“That’s what I’d like to know,” said my companion in a mystified tone; and presently he was showing me the cords with which the man had been bound—enough of them to have swathed the captive from neck to ankles.
The knots had been untied, not cut, and the ropes had evidently been tossed aside in haste. But there was no man entangled in their meshes, and nothing to point out his way of escape from the cellar.
We looked everywhere, as we thought, and carefully, for with this man at large there was an added danger to be faced. How he could have escaped from the cellar was a mystery which was still unsolved after we had examined as we thought, every foot of exposed wall surface for another outlet and had found none.
“We have missed it somehow,” I insisted, when we had made a second circuit of the place, peering behind the casks of liquor and probing, as we imagined, every nook and corner that would have hidden a cat. “There is a secret way out of here, somewhere, and your man has taken it. Let us hope he will stay away until we have borrowed what we need of food and shelter and transport.”
“I’ll drink to that hope,” said my sergeant, who had found an earthen pot and a cask up-ended with a spigot piercing it near its lower chime.
I told him to drink heartily and give the house a good name, but at the first mouthful he strangled and spat and spilled the potful of the liquor in the straw.
“Faugh!” he grimaced. “I thought I knew all the flavors that can come out of a barrel, but this is sure the major-general of them all for nastiness! Whoosh! it tastes as if all the old boots of the British Army had been steeped in it for a month!”
“And yet some other man would no doubt choose it before good, sound old Madeira,” I returned, climbing the steps to the cleaner air of the room above. And when Champe was up: “Shut the trap, Sergeant, so we may eat our suppers without the reminders. It would make a drunkard sick to stay within nose distance of that foul hole.”
Back at our fireplace in the fore-room, we found the kettle boiling merrily. Champe discovered a tea-chest among the boat-builder’s provisions, and a hot cup of tea, made strong enough to float an egg, speedily cleared my head of the bee-tangles, and let me punish, with as good an appetite as the sergeant’s, the black bread and cheesy butter, greased down with cuts from the haunch of boiled ham that Champe had spared from his midday meal.
Not to miss any of the comforts afterward, we rummaged a bit of tobacco out of the Dutchman’s closet, together with a couple of the long-stemmed china-bowled pipes of the Netherlands; and, could we have been assured that we should remain undisturbed for the hour or two that must elapse before it would be safe to take the to-be-borrowed boat out of the Dutchman’s shop at the river-end of the garden, and in it seek fresh adventures, there would have been nothing left to wish for.