"Good-night," smiled the leader again. "Good-night, and bon voyage."
I do not know why I shuddered—perhaps out of fear for Grant; perhaps at the thought of the sacred figure of the Saviour in such surroundings; perhaps merely because I was tired and overstrained.
But with the shudder shaking me, almost like an ague, I turned, closed the door, and made my way down the stairs.
From the second landing window, the yard which lay immediately underneath and the stretch of waste land beyond, looked more darkly-desolate than ever. A single light on the far side of the river made a snake of fire, writhing and twisting as if in the throes of torturing agony upon the water. Otherwise, nothing moved, nothing stirred.
Arrived at the first landing I saw that the chink of light from under the two doors had gone, so that the stairs, leading down to the passage and to the kitchen door, were in absolute darkness. As I reached the bottom of the stairs and turned into the passage, I was immensely relieved to see that the front door stood ajar, evidently as the two men who had just gone out had left it. The whiff of outer air which blew through the opening was infinitely sweet after the reek and stench of opium in the den upstairs. My spirits rose at a bound. Surely I must have been mistaken in thinking the house other than merely a place for the smoking of opium. If anything illicit, anything in the nature of crime, were carried on here, the door would not have been left ajar, as I now found it, nor have been left unlatched and unlocked as it was when I had first come to the place.
All this went through my brain in a flash while my foot was between the last step of the staircase and the passage floor. Then suddenly the picture I had seen, when looking in the eyes of the leader of the gang, flashed before me—the picture of a man in a dark passage, as I at that moment was, and two other men waiting to brain him as he groped his way out.
"It's precious dark here!" I said aloud as if to myself, and in the most unconcerned voice I could assume. "I must go carefully, for I nearly came a cropper over the break-neck stairs in going up."
Meanwhile, I had been feeling stealthily in my pocket for a match-box.
Ah! I had it!
Slipping out a vesta, I struck it sharply, and placing the palm of my open hand between the flame and myself, so as to shade my own face and to cast what light there was in the direction of the door, I scanned the passage as if I had of a sudden become all eyes. Stretched across, just where it would take me over the ankle and so cause me to stumble forward, was a piece of wire. Behind the door, and with what looked like an iron bar, upraised ready to strike as I fell, was a man; and in case he failed to finish me, another—for I saw the white face of him peeping through the chink of the partly opened door—stood outside. And then, as the light in my hand suddenly flickered and went out, I heard behind me the stealthy steps of someone creeping down the stairs.