In the gloom and the silence that followed, Dunburne could hear for a while nothing but the dash of the rain upon the roof and the ceaseless drip and trickle of the water running from the eaves into the puddles beneath the building.
Then, as he stood, still marvelling at what he had seen, there suddenly came a loud and startling crash, as of a trap-door let fall into its place. A faint circle of light shone within the darkness of the building, as though from a lantern carried in a man's hands. There was a sound of jingling, as of keys, of approaching footsteps, and of voices talking together, and presently there came out into the vestibule the dark figures of two men, one of them carrying a ship's lantern. One of these figures closed and locked the door behind him, and then both were about to turn away without having observed Dunburne, when, of a sudden, a circle from the roof of the lantern lit up his pale and melancholy face, and he instantly became aware that his presence had been discovered.
The next moment the lantern was flung up almost into his eyes, and in the light he saw the sharp, round rim of a pistol-barrel directed immediately against his forehead.
In that moment our young gentleman's life hung as a hair in the balance. In the intense instant of expectancy his brain appeared to expand as a bubble, and his ears tingled and hummed as though a cloud of flies were buzzing therein. Then suddenly a voice smote like a blow upon the silence—"Who are you, and what d'ye want?"
"Indeed," said Dunburne, "I do not know."
"What do you do here?"
"Nor do I know that, either."
He who held the lantern lifted it so that the illumination fell still more fully upon Dunburne's face and person. Then his interlocutor demanded, "How did you come here?"
Upon the moment Dunburne determined to answer so much of the truth as the question required. "'Twas by no fault of my own," he cried. "I was knocked on the head and kidnapped in England, with the design of being sold in Baltimore. The vessel that fetched me put into the harbor over yonder to wait for good weather, and I jumped overboard and swam ashore, to stumble into the cursed pickle in which I now find myself."
"Have you, then, an education? To be sure, you talk so."