“Near the kitchen,” was the reply scarce audible. “Sounded to me to come from the hall,” whispered the other.
Both men changed color, but retained their presence of mind and their cunning. brutus stepped back to the plate-closet, put the bag in it, and closed it, but without locking it. “Stay there,” whispered he, “and if I whistle—run out the back way empty-handed. If I mew—out with the bag and come out by the front door; nothing but inside bolts to it, plan says.”
They listened a moment, there was no fresh sound. Then brutus slipped down the front stairs in no time; he found the front door not bolted; he did not quite understand that, and drawing a short bludgeon, he opened it very cautiously; the caution was not superfluous. Two gentlemen made a dash at him from the outside the moment the door was open; one of their heads cracked like a broken bottle under the blow the ready ruffian struck him with his bludgeon, and he dropped like a shot; but another was coming flying across the lawn with a drawn cutlass, and brutus, finding himself overmatched, gave one loud whistle and flew across the hall, making for the kitchen. Flew he never so fast mephisto was there an instant before him. As for the gentleman at the door he was encumbered with his hurt companion, who fell across his knees as he rushed at the burglar. brutus got a start of some seconds and dashed furiously into the kitchen and flew to the only door between them and the scullery-window.
THE DOOR WAS LOCKED.
The burglar's eyes gleamed in their deep caverns, “Back, Will—and cut through them,” he cried—and out flashed his long bright knife.
CHAPTER XLIX.
WHILE the two burglars were near the scullery-window watching the light in the upper story a third man stood sentinel on the opposite side of the house; he was but a few yards from the public road, yet hundreds would have passed and no man seen him; for he had placed himself in a thick shadow flat against the garden-wall. His office was to signal danger from his side should any come. Now the light that kept his comrades inactive was not on his side of the house; he waited therefore expecting every moment their signal that the job was done. On this the cue was to slip quietly off and all make by different paths for the low public-house described above and there divide the swag.
The man waited and waited and waited for this signal; it never came; we know why. Then he became impatient—miserable; he was out of his element—wanted to be doing something. At last all this was an intolerable bore. Not feeling warm toward the job, he had given the active business to his comrades, which he now regretted for two reasons. First, he was kept here stagnant and bored; and second, they must be a pair of bunglers; he'd have robbed a parish in less time. He would light a cigar. Tobacco blunts all ills, even ennui. Putting his hand in his pocket for a cigar, it ran against a hard, square substance. What is this?—oh! the book mephisto had sold him. No, he would not smoke, he would see what the book was all about; he knelt down and took off his hat, and put his dark-lantern inside it before he ventured to move the slide; then undid the paper, and putting it into the hat, threw the concentrated rays on the contents and peered in to examine them. Now the various little pamphlets had been displaced by mephisto, and the first words that met the thief's eye in large letters on the back of a tract were these, “THE WAGES OF SIN ARE DEATH.”
Thomas Robinson looked at these words with a stupid gaze. At first he did not realize all that lay in them. He did not open the tract; he gazed benumbed at the words, and they glared at him like the eyes of green fire when we come in the dark on some tiger-cat crouching in his lair.