“What is it?” I asked, but only with my eyes.
“There is some one stirring in the room beyond,” he said in a half-whisper. “Who is your neighbor, Captain Dick?”
Matching his tone, I said that I knew none of my fellow lodgers save Lieutenant Castner, and that I did not know the placing of the lieutenant’s room.
“We were full careless,” said my companion. And then he got upon his feet with no more noise than a cat would have made and suddenly extinguished the candle. The firelight still flung long shadows about the room, and in the shelter of the broadest of them Champe glided away to the wall of suspicion and examined it foot by foot with scrutinizing eyes and gently gliding finger-tips. When he crept back to me he was holding out a forefinger the end of which was whitened with powdered lime.
“That tells the tale,” he whispered. “There’s a whiff of this dust on the floor, and above it, at the height of a man’s head, a peep-hole the size of a goose-quill. We must know who is in that room, Captain Dick.”
Here was a crude peril at the very outset of things; but what the sergeant said was very true. We must know who our spy was at all costs. Taking off our shoes we passed silently into the corridor and found the neighboring door by feeling cautiously for it in the dark. It was on the latch, and after listening breathlessly for a full minute we opened the door by slow inchings and listened again. Still there was no sound, and now we entered the room, groping blindly, first for impeding obstacles and then for the bed where our spy might be feigning sleep.
In this noiseless circuiting Champe went to the right and I to the left, and we met in the far corner where the high, four-posted bed filled a sort of alcove built to contain it. Then I think we both drew breath of relief, for the bed was empty.
“Wait for me,” whispered my companion; and when he returned a little later he had relighted our candle and was carrying it high above his head.
But the candle told us nothing more than our gropings had. The room was unoccupied; was bare of any lodger’s belongings; had evidently been undisturbed since its daytime redding by the chamber-maid. But in the partition wall between it and my room we found the peep-hole which, on the principle of locking the stable after the horse had been most successfully stolen, we carefully plugged.
When we were before my fire again we were little wiser than when we had left it. Our danger turned upon a question of time. When was the hole bored through the partition wall? There was no way of determining this: but Champe was sure he had heard footsteps in the adjoining room at the moment when he had called my attention.