This door creaked loudly as it was opened, and a man of a bandit form and dress, who was lying on a pallet within, revealed by the bright moonlight streaming in at two windows, half roused himself as Jimmy crouched at the door, where a partition, as of a very large clothes-press, taking up fully half the room, rose between the intruder and the occupant.
"Who's there?" exclaimed a voice, with a slight lisp in it.
Jimmy discovered that there was a low trap or door near the floor, opening into this remarkable closet, and he slipped inside and drew his knife again. The man was heard moving about the narrow room, and he finally seemed to walk out into the hall and down the stairs.
Feeling around his closet, which was pitch dark, Phœbus found a deep indentation in it, as of a smaller closet, and the sound of crooning voices came from above.
"By smoke!" Jimmy mentally exclaimed, "this big closet is nothin' but a blind fur a stairway in the little closet to climb up to the dungeon under the big roof."
He stole out again and found the moonlight now streaming upon an empty pallet and the burly watchman gone, and streaming, too, upon a larger door in the closet opposite the indentation he had felt, this door secured by a padlock through a staple fastening an iron bar. The key was in the padlock, and Jimmy turned it back, drew off the lock and dropped the bar.
The moment he opened the door an almost insupportable smell came down a shallow hatchway within, up which leaned a rough step-ladder, movable, and of stout construction.
"That smell," said Phœbus, entering, and pulling the door close behind him, "might be wool, or camel, or a moral menagerie from the royal gardings of Europe, but I guess it's Nigger."
He went up the steep steps with some difficulty, as they were made to pass only one person, and at the top he entered a large garret, divided into two by a heavy partition of yellow pine, with a door at the middle of it, and from beyond this partition came the sounds of crooning and babbling he had heard.
The bright night, shining through a small gable window, revealed this outer half of the garret empty, and not furniture or other appurtenance than the hole in the floor up which he had come, and the door into the place of wailing beyond, which was fastened by a long iron spike dropping into a staple that overshot a heavy wooden bar. As he slipped up the spike and took the bar off, Phœbus heard some person in the room below mutter, and lock the great padlock upon the other door, effectually barring his escape by that egress.