Then one after another the six men entered. These were the ordinary guests of the master-tanner, the same contrabandists who one evening wished to kill Maurice, but had now become his friends.
They closed the doors, and descended into the vault.
This vault, so contemptuously treated during the day, had become at night the most important part of the house.
Having first stopped up every crevice through which a curious eye might penetrate to the interior, Morand placed a cask upright, and began to trace with a crayon geometrical lines upon a piece of paper.
While he was thus engaged, his companions, conducted by Dixmer, left the house, following the Rue de la Corderie, and at the corner of the Rue de Beauce stopped before a covered carriage. In this carriage was a man who silently distributed to each one the instrument of a pioneer,—to one a spade, to another a mattock, to this one a lever, to that a pick-axe; each man concealed his tool under his overcoat, or mantle. The miners retraced the road to the small house, and the carriage disappeared.
Morand had finished his calculation.
He went straight to an angle of the cave.
"There," said he, "dig!"
And the work of deliverance immediately commenced.