Ken controlled his own instinctive shivering at the thought. He knew that rats and snakes were the two things Sandy hated most. “Just keep shuffling your feet,” he said, “and they won’t come near us.” He shuffled his own feet noisily on the gritty floor.
“If I could just—!” Sandy broke off with a gasp and Ken realized that he was straining at his bonds.
“You’ll never break that twine,” Ken told him. “Don’t wear yourself out trying.”
Sandy let his breath out in a gust. “Guess you’re right.” He moved a few steps. “But I can try the door. Maybe—” He threw his weight against it, using his shoulder as a battering ram.
The wood didn’t even budge. Sandy tried a second time, and a third, with no better results. Then he gave up.
“Doesn’t make any sense, anyway,” he muttered. “Even if we got out of this hole—” He stamped his feet up and down several times, and somewhere a startled rat squealed sharply. “I wish I’d taken the time to hit dear old Cal a second time. If there’d been just two of them to handle—It would have been even smarter if I hadn’t tried to adjust my camera in the light of your flash.”
“How could we have guessed,” Ken demanded, “that one of those old men in the library reading room was a lookout? Anyway,” he added, “we’d have been all right if I hadn’t stopped on the way out to grab a couple of those bills off the table. If I’d reached the door half a second earlier I’d have had it open before Grace got there and we could have been out on the street.”
“I didn’t know you had some of the bills.” There was a desperate note in Sandy’s sudden laugh. “Well, they say money talks. Maybe it’ll tell us how to get out of here.”
“Grace and his friends are going to get us out of here themselves before tomorrow morning,” Ken said firmly. “You could tell that from the way they talked. They’re not going to risk keeping us here when the buildings on either side are opened up.”
“Maybe they’re not going to keep us anywhere—alive,” Sandy said. “Grace didn’t fall for your hint that the police know as much about them as we do. Probably he thinks he could just quietly put us out of the way, without anybody ever guessing what had happened to us.”