He turned to go, daring a retort with the tail of his eye. On the threshold he paused. A sinister little laugh had reached him from the bowels of the house. In a moment he strode back, fierce and lowering.
“You have company in the inn now. Where do they sit?”
The landlord did not answer; but, in the gathering darkness of the tap, there was a sound as if his teeth chattered.
Without another word, Tuke stepped into the passage, and stood listening. All was silent; but somewhere to the rear of the building a thread of light broke the run of the panelling almost from ceiling to floor. For this thread he made, and coming plump against a door, burst it open and half fell into a long dimly-lighted room with a trestle-table set in the middle of it.
Recovering himself, he stood at instant guard. The light of a couple of oil-lamps on the wall swam in his eyes and blinded him for a moment. Then his vision cleared, and he saw his company—two men seated at the table, and one who stood by a half-closed door to his left.
The room was full of tobacco-smoke, and a reeking smell of warm hollands hung in the air like a sickly dew.
“Charge your rummers, gentlemen!” said some one in a thin nasal voice. It was such a queerly weak and ineffective voice, that despite a certain awkwardness in his situation, the intruder could not forbear fixing his eyes on the speaker with a start of wonder.
Then he recognized him at once. It was the squab white-haired man, with a face like a hip, whom he had seen at lounge on the window-sill.
Him he had expected to find; nor much less the gentleman like a decayed schoolmaster, whom he had happened on a-fishing, and who sat next to the other.
“Mr. Joseph Corby should be the third,” thought he; and sure enough it was Joe who stood by the door.