“Is anything the matter?” he said.
“Matter?” I replied, as the absurdity of his question seemed to surprise me. “Oh no, nothing at all the matter, only that my head feels as if it had been crushed by a stone, and we had just saved ourselves from the most terrible death that could have come to two poor wretches who want to live. It’s very comic altogether—isn’t it?”
Denham sat in silence, and we could hear the firing still going on. At last he spoke with a low, subdued voice.
“Yes,” he said, “we have escaped from a horrible death. Val, old fellow, I shall never forget this. But don’t let us talk about it. Let us talk about who did it. Some one must have struck at us and knocked us down that hole.”
“Yes,” I said; “and there’s only one ‘some one’ who could have done it.”
“That renegade Irishman?”
“Yes,” I replied. “It seems like this: he couldn’t have got away, but must have been in hiding here. He couldn’t escape the watchfulness of the sentries, I suppose.”
“No; and he must have managed to get that rope to let himself down from the walls.”
“To let himself down into a place where he could hide, I think,” was my reply.
“For both purposes. But what a place to hide in!” said Denham, with a shudder. “He could not have known what he was doing, or he would not have gone down.”