The intelligible reader may easily guess that we finished our dinner as quickly as we could, and we put on our outers, sympathising with Dicky and Dora, who, owing to boots, were out of it, and we went into the garden. There are five steps down to that door. They were red brick when they began, but now they are green with age and mysteriousness and not being walked on. And at the bottom of them the door was, as Noël said, not fastened. We went in.
"It isn't beery, winey cellars at all," Alice said; "it's more like a robber's store-house. Look there."
We had got to the inner cellar, and there were heaps of carrots and other vegetables.
"Halt, my men!" cried Oswald, "advance not an inch further! The bandits may lurk not a yard from you!"
"Suppose they jump out on us?" said H.O.
"They will not rashly leap into the light," said the discerning Oswald. And he went to fetch a new dark-lantern of his that he had not had any chance of really using before. But some one had taken Oswald's secret matches, and then the beastly lantern wouldn't light for ever so long. But he thought it didn't matter his being rather a long time gone, because the others could pass the time in wondering whether anything would jump out on them, and if so, what and when.
So when he got back to the red steps and the open door and flashed his glorious bull's-eye round it was rather an annoying thing for there not to be a single other eye for it to flash into. Every one had vanished.
"Hallo!" cried Oswald, and if his gallant voice trembled he is not ashamed of it, because he knows about wells in cellars, and, for an instant, even he did not know what had happened.
But an answering hullo came from beyond, and he hastened after the others.
"Look out," said Alice; "don't tumble over that heap of bones."