“I have many enemies,” he said. “Some of them are hateful, and I want to tell you this, that if trouble ever comes and that boy is within call—go to him. I know men, good, bad and indifferent; he’s neither bad nor indifferent. And now, good night!”
He kissed her on the forehead.
“You needn’t tell your aunt what I’ve been talking about,” he said at parting and led her to the door, closing and locking it behind her.
He sat down in his chair for a very long time before he made a move, then he began picking up the packages and carrying them to the safe. He stopped half-way through and resumed his seat in the chair, waiting for the hour to pass, by which time he judged the household would be asleep.
At midnight he took a pair of rubber boots from a locker, pulled them on, and went out through the door leading to the balcony, down the covered stairway to the garden. Unerringly he walked across the lawn to a corner of his grounds which his gardeners had never attempted to cultivate. He stopped once and groped about in the bushes for a spade which he had carefully planted there a few nights before. His hand touched the rotting wood of an older spade and he smiled. For six years the tool had remained where he had put it the last time he had visited this No-Man’s-Land.
Presently he came to a little hillock and began digging. The soil was soft, and he had not gone far before the spade struck wood. He cleared a space two feet square and drew from the earth a small crescent of wood. It was, in fact, a part of the wooden cover of a well which had long since gone dry but which had been covered up by its previous owner and again covered by Maxell.
Lying at full length on the ground, he reached down through the aperture, and his fingers found a big rusty nail on which was suspended a length of piano wire. At the end of the wire was attached a small leather bag and this he drew up and unfastened, and putting the bag on one side, let the free end of the wire fall into the well.
He replaced the wood, covered it again with earth, all the time exercising care, for, small as the aperture was, it was big enough for even a man of his size to slip through.
A cloaked figure which stood in the shadow of the bushes watching him, which had followed him as noiselessly across the lawn, saw him lift the bag and take it back to the house and disappear through the covered stairway. So still a night it was, that the watcher could hear the click of the lower door as Sir John locked it, and the soft pad of his feet as they mounted the stairs.