"They will find a lot here at daylight," chuckled Fred—"a lot of dust."
The party silently made their way through a side passage to what appeared to have been intended as the dining and cooking domain. Gervais had assumed the duties of guide, and he showed thorough acquaintance with the premises by first producing a dark lantern from a cupboard, and then moving directly to the black mouth of a steeply inclined flight of stone steps descending far below the level.
The spacious cellar was divided into sections by partitions of solid brick. But it was at the center of the foundation wall on the west where Gervais halted.
"Give me a leg up."
Fred gave his comrade the required lift, and Gervais secured a hand-grip on a big drain pipe that curved into the wall. He gave the pipe a strong-arm-twist, and the bull's-eye shine of the lantern revealed an aperture in the masonry, into which the climber squirmed.
Hardly had his feet disappeared, when he had turned about with his head out of the hole in the wall and a hand down to help the next comer to scale the space between the floor and the dislocated pipe.
Billy was given the hoist and crawled over the prostrate Gervais into the narrow passage above; Henri quickly followed, then Anglin, and finally Fred, who lent aid in pulling the pipe back to its moorings.
"'Snug as a bug in a rug,'" quoted Billy, who was really enjoying this method of getting out of a tight place, even though getting into another.
However, the rounded and cemented passage did not squeeze enough to be uncomfortable, and there was steady draught of fresh air coming from somewhere further ahead.