Here the robber rider slackened his pace.
The deep silence that prevailed, the thick growth of leafless weeds and briars through which their horse had to wade, all showed that this house had been long uninhabited and the grounds long uncultivated.
Yet there was some one on guard; for when Moloch rode up to the door and dismounted, and holding Sybil tightly clasped in his left arm, rapped three times three, with his right hand, the door was cautiously opened by a decrepit old man, who held a lighted taper in his withered fingers.
"Ho, Pluto! who is here?" inquired Moloch, striding into the hall, and bearing Sybil in his arms.
"No one, sir, but the girls and the woman; and they have just come," answered the old man.
"No one but the girls and the woman! and they have just come! And no fire made, and no supper ready? And this h—ll of an old house colder and damper than the cavern! Won't the captain be leaping mad, that's all! Come, bestir yourself, bestir yourself, and make a fire first of all. This lady is as cold as death! Where is Iska?"
"In this room, sir," answered the old man, pushing open an old worm-eaten door that admitted them into a large old-fashioned oak-pannelled parlor, with a wide fireplace and a high corner cupboard, but without other furniture.
On the hearth knelt Gentiliska, trying to coax a little smouldering fire of green wood into a blaze.
"What the d—l is the use of puffing away at that? You'd just as well try to set fire to a wet sponge," impatiently exclaimed Moloch.
And he went to one of the windows, wrenched off a dry mouldering shutter, broke it to pieces with his bare hand, and piled it in among the green logs. Then from his pocket he took a flask of whiskey, poured a portion of it on the weak, red embers, and in an instant had the whole mass of fuel in a roaring blaze.