"He has left his traces. Also--now--I know how he descended."
"I must follow," Valentin called back. "'Tis nothing. And the rope will surely bear both."
"It needs but to bear one," Andrew replied. "I have reached a platform, a half platform--crescent-moon shaped--leaving still, however, room for the passage of a man below, to further depths. He has gone that way."
"I come," Debrasques called once more--and, heedless of Andrew's warning him to remember that he was still weak from his wounds, he seized the rope and slung his slight young form down it--the other holding up the lantern so that he might better see as he descended.
A moment later and the two men were standing side by side upon the platform mentioned by Andrew, a slab of flat stone, jutting out from one side of the oubliette's now slimy walls--for the damp was very perceptible here; the sides reeked with it, and drops of water oozed from out of them and ran down to the stone slab itself. And, at their feet, was the opening to the further depths.
But, also at their feet, was something else, something beside the coil of the lower part of the rope by which they had come.
A chain, itself lying in a coil upon the platform--with a foot or so of it hanging over into the abyss below. With, upon the ledge of the platform, an inch of brown-coloured velvet--a strip torn doubtless from a man's sleeve as he let himself down from the ledge and laid one arm along the stone, while groping with the other for the means to descend.
"His coat," said Debrasques, turning the strip over in his hand beneath the light of the lantern. "He was wearing such a one when last I saw him out of his trappings."
"And, as I think, on the night when he returned to this house; loomed up before my eyes as they struck me down. Come, Valentin, let us go on. To the end now."
"But how get there?" asked the Marquis, "how arrive? How use that chain?"