We were facing this last resort in silence, with the misshapen candle guttering down to its final two inches, when the suspense ended in the crash of a rudely opened door in the room overhead, the trampling of many feet and a hoarse murmur of voices. Our devil of a boat-builder had returned, bringing other devils with him. I held my watch to the flickering light.
“Ten o’clock, Sergeant; and we have only two hours before midnight,” said I. “How long will it take us to pull the boat you speak of around to Arnold’s garden, if so be we are lucky enough to have a chance to man the oars?”
“An hour, maybe, if we don’t have to go too far a-sea to dodge the guard boats.”
“Good. Then we have something less than an hour in which to claw or fight our way out of this and get afloat. Work your brain with that end in view, John Champe: our lives are but a means to an end, which is to drag the greatest villain of his time back to justice. Don’t lose sight of that if we have to fight for it; but we’ll not fight if we can help it. Back to that dodge-door again, and we’ll see if we can’t hit upon some way to force it.”
XV
IN THE FOG
CHAMPE nodded and we passed together behind the row of casks concealing the low arched doorway. Wedging the candle in a niche of the stone wall we made another examination of the mysteriously fastened door. Common sense cried aloud that it must be openable in some way from the inside; that no door save that of a jail was ever built otherwise.
“Maybe it will be one of these jamb stones that will unlock it,” Champe suggested; so we laid hold and pushed and pulled on first one and then another of the stones framing the opening. At the third trial we found one that seemed slightly loose and gave a little, and after that, stuck fast and gave no more. But when we put our united strength to it again, it yielded slowly, leaving an angled opening to some dark space beyond, in which Champe was presently thrusting an exploring arm.
“I have it,” he declared. There was a sound as of wooden bolts leaving their sockets, and the door swung open to my shoulder-push, heavily because of a weighting of sand-bags with which it was hung, doubtless to deaden sounds from within or without, we did not know which.
“’Tis plain as a pikestaff now why the pickled Dutchman stayed till we came,” was Champe’s muttered comment. “He hadn’t the gizzard in him to move that stone by himself.”
We had crawled safely through the archway, and into a roomy underground passage beyond it, before we heard a squeaking of pulleys betokening a lifting of the kitchen trap-door by means of a block and tackle. Champe was for hurrying, having an outdoor man’s horror of being forced to fight in an underground burrow, but while I shared this reluctance with him to the full, I delayed long enough to close the weighted door for the halt it might impose upon our pursuers. When he saw what I was about, Champe quickly lent a hand, and what was still more to the purpose, his mechanical head. Slipping one of the wooden bar-bolts from its sockets, he braced it angle-wise against the door so that nothing short of a battering-ram could force an opening from the cellar-side.