wall was comparatively uninjured. “Probably the powder became ignited before it was properly placed in position,” suggested Mr Burgrave. “If the man in charge intended to use a slow match, the attack may only have been planned for dawn, so that the various parties were naturally not prepared. This fiasco here was a kind of drunken forlorn hope, started simply by the noise of the explosion.” “Yes, but why should the powder get ignited? Why, Winlock!” The young man had made his appearance with his arms full of rope. “I want to go down and look for Anstruther, sir. He must be awfully hurt, for he was going to try and stop the explosion.” Half-an-hour later Mabel and Flora, waiting anxiously in the verandah to learn the result of the attack, heard in the passage the slow tread of a body of men carrying something. Dick was at their head. “We’ll bring him in here, as the hospital is full,” he was saying. “As I shall be away, there’ll be the room I had last night to spare, and the ladies will help to look after him.” “Who is it? What has happened?” asked the two girls together.