The car stopped. Birdie opened the door on his side, and stepped to the ground. He was joined by the man who had driven the car, and who, as John Bruce now found he had correctly assumed, had acted as the decoy at the gambling house.
“Get out!” ordered Doctor Crang curtly.
John Bruce followed Birdie from the car. It was dark out here, exceedingly dark, but he could make out that the car had been driven into a narrow lane, and that they were close to the wall of a building of some sort. The two men gripped him by his arms. He felt the muzzle of Crang's revolver pressed into the small of his back.
“Mind your step!” cautioned Birdie gruffly.
It was evidently the entrance to a cellar. John Bruce found himself descending a few short steps; and then, on the level again, he was guided forward through what was now pitch blackness. A moment more and they had halted, but not before John Bruce's foot had come into contact with a wall or partition of some kind in front of him. One of the men who gripped his arms knocked twice with three short raps in quick succession.
A door opened in front of them, and for an instant John Bruce was blinded by a sudden glare of light; but the next instant, his eyes grown accustomed to the transition, he saw before him a large basement room, disreputable and filthy in appearance, where half a dozen men sat at tables drinking and playing cards.
A shove from the muzzle of Crang's revolver urged John Bruce forward into an atmosphere that was foul, hot and fetid, and thick with tobacco smoke that floated in heavy, sinuous layers in mid-air. He was led down the length of the room toward another door at the opposite end. The men at the tables, as he passed them, paid him little attention other than to leer curiously at him. They greeted Birdie and his companion with blasphemous familiarity; but their attitude toward Crang, it seemed to John Bruce, was one of cowed and abject respect.
John Bruce's teeth closed hard together. This was a nice place, an ominously nice place—a hidden den of the rats of the underworld, where Crang was obviously the leader. He was not so sure now that the promptings of so-called common sense had been common sense at all! His chances of escaping, practically hopeless as they had been in the car, would certainly have been worth trying in view of this! He began to regret his “common sense” bitterly now.
He was in front of the door toward which they had been heading now. It was opened by Birdie, and John Bruce was pushed into a small, dimly-lighted, cave-like place. Crang said something in a low voice to the two men, and, leaving them outside, entered himself, closing the door only partially behind him.
For a moment they faced each other, and then Crang laughed—tauntingly, in menace.