Rees walked on in silence. He was beginning to see some of the disadvantages of having a rogue for a partner. At sight of the grating, however, when they had removed the covering, everything but the excitement of the search went out of his head. Not heeding Sep’s admonitions to be careful, he lighted the lantern, and went down the steps with so much haste that at the bottom he slipped, and found himself sitting in the mud on the floor of the little chamber, close to the mouth of the drain-pipe.
Luckily, all the water had by this time drained off down the pipe, and he was able to make a thorough examination of the walls and floor. The little chamber was about six feet square, rough-hewn in the rock. The walls were wet and slimy, and the floor was deep in malodorous mud. As he slipped into the slush, his heels fell with a dull thud on something which was not rock. Not heeding the mud, nor the whispered cries of his friend above, who was afraid he had hurt himself, Rees groped about with his hands in the slime which covered the floor.
Suddenly Sep was startled by a wild cry. Half beside himself with fear for his companion, he began to descend the steps himself. He saw the light of the lantern moving about below him; the worst had not happened therefore: Rees was alive. As he put his foot on the bottom step, Sep found himself suddenly seized by a strange figure with wild eyes and face bespattered with mud, coated from head to foot with slime. Being a particularly neat and dapper little man in his appearance, Sep rather resented this embrace.
“I’ve found something!” stammered Rees hoarsely.
“Yes, I see you have; and you may keep it, and welcome,” answered Sep, trying ruefully to brush the mud off his own coat-sleeves.
“But listen, Sep, listen, you don’t understand,” went on Rees, at a white heat of excitement. “I’ve found a trap-door in the floor. What do you think of that?”
“Perhaps it’s another drain,” suggested Sep, who was inclined to be sceptical about the whole business, knowing by experience that fortunes are more easily lost than found.
“Nonsense! We’ve got to open it. Hold the lantern and give me the spade.”
Sep obeyed, and stood on the bottom step, a pitiful figure, holding the lantern aloft while he shivered with the damp, grew sick with the smells, and gazed at his coat-sleeves with ever-increasing annoyance to think that he had let himself be drawn into such a crack-brained enterprise.
Meanwhile, Rees, with feverish energy, was cleaning the mud in spadefuls from a space on the floor about two feet square. When this was done, down he went on his knees again, and after several futile efforts, lifted, not a trap-door, but a heavy square piece of wood, like a box lid, which had evidently been sawn out of the trunk of a tree in the roughest manner, and chopped into an uneven square. This was about five inches thick. When it was dragged away, the light of the lantern showed an abyss of blackness underneath, at which both men instinctively drew back a little. After a few seconds, Rees knelt down again beside the hole and peered into it with keen eyes.