"Watch me get into the sack!" He stepped into it as he spoke. "Look at what I have in my hand," he went on, holding up his right hand in full view of the audience. "I have a plug of wood covered with the same material as this sack. As soon as I stoop down and the sack is pulled over me I shall thrust this plug into the mouth of it and Mr. Kelson will bind the sack round it. I shall then be put into the coffin. You think you know this coffin but you don't. See!"—and stepping out of the sack he tapped the head of the coffin, which was very broad and deep. "Come closer!" and he beckoned to the referees, whose numbers were now augmented by three newspaper reporters—representatives of the Daily Snapper, the Planet and the Hooter respectively. "Here is a secret panel worked by a spring. I will press, and you will press too."
And amidst a breathless silence—the nine members of the audience on the stage following every movement—Curtis put his hand inside the head of the coffin and touched a very slight elevation in the wood. In an instant, by a wonderfully neat piece of mechanism, a panel slid back, leaving just sufficient room for a man of moderate dimensions to squeeze through.
Everyone now looked at John Martin—he was leaning back in his chair, breathing hard, his eyes starting out of his head, his cheeks white. Hamar saw him and grinned, grinned malevolently, but the smile died out of his face when he glanced at Gladys—the scorn in the girl's eyes made his blood boil.
"All right, Miss Martin," he muttered between his teeth; "you adopt that attitude now, but you will adopt a very different one later on! I'll win you body and soul, or my name is not what it is."
He was interrupted in this amiable reflection by Curtis. "I'm too stout to play the rôle of the corpse, and so is Matt," Curtis said to him; "you must undertake that part. Now!" he went on, "take this plug and get into the sack," and he whispered a few instructions in his ear. Then he tied the top of the sack—in reality tying it round the plug Hamar was holding—and one of the audience sealed the knot. Curtis and Kelson then lifted Hamar into the coffin, shut the lid and corded it. Then Curtis, turning to the audience, said:
"What is now happening inside the coffin is this—'the corpse' pulls the plug out of the mouth of the sack from the inside. The cord thus becomes loose and 'the corpse' is able to open the sack. He at once touches the spring I pointed out to you in the head of the coffin, and the panel slides back—So!"
And as the audience looked, they saw the panel slide back, and first of all Hamar's head, and then his body, wriggle through the aperture thus made.
"The reason why you, audience, cannot see him make his escape is this," Curtis explained; "the head of the coffin is always turned away from you and placed against a mirror which you can't see, and which to you appears but the continuation of the stage. In this mirror exactly opposite the head of the coffin is an aperture, and it is through this 'the corpse' makes his exit to the back of the stage. I will show it you. Here it is"—and beckoning to the referees to come quite close, he pointed to a glass screen, in the centre of the base of which was a glass trap-door, corresponding in height and girth to the head of the coffin. "Here, corpse!" Curtis said, "crawl through"—and Hamar, looking as if he by no means appreciated the undignified task of wriggling on his stomach before so many eyes, drew himself as tight together as he could, and squirmed through.
"Does that satisfy you, gentlemen?" Curtis inquired.
"Perfectly!" the referees answered. "Nothing could be plainer. We see exactly, now, how the trick is done."