Again I chided myself for my fears, when, as I looked up the alley to the street, I saw a group of four men come in stealthily. They said not a word, but I could make out their forms distinctly against the houses opposite.
I was caught in my own trap!
Not quite! They had not seen me, for I was wholly in shadow. I stepped quickly in at my own slide. I pushed it back and bolted it securely, and with my heart in my mouth, I waited at my hole of observation. In a minute more they were close around me, though they did not suspect I was so near.
They also had a dark-lantern, and, I thought, more than one. They spoke in low tones; but as they had no thought they had a hearer quite so near, I could hear all they said.
“I tell you it was this side, and this is the side I heard their deuced psalm-singing day before yesterday.”
“What if he did hear psalm-singing? Are you going to break into a man’s garden because he sings psalms? I came here to find out where the girl went to; and now you talk of psalm-singing and coal-bins.” This from another, whose English was poor, and in whom I fancied I heard the Dane. It was clear enough that he spoke sense, and a sort of doubt fell on the whole crew; but speaker No. 1, with a heavy crowbar he had, smashed into my pine wall, as I have a right to call it now, with a force which made the splinters fly.
“I should think we were all at Niblo’s,” said a man of slighter build, “and that we were playing Humpty Dumpty. Because a girl flew out of a window, you think a fence opened to take her in. Why should she not go through a door? and he kicked with his foot upon the heavy sloping cellar-door of the church, which just rose a little from the pavement. It was the doorway which they used there when they took in their supply of coal. The moon fell full on one side of it. To my surprise it was loose and gave way.
“Here is where the girl flew to, and here is where Bully Bigg, the donkey, let her slip out of his fingers. I knew he was a fool, but I did not know he was such a fool,” said the Dane (if he were the Dane).
I will not pretend to write down the oaths and foul words which came in between every two of the words I have repeated.
“Fool yourself!” replied the Bully; “and what sort of a fool is the man who comes up a blind alley looking after a girl that will not kiss him when he bids her?”