“I meant Gurther,” she said.
“Well, I know you meant Gurther, young miss,” he said stiffly.
To get back to the house they had to make a half-circle of the factory and pass between the canal wall and the building itself. The direct route would have taken them into a deep hollow into which the debris of years had been thrown, and which now Nature, in her kindness, had hidden under a green mantle of wild convolvulus. It was typical of the place that the only beautiful picture in the grounds was out of sight.
They were just turning the corner of the factory when the doctor stopped and looked up at the high wall, which was protected by a cheval de frise of broken glass. All except in one spot, about two feet wide, where not only the glass but the mortar which held it in place had been chipped off. There were fragments of the glass, and, on the inside of the wall, marks of some implement on the hard surface of the mortar.
“So!” said the doctor.
He was examining the scratches on the wall.
“Wait,” he ordered, and hurried back into the factory, to return, carrying in each hand two large rusty contraptions which he put on the ground.
One by one he forced open the jagged rusty teeth until they were wide apart and held by a spring catch. She had seen things like that in a museum. They were man-traps—relics of the barbarous days when trespass was not only a sin but a crime.
He fixed the second of the traps on the path between the factory and the wall.
“Now we shall see,” he said. “Forward!”