Wishing now that I had taken the automatic that lay on the table beside my bed, I stole into the Gunroom passage. I still thought I might have to deal with one of the servants. In fact, I didn't think very much of anything, except the necessity of discovering the identity of the intruder.
The door of the Gunroom opened into the passage. It was ajar, but not sufficiently to permit me to see inside. I drew it cautiously toward me. The chink of light was more pronounced. A brief mutter of voices, hoarse and restrained, reached my ears. As the crack widened, I adjusted my eye to the opening and peered in.
The Gunroom was a pool of shadows, save only in front of the fireplace, where a single ray of light played upon a preposterous figure crouched on the mantle-shelf. The light came from an electric torch in the hand of a second figure outlined against the dying coals of the woodfire on the hearth. They mumbled back and forth to each other, and now I caught once more the faint noise like the prolonged ripping of tough cloth which had attracted my attention upstairs.
The light flashed on steel, and I realized that the figure on the mantle-shelf was working with a small saw on the panel of the over-mantle containing Lady Jane's verse. As I watched, he suspended his efforts and barked impatiently at his assistant. The ray of light quivered and shifted upward. For a fleeting section of a second it traversed the figure on the mantle-shelf and focussed momentarily on his head and shoulders.
I gasped. The figure on the mantle-shelf was Professor Teodoreschi, the Italian chemist who had accompanied the Hilyer's party. There was no mistaking the tremendous shoulders, the long ape-arms, the pallid face, with its high forehead and heavy jaw. He wore the same costume of shooting-coat and knickerbockers that he had had on in the afternoon.
In my amazement my hand tightened involuntarily its grip on the door, which swung out past me with a loud groan. Another beam of light flashed from the shadows close by, focussed on me and snapped off.
"Amerikansky!" cried a man's voice.
I heard him leap through the litter of furniture, and dimly saw him fling his torch at me. It crashed against the door, and I snatched up a chair, stooped low and lashed at his legs. He tumbled in a heap.
"Hugh! Nikka!" I shouted at the top of my lungs.
I had my hands full on the instant. The man who had flung the torch at me was already scrambling to his feet. The gorilla-like Italian had jumped from the mantle-shelf with the alert energy of a big cat. He and the man who had been helping him were now dodging towards me.