“You young swine,” the man said; “it’s lucky for you you didn’t, for if you had, I’d have settled you.”
Hi went through the door and bolted it behind him. He tiptoed swiftly along the passage to the corridor down which the Indians had dragged him. The corridor stretched right and left along the length of the house. Hi could make out a staircase, the blackness of doors, and light in one place from a half-opened door. Hi listened.
All was silent at first. Then from somewhere upstairs he heard the noise of stealthy footsteps, moving slowly. To his right, from time to time, there was a little light fluttering noise, as though the wind were stirring an ill-fitting shutter or loosened jalousie. The man in the prison yard was quiet. The smell of tobacco smoke shewed that the other prisoner had passed that way.
Hi went quietly to the half-opened door, listened there, heard nothing suspicious, and peeped in.
The room was lit by an oil-lamp which had been turned so low that it stank. He could not see far into the room. From within there came again the fluttering noise, which was now not quite that of a shutter, but liker the yielding of paper under pressure, as though someone were opening a book and pressing the pages down so that it should remain open at the place. It gave Hi the sense that some industrious old man was working there in the half darkness gumming papers together.
He pushed the door very gently till he could see that the room was a kind of board-room, with shuttered windows. The table, from which the chairs had been flung back, was littered with papers. A big picture, partly out of its frame, was hanging askew on the wall to the right. Nobody was to be seen; but the noise of the pressed papers came from somewhere on the floor beyond the table.
Hi thought, “It is rats gnawing papers,” but on coming into the room he saw that it was a dead man beset by myriads of cockroaches. The man’s pockets had been turned inside out.
Hi suddenly whirled about in terror: someone was at his elbow.
He saw at once that he had no need to be terrified; it was the little man who had opened the prison door. He had stolen up in his silent way. He grinned at having scared Hi.
“Didn’t ’ear me, did yer, cocky?” he said. “Seen the stiff? They done him in and gone through him; grizzled party; one of these Digos. We’d better ’op it arter ’ere.”