“‘You air a niste promisin’ young officer, you air. You’re aspiring to be a detective, you air; and jest in the midst o’ business you’re a-goin’ to commit yourself like that. How do you know it ain’t a trap?’
“Well, you see, that was rather a settler; so I leaves the glass alone, though it was rather hard work, and then I has another look, and sees as there was foldin’ doors leading into the back room, and one o’ them doors was not close shut.
“My finger goes up to the side o’ my nose, and I gives myself a wink, and slips out again to see if there warn’t a door outer the back room on to the landing. As a matter o’ course there it was, so that any one might slip out o’ that hole while I went in at t’other. So I slips in again and feels as there was one o’ them little turning bolts on the folding door; so I claps the door to, turns the bolt, and was out again on to the landing in a jiffy.
“I needn’t have hurried myself, though, for all was as quiet as could be; and I thought as there was no one there, but of course I has to make sure. All at once I thinks that perhaps the landing door would be locked in side, and as I’d shut the folding door that would be locked too, so that I should be obliged to have ’em broken open, and this was the sort of house where you wouldn’t have a row if you could help it.
“How-so-be, sir, I tries the landing door, and finds it open easy enough, and then I was inside the room, but what sort of a place it was I couldn’t tell, for it was as dark as Ejup. Of course I expect it was a bedroom, and thinks as I should soon feel the bedstead, as would fill up a good bit o’ the place. But fust of all I drops down upon my hands and knees; so as if anybody hit at me, or shot at me, or tried any o’ them little games in the dark, as they’d most likely do it at the height of a man, why it would go over one, and only hit the furniture, which can be replaced, when you can’t replace active and enterprising officers—leave alone being cut off in the flower of one’s youth, you know.
“Then I listens. All as still and as dark as could be. But still as it was, I could hear my heart go ‘beat, beat,’ wonderful loud.
“‘Wish I’d a light,’ I says to myself, but then it warn’t no use wishing; and I didn’t want to go to the people downstairs, so I begins feeling about as slow and as quiet as I could.
“I soon finds out as it’s a bedroom, for I rubs my knuckles up against the bed-post, and soon was close up alongside o’ the ticking, when I thinks as I heered a noise, and darts back to the door in a moment; but all was still again, and I turns back, and then in a manner I got lost, and confused, and could not tell which way I was going, nor yet where was the door.
“Now, I daresay that all sounds werry queer; but perhaps you don’t know how easy it is to be lost in a dark room as you’ve never been in before, even if it is a little ’un; and if so be as you thinks werry little of it, jest you get a handkercher tied tight over yer eyes, and do as you does at Christmas time—‘turn round three times and ketch who you may,’ and then see where you are in two twinklings.
“Well, first of all I hits my hand again a chair; then I butts my head again the corner of as hard a chest o’ drawers as ever I did feel in my life; and then I kicks up such a clatter with the washstand as would have a’most alarmed the house; but I keeps down on my hands and knees, being suspicious of an ambushment, till last of all I feels my way round to the bedside again, and when I was far enough I reaches my hand lightly over, and lays it on the bed, and then I jumps as though I was shot, for I felt somebody’s leg under the clothes.