I
Josephine Stone and Acey Smith descended the cliff and walked to the upper tunnel at the water-gate of the Cup of Nannabijou with scarcely a word uttered between them. There was a host of things she wanted to say to him and to ask him about, but his present mood entirely precluded it. It made her feel like a child and baffled her so that she was vexed at him and at herself.
In the tunnel he stopped to touch the secret button. As the gong sounded he looked up at it quickly.
“That’s odd,” he remarked, “that sort of prolonged twin-stroke. I never heard the bell ring just that way before.”
When the water in the channel had disappeared he helped her down the steps.
They had progressed about half way, to the point where the channel curved and the lower tunnel should next come into view on the left, when the deep, vibrating alarum of the water-gate gong sang out again.
At his startled gasp she turned and saw racing at them a great wall of foaming, raging water. Josephine Stone screamed out of very terror of it.
“Quick!” he cried as he drew her swiftly with him. “There is one way I may save you.”
She had a fleeting vision of a group of horror-stricken faces at the lower tunnel’s mouth, Hammond’s among them.
The tunnel and the flight of steps running up to it were but a few short paces away, but the raging, death-dealing torrent was foaming at their very heels and the tunnel’s mouth was high above their reach.