A dog yapped; perhaps the same that they had heard barking, a few minutes before.

Then came the faint, sharp tapping of a hammer smiting metal.
"They're knocking out the holding-pins," thought the major.

"In a few minutes it'll be too late, _if_ we don't strike now!" He felt a great temptation to urge haste, on the Master.

But, aware of the futility of any suggestion, the risk of being demoted for any other _faux pas_, he bridled his impatience and held still.
Realizing that they were now lying at the exact distance of 440 yards from the stockade that protected the thing they had come to steal--if you can call "stealing" the forced sale the Master now planned consummating, by having his bankers put into unwilling hands every ultimate penny of the more than $3,500,000 involved, once the _coup_ should be put through--realizing this fact, Bohannan felt the tug of a profound excitement.
His pulses quickened; the tension of his Celtic nerves keyed itself up like a banjo-string about to snap.

Steeled in the grim usages of war though he was, and more than once having felt the heart-breaking stress of the zero hour, this final moment of waiting, of suspense before the attack that was so profoundly to affect his life and the lives of all these other hardy men, pulled heavily at his nerves.