With wildly throbbing pulses and a heart that beat as if it would choke him, Ned began tumbling about again. But his rollings and heavings had a definite object now—to locate again the sharp thing that had cut him. He was about despairing of finding it when, all at once, he felt something grate against the taut ropes at his wrist. Rolling over till his weight bore down on the object he had encountered, the Dreadnought Boy swayed his body as much as he could, so as to chafe the rope. Once, twice, thrice, he wriggled, and then—oh glory!—he felt the rope part with a quick snap.
An instant later he had a hand loose and was rapidly uncoiling the long rope wrapped about him. Another five minutes and he was free, but oh how stiff! Pins and needles shot through his limbs. He felt quite sick and faint as he stood upright.
“Here, this won’t do,” he thought; “I’ve only got a short time to act in, and I’ll have to make the best of it.”
He fell to chafing his stiff limbs, and soon had the blood comfortably circulating.
“Wonder what that was that so providentially gave me a cut fist and then set me free?” mused the lad, feeling about in the sand as he waited the moment when he could stir without excruciating pain. He soon found it, the broken end of a bottle. Evidently, when the cellar had been made, the glass object had been left in the sand. If ever there was an instrument of providence, that broken glass bottle had proved itself to be the article.
“I feel like having you mounted in gold,” said Ned to himself, as he ran his fingers over it in the darkness.
As his stiffness vanished, Ned rapidly became a very much animated young prisoner. Feeling his way in the darkness, he soon came to a flight of steps. These, he surmised readily enough, led upward to the door through which he had been tumbled so unceremoniously. But a short examination sufficed to show him that it would be impossible to make an exit that way. It was, evidently, clamped too firmly on the outside for it to be a feasible project to open it.
Rather cast down at this discovery, for somehow he had calculated on getting out that way, Ned started a systematic round of the cellar. It was walled with rough stone, against which he groped in the darkness as he went round it. All at once, his hands encountered an empty space. By dint of feeling he could make out that the wall at that point was built in a U-shape, as if it had been intended to make a chimney or a fireplace there.
Hardly had he made this discovery before Ned found out something else.
This was, that by gazing upward he could feel a cool breeze in his face. Presently, far above him he saw the glimmer of stars.