Treading softly for fear of a spark from his
boots, and guarding the lantern well, Carne approached one of the casks
in the lower tier, and lifted the tarpaulin. Then he slipped the wooden
slide in the groove, and allowed some five or six pounds to run out upon
the floor, from which the cask was raised by timber baulks. Leaving the
slide partly open, he spread one end of his coil like a broad lamp-wick
in the pile of powder which had run out, and put a brick upon the tow
to keep it from shifting. Then he paid out the rest of the coil on the
floor like a snake some thirty feet long, with the tail about a yard
inside the barricade. With a very steady hand he took the candle from
inside the horn, and kindled that tail of the fuse; and then replacing
his light, he recrossed the open timber-work, and swiftly remounted the
ladder of escape. "Twenty minutes' or half an hour's grace," he thought,
"and long before that I shall be at the yew-tree."
But, as he planted his right foot sharply upon the top step of the
ladder, that step swung back, and cast him heavily backwards to the
bottom. The wedge had dropped out, and the step revolved like the
treadle of a fox-trap.
For a minute or two he lay stunned and senseless, with the lantern
before him on its side, and the candle burning a hole in the bubbly
horn. Slowly recovering his wits, he strove to rise, as the deadly peril
was borne in upon him. But instead of rising, he fell back again with a
curse, and then a long-drawn groan; for pain (like the thrills of a man
on the rack) had got hold of him and meant to keep him.
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