“His room!” cried Fern, putting his hand to his forehead and staggering back.
The next moment they were out on the landing again. The sitting sentry grunted and cocked a bleared eye at them. With a foul curse, and no condescension of question to him, Brander drove his heavy foot at the man with all his force. The fellow started up with a shriek like a neigh, doubled upon himself, and, toppling, went down the whole flight with a noise of snapping, and collapsed in a writhing and coughing heap at the bottom.
Immediately there was a humming uproar of waking men, in the midst of which the two bounded into the passage and scrambled for the door of the second prison-chamber.
They burst it open. The window was flung wide—the room was empty—a fragment of rope trailed from the fire-place.
“Dolts! dogs! bullock-heads!” cried Brander, pelting, screaming with fury, into the passage again. “Where are they? What have you been doing, hearing, overlooking in your damned folly? Let me pass, you worse than curs and maniacs!”
He was wrenching and tugging frantically at the handle of the entrance-door. In an instant he was out, had staggered, had sprawled with his hands to save himself, and had gone with a sliding run into the snow. He was up directly, and shrieking to those within for a light. Some one brought it flurried, and he seized and held it over some shapeless thing huddled against the porch.
“Drunk?” he muttered. “No, by God!” and he stooped and gave a little pull to the inert mass. A squelch of darkness ran out into the snow, that received and held it like a blotting-paper.
Mr. Corby had been stabbed to the heart.
CHAPTER XLVII.
When upon the poor gentleman, starved and re-fettered, descended once more the sick loneliness of confinement, he assured himself that only a little time now was needed to see the quenching of his last spark of reason. He was so exhausted and unstrung—so doubly weakened by this latest wanton cantrip of Fortune, as to feel that the spirit of venture, fluttering within him on a broken wing, was physically incapable at last of the least independence of action. He looked upon himself as one who, having half raised a fallen treasure from a near-inaccessible ledge, has let it slip out of pure carelessness into the abyss; and so regarding his folly, he was miserably ready, like the born gambler he was, to cry Kismet! over his punishment.