Beresford listened intently, Forrester standing below with his hand on the ladder.
"Yes," said Beresford at length, "you are right. But it appears to be at one side, not directly overhead. Ah! there are footsteps. Listen!"
They kept absolute silence. The dull thud of footsteps overhead was clearly audible. Forrester looked up at his friend, dimly visible high above him. His attention was so fully concentrated that a slight sound behind caused him to jump round with a sudden start. And there, in the entrance to the cavern, he saw the priest, peering up towards the hole in which the ladder rested.
There he saw the priest, peering up towards the hole in which the ladder rested.
In after years Forrester often felt a quickening of the pulse as he tried to piece together the confused sequence of events in the next crowded minute. Whether he shouted to warn his companion before the Chinaman swung round and dashed back along the passage, or whether the Chinaman fled first and his cry followed, he could never distinctly recollect. All that he could remember was that, impelled by an instinctive feeling that the priest must be caught and silenced, he sprang like a tiger towards the intruder. Probably the fact was that the priest, being on the alert, had already turned before Forrester dashed after him, for he had a lead of several yards up the narrow passage.
Forrester was the younger and the fleeter of the two. Weeks of life in the mephitic atmosphere of the underworld, indeed, had slackened his muscles and lowered his nervous energy; his wind came short; but at this perilous crisis he seemed to regain all the athletic vigour which had served him so well on the football field in years gone by. When the priest dashed into the outer cavern, Forrester was only a few yards in the rear.
The former, feeling no doubt that he had now desperate men to deal with, rushed straight across to the entrance, where he might expect to find the negrito guards ready to support him. The little men, however, startled out of their wits by a sight which never, in all their years of servitude, had they beheld before, stood like stockfish, gazing amazedly at the two figures swiftly approaching them. When he reached them, the Chinaman appeared to realise instantly that he could place no reliance on men so palsied. He darted between them, turned to the right, and ran as fast as his long robe would allow along the ledge leading to the ward-room on the other side of the lake.
Crossing the cavern Forrester had gained on him. At the entrance he was barely two yards behind. He flashed past the astounded negritos, swung round on to the ledge, came up with his quarry just as he reached the plank bridge, and making a spring forward, caught him round the waist, as he had tackled many a man in pursuit of the oval ball. The Chinaman, however, although less agile, was of heavier build, and by sheer strength and weight he began to haul Forrester along the bridge towards the further ledge, at the end of which his colleague and the negrito guards were already massing.
Forrester clung to him desperately, tried to drag upon him by digging ineffectual heels into the plank; but with the cavern wall on his right, and only two feet of planking to manoeuvre on, he found that inch by inch he was being pulled into the jaws of danger. The Chinaman was clutching at the crazy handrail for purchase in hauling his tenacious grappler along. In a few seconds Forrester must either release him, or fall a captive into remorseless hands. Despair struck a spark in his darkening mind. There was one chance--one, and no more!