“Going to have him up for our supper guest, Captain Dick? He’ll be most awkwardly in the way, won’t he?”
“Never mind; bring the candle and show me the way. Why, good heavens, man! what has the poor devil done that we should treat him as if we were red Indians? He may be one of our friends, for aught we know!”
“He’s a Dutchman, and he builds small-boats for the king’s ships,” growled Champe stubbornly; but he took up the candle and piloted the way to a room in the rear, a bare shed of a place, with fire-wood stacked along two sides of it, a dismantled baking oven buttressing the chimney of the fore-room, and a great pile of the bricks heaped upon a huge square trap-door leading to the cellar. From a ceiling beam above the trap a stout iron hook depended, as if the cellar had been a ship’s hold to be filled and emptied with a block and tackle.
Champe put his candle on the oven ruins and addressed himself to the task of removing the door weightings. The uncovering revealed a ring sunk in the planking of the trap, and when the door was lifted, an ill-smelling black cavern, with rude steps leading down into it, came into view.
The sergeant swung into the dank pit and held up his hand for the candle.
“Give me the glim and I’ll fetch him out,” he said. “There’s no need for two of us.” And when the yellow glow of the candle disappeared in the liquor-smelling depths I was left in the dark.
It seemed a long time before the glow reddened again in the darkness below as Champe made his way back to the stair-head.
“Come down, Captain Dick, if your head’s steady enough,” he called. “I’m fairly stuck.”
I promptly lowered myself into the hole, with the sergeant lighting the way for me. The cellar was a curiously spacious underground store-room for so small a house, wide and to the full as high as the rooms above, and the liquor odor was amply accounted for by a double row of great casks, ranked against the walls. Then I saw the meaning of the trap-door’s size, and of the hook set in the beam above it.
“Your Dutchman is something both more and less than a boat-builder, Sergeant,” I commented. “This is a smuggler’s store-house. But where is he?”