"Now for those chaps up there," said Dennis, with a thrill of exultation. And they bolted for a little door in the thickness of the tower wall. A man named Rogerson was the first to enter, and he went pounding up the winding stone steps in his heavy hobnailed boots, followed by Tiddler, Dennis having to content himself with third place. But their shout, the two rifle shots, and the sudden lull in the firing of the 77 mm. had not been lost upon those above. The boarded floor of the bell chamber was full of cracks and fissures, and through one of them a sharp voice cried in German: "What's going on down there?" "Wait and see!" retorted Dennis at random; and his men laughed at the familiar catchword. There was a great stamping of feet overhead, and Harry Hawke, who chanced to be the last to reach the little door, cast his eyes upward as he was about to enter. A man's head was looking down, and Hawke fired at it. The head remained where it was, but the marksman chuckled, knowing his own powers; and as he stepped inside the doorway something splashed on to the pavement where he had stood, something wet that shone very red in the sunshine. Their haversacks and water bottles brushed against the narrow sides of the winding stairway; and as Rogerson reached the last step a revolver cracked out, and he threw up his arms. Tiddler immediately behind him caught the falling body on his head and shoulder, and passed his rifle to Dennis. "Poor old Jim!" muttered Tiddler, as he gripped the dead weight in both hands, and, using the body as a shield, staggered into the bell chamber. There, in the full blaze of the sun, the bells still dangled from a huge transverse beam; but everything else had been carried away, and the floor presented an open platform exposed to the sky, with a screen of sandbags at its western edge, through which the Germans had worked a Nordenfeldt. There were only two men, and the one who had emptied his revolver into Jim Rogerson held up his hands, crying in a terrified voice: "Mercy, Kamerad!" "Yus!" hissed Tiddler, dropping the dead man and snatching his rifle from Dennis's hand before he could interfere. "The mercy you showed to my mate!" And he ran him through. As the grim khaki figures sprang out on to the platform, the other German clubbed his rifle and made a dart for the head of the stairs, but the man Hawke had shot lay between him and liberty; and, tripping up, he plunged over the edge into space, clutched wildly at a broken beam that still spanned the ruined walls, and dropped with a sickening crash on to the floor below. "Reckon he won't do that any more, sir," chuckled Harry Hawke; but Dennis had already jumped on to the sandbags, and was semaphoring wildly with both arms. "Guns captured! Come on, you chaps!" he signalled. And as the message was seen and understood, a wild cheer rose from the other end of the street as the Highlanders and his own battalion jumped from their cover and tore forward at the double.