“What a day!” choked the Marquis, in a whisper—we feared, somehow, to talk aloud. “You may have thankfulness that you are as lean as a herring, Flint. If you had my weight——”
He sat down on the floor to cool off—and it promptly gave way beneath him. I hauled him out with some trouble, and set him in a safe place.
“I believe that’s a trap-door,” I said, looking at it. “Seems to be meant for a hurried get-away in case of trouble. Not a bad idea. I wonder how he came to leave it open.”
We looked about us. The bamboo that had given us such an unpleasant start on the day before was nowhere to be seen. Otherwise the house was the same. Still—whether it was the effect of the alarm in the night, or simply the discouragement that always treads close on the heels of excited hope—I did not feel that we were nearer our goal. Rather, I felt farther away.
“We must look,” said the Marquis, who evidently did not share my discouragement. “You will look one side of the house, I will look the other, and before Mo will come back——”
He did not finish the sentence, for up the long ladder leading to the door (Mo’s house was the highest in the village) came, at that moment, a slowly creaking step.
With one consent we dived through the trap-door and pulled it flat after us. Then we halted under the house, listening and looking eagerly.
“If he doesn’t see us—” I whispered.
“I think he can not,” answered the Marquis, cautiously. “But we can see him through these cracks—What chance! What chance!”
... It is long ago now, but to this day I am vexed when I think how easily the greasy old villain took us in—how readily we dropped into his snare. That Mo had been perfectly aware of our visit the day before, that he guessed we would come again, had returned early in order to hurry us out, had left the trap-door open in order that we might go through it and watch him underneath the house—had indeed planned the whole thing from start to finish—never occurred to either of us at the time, though, indeed, we might have guessed that the chief sorcerer of the chief town of sorcery-riddled Kata-Kata was not likely to be quite so simple as he seemed.