“Our hopes!” he drawled insolently. “Here of course is the tentative place-seeker on the very threshold of my inheritance.”
“Now,” muttered Tuke to himself, “this cur snarls over his bone before the sheep is killed.”
“The way in, man—the way in!” cried Luvaine, beating his hands together. “Why do you keep me outside? You can play cicerone to your damned barrow when the stone is in my pocket.”
Tuke caught his servant’s eye entreating, and came peremptorily to the front.
“Of course,” he said to him—“you must enter first and prepare the woman for our coming. Whatever her status, she has the right of priority here.”
“A rat in a drain!” cried the soldier jeeringly. “I don’t stand on ceremony with such.”
“Pardon me, sir. You owe this consideration to my servant, without whose self-sacrificing assistance you were like to go jewelless for all time.”
He made a sign to Dennis. The man turned and went round about to where close by a scarce noticeable passage had been forced through the bramble. The thicket received and swallowed him to the shoulders. A dozen yards in, he faced about, waved to his master, stooped, and vanished. Luvaine, stamping in a fury of restlessness, would not yet venture upon pursuit; but as he padded it to and fro he cast quick, hateful glances at the man who had baulked him.
Perhaps for a minute they awaited the desired summons, hammering their feet on the frozen turf, hugging themselves with their pocketed hands for a little warmth. It seemed impossible that that smooth white desolation could contain any sunken chamber of refuge.
Quite suddenly a cry came to their ears—an attenuated scream forced from the bowels of the earth. To men in their impatient and overstrung condition it wavered up weird and deathly. With one impulse they dashed for the path into the thicket, stumbling and pushing and striving for the lead. It fell to Tuke. Reaching the spot where he calculated his man had disappeared, he flung about like a nosing hound, saw where a loose path of undergrowth was swung before a jagged fissure in the tangle, elbowed it aside, and slipped into a narrow broken tunnel that seemed to undermine the hill.