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By Root 1018 0

immediately; his face would become stern and expressionless once more inside its cat-like ruff of whiskers. There was no reason to make too much of this, however...a man has to be allowed a few personal idiosyncrasies, after all, and the Collector had done a splendid job so far. All the same, the Collector was in complete command of the garrison and everything that happened in the enclave happened at his behest. The siege, in a manner of speaking, was his idea. It would be unfortunate, to put it mildly, if now or at some later stage he should collapse when so much depended on him. So no wonder that people had begun to watch him rather uneasily. Mind you, he was probably still as sound as a bell. And it could hardly be a bad thing that he had come to listen to the singing of hymns. It was a pity that his face could not be seen more clearly in the shadows.

Miriam stood in the light of the lamp. Her face had grown pink, her eyes shone, and her breast heaved. She had never sung so thrillingly before.

“Yes,” thought Fleury, “she’s going at it hammer and tongs for his benefit!” Full of self-pity he made his way back to his lonely charpoy in the banqueting-hall.

The following morning he and Harry waited tensely with their horses in the shelter of Dr Dunstaple’s house for the signal that Cutter was ready to spring his mine. The sortie was to be led by Lieutenant Peterson. A number of other gentlemen were also there, including Mr Ronald Rose, one of the railway engineers, Mr Simmons, the skin of whose face had now been totally flayed by the sun, and the Schleissner brothers, Claude and Michael, both ensigns from Captainganj.

“I say, I’ve just remembered, it’s my birthday today,” Fleury remarked casually to Harry, and then scowled at his blunder; he had not meant to tell anyone, then he had blurted it out.

“Many happy returns,” said Harry, rather absentmindedly. He would have shown more interest but in a few moments, whirling his sabre, he would be riding for the enemy lines. Beside this crimson thought Fleury’s birthday seemed anaemic.

Fleury clenched his teeth morosely, thinking: “Cutter is taking a devilish long time with his mine.”

As a matter of fact, Fleury had something else on his mind besides his birthday. Recently he had been employing his idle hours (for a siege can be very dull to a man of culture) in a deep and thorough investigation of the military arts. Like the Collector he believed that nothing need be outside the scope of the man of intelligence. And so he had made a rapid, sceptical reading of the Collector’s authorities, Vauban and so forth, groaning derisively to Harry over their lack of imagination, errors of logic, and sluggish mental processes. The only idea which had caused him any enthusiasm he had found in Carnot, who had attempted to prove mathematically that by using a thirteen-inch mortar to discharge six hundred iron balls at a time any besieging force could be rapidly wiped out.

For three or four days he had pestered the Collector with offers of advice, but then his enthusiasm for Carnot’s idea had lapsed in favour of one of his own. This was a design for a new weapon which would, he believed, create a revolution in the cavalry charge. Now, the great difficulty in the cavalry charge, as Fleury saw it, is that you very often have to deal with two of the enemy at once, with the result that while you are cutting the head off one of your assailants his companion is doing the same for you. The weapon which Fleury had designed and made for himself in order to overcome this difficulty resembled a giant pitchfork with prongs roughly at a distance of a man’s outstretched arms; it also had a wide tail, like that of a magnified bishop’s crozier which, reversed, could be used for dragging people off horses; on the shaft, for psychological reasons, there fluttered a small Union Jack. His only problem was to find a place to attach the weapon to his saddle. For the time being the prongs of the instrument (which he had christened the Fleury Cavalry Eradicator) sprouted over his horse’s head like a pair of weird