He turned and began to make his way silently under the trees toward the appointed meeting-place. Once he thought of the old Michel and wondered where that gnarled and withered watch-dog had betaken himself. Somewhere, within or without the house, he was asleep or pretending to sleep, and Ste. Marie knew that he could be trusted. The man's cupidity and his hatred of Captain Stewart together would make him faithful, or faithless, as one chose to look upon it.
He came to that place where a row of lilac shrubs stood against the wall and a half-dead cedar stretched gnarled branches above. He was a little before his time, and he settled himself to listen and wait, his sharp ears keenly on the alert, his eyes turned toward the dark and quiet house.
The little noises of the night broke upon him with exaggerated clamor. A crackling twig was a thunderous crash, a bird's sleepy stir was the sound of pursuit and disaster. A hundred times he heard the cautious approach of Richard Hartley's motor-car without the wall, and he fell into a panic of fear lest that machine prove unruly, break down, puncture a tire, or burst into a series of ear-splitting explosions. But at last--it seemed to him that he had waited untold hours and that the dawn must be nigh--there came an unmistakable rustling from overhead and the sound of a hard-drawn breath. The top of the wall, just at that point, was in moonlight, and a man's head appeared over it, then an arm and then a leg. Hartley called down to him in a whisper, and Ste. Marie, from the gloom beneath, whispered a reply. He said:
"The boy has promised to come with us. We sha'n't have to fight for it."
Richard Hartley said, "Thank God!" He spoke to some one outside, and then turning about let himself down to arm's-length and dropped to the ground. "Thank God!" he said again. "The two men who were to have come with me didn't show up. I waited as long as I dared, and then came on with only the chauffeur. He's waiting outside by the car ready to crank up when I give the word. The car's just a few yards away, headed out for the road. How are we to get back over the wall?"
Ste. Marie explained that Arthur Benham was to come out to join them at the wooden door, and doubtless would bring a key. If not, the three of them could scale fifteen feet easily enough in the way soldiers and firemen are trained to do it. He told his friend all that was necessary for the time, and they went together along the wall to the more open space beside the little door.
They waited there in silence for five minutes, and once Hartley, with his back toward the house, struck a match under his sheltering coat, looked to see what time it was, and found it was three minutes past two.
"He ought to be here," the man growled. "I don't like waiting. Good Lord, you don't think he's funked it, do you? Eh?"
Ste. Marie did not answer, but he was breathing very fast and he could not keep his hands still.
The dog which he had heard from his window began barking again very far away in the night, and kept it up incessantly. Perhaps he was barking at the moon.