Ooh, aha-ha ..."


From a throat of tin, it mocked them insanely with squealing,
black-hearted guffaws. Heywood sat smoking, with the countenance of a
stoic; but when the laughter in the box was silent, he started abruptly.

"We're off, old chap," he announced. "Bedtime. Just came to see you were
all up-standing. Tough as ever? Good! Don't let--er--anything carry
you off."

At the gate, Wutzler held aloft his glow-worm lantern.

"Dose fellows catch me?" he mumbled, "Der plagues--dey will forget me.
All zo many shoots, _kugel_, der bullet,--'_gilt's mir, oder gilt es
dir?_' Men are dead in der Silk-Weafer Street. Dey haf hong up nets, and
dorns, to keep out der plague's-goblins off deir house. Listen, now, dey
beat gongs!--But we are white men. You--you tell me zo, to-night!" He
blubbered something incoherent, but as the gate slammed they heard the
name of God, in a broken benediction.

They had groped out of the cleft, and into a main corridor, before
Heywood paused.

"That devil in the box!" He shook himself like a spaniel. "Queer it
should get into me so. But I hate being laughed at by--anybody."

A confused thunder of gongs, the clash of cymbals smothered in the
distance, maintained a throbbing uproar, pierced now and then by savage
yells, prolonged and melancholy. As the two wanderers listened,--