“I can name one of those men—possibly both of them!” he cried. “But go on, Captain Page; go on, sir!”
“They made tea and ate,” I went on, wondering what new pool of disturbment I had unconsciously troubled. “Afterward they sat before the fire and smoked. Later, the soldier rose and went into another room, coming back directly to say something which made the officer spring up and go with him. They took the candle, and, as the fire had died down, the house was dark; dark and silent. But after a time there came muffled cries, and a crash like that of a falling trap-door followed by a bedlam of thunderings as if a cataract of bricks were pouring upon the floor. Then a strange little man, dripping and reeking as if he had been soaked in a cask of liquor, dashed out of the house and disappeared in the darkness.”
I paused to give him his chance to lead me. It was a perilous road that I was traversing, but I meant to draw him so far afield this time that he would never get back to any suspicion of Champe or me.
“Well?” he said sharply. “That was not the end of your adventure, Captain Page?”
“No,” I rejoined. “The little man was gone but a short time before he came running back with a mob at his heels—sailors, armed with guns and cutlasses. It did not take us long to understand that the little man was the boat-builder, and that he had contrived to pen his two housebreakers in the cellar.”
Arnold nodded with apparent satisfaction.
“A troublesome friend of yours and mine will probably trouble us no more, Captain Page,” he commented. “The boat-builder’s house is a hiding-place for smugglers—one of a number in the locality you have described. And your armed sailors were a smuggler’s crew. There was a fight?”
“We could not be sure; there was a great deal of noise. But it ended in a fiasco. There was a loophole of escape, and the two cellar prisoners must have found it—we guessed it would be an underground passage leading from the cellar to the boat-builder’s shop at the water’s edge. At any rate, a dim light flickered for a minute or two in the shop, and then a boat was run down the launching ways, with two men scrambling into it at the final instant.”
Again I paused, and once more he gave me my lead.
“They escaped?—got off? But surely you did not give up, Captain?”