He looked around the place, and, as far as he could see, there was not a place where he could have hidden away a bodkin, let alone the weapon in his hand.
Certainly he might have heaped over it the black ashes of the straw and the few unburned scraps; but such a proceeding would have been childish in the extreme.
It was terribly tantalising, for there was absolutely no place where he could conceal it; and at last, biting his lips with vexation, he exclaimed, after vainly looking out for a slab that he could raise:
“I must either fight for it or throw it out of the window; and I’d sooner do that than he should have it back. Hurrah! That will do!” he cried eagerly, as a thought struck him.
Laying down the cutlass, he leaped up to the window, pressed his face sidewise against the bars, and looked down, to see that the grass and weeds grew long below him.
He was down again directly and seated upon the floor, where, after listening for a few moments, he stripped down one of his blue worsted stoutly-knitted stockings, sought for a likely place, cut through a thread, and, pulling steadily, it rapidly came undone. This furnished him with a line of worsted some yards long.
Leaping up, he rapidly tied one end round the hilt of the cutlass, climbed to the window, and lowered the weapon down outside, till it lay hidden amongst the grass close to the wall. Then he tied the slight thread close down in the rusted-away part of one of the bars, descended again, and raked up some ashes, with which he mounted and sprinkled them over the thread, making it invisible from inside; after which he descended, feeling quite hopeful that the plan would not be discovered.
This done, he seemed to have more time for a look round at the effects of the fire; but beyond a little blackening of the ceiling and the heap of ashes, there was nothing much to see. The strong spirit had burned itself out without doing more than scorch the bottom of the door; but he had a lively recollection of the strange scene as the little blue tongues of fire seemed to be fluttering and dancing all over the place.
Just then he noticed the corner where he had placed the remains of his previous night’s meal, and there were the empty plates—for not a scrap of the food was left; and this satisfactorily indorsed his ideas respecting the touch that had so startled him into wakefulness.
“Better be awakened by that than by the blaze of fire,” he said half aloud. “Oh, won’t I give Sir Henry a bit of my mind about the treatment I meet with here, and—here he is.”