Ralph Darrell's heart was bound up in the new work he had recently began, and so anxious was he to push it that he was engaging all laborers who came that way. As yet his force was very small, but he was in hopes of speedily increasing it. Thus, to discover that three of his strongest men had suddenly thrown up their jobs and left him without warning filled him with anger. So furious was he, even after he entered the house, that poor Mary, who had just returned badly frightened from the cavern, dared not confess to him that, through her own carelessness, another stranger had been admitted to the hidden storehouse of the cliffs.
Perhaps by morning this unwelcome visitor would have disappeared, as the other had done; and, at any rate, he could never find the secret passage, for it was too carefully concealed. By morning, too, her father would be restored to his ordinary frame of mind, and it would be easier to tell him what she had done, if, indeed, it should prove necessary to tell him at all.
In the meantime Mike Connell was much puzzled by the nature of the place in which he found himself after his climb, as well as by the abrupt disappearance of the lad upon whom he had counted for guidance. The darkness, with its accompanying profound silence, so affected him that, while he called several times, "Whist now! Where are you? Come out o' that, young feller, and have done with your foolin'!" he did so in an awed tone but little above a whisper.
"All right; stay where you are then!" he added, after listening vainly for a reply. "If it's a game of hide-and-seek ye want, I can soon accommodate you, seeing as how you've been so kind as to leave me a couple of glims, though it's only one of them I'll need."
Thus saying, the new-comer removed one of the two lanterns that had been hung out as a warning to the smugglers, and unwittingly changed the danger-signal into one of safety and invitation by so doing. With the lantern thus acquired to light his footsteps, he began a careful survey of the cavern, hoping to discover either an exit from it or his vanished guide.
With his previous knowledge of the principal industry of that region, it did not take him long to conjecture the meaning of the bales and boxes upon which he soon stumbled.
"Holy smoke!" he cried; "it's a cave of smugglers you've broke into, Mike Connell, no less, and a sorrowful time ye'll have of it if the folks comes home and catches you at the trespassing! Where the divil is the back door, I wonder, for the one in front is no good at all? Saints preserve us! What's that?"
With this last exclamation the frightened Irishman began to retreat slowly backward, holding his lantern so that, while it revealed his own terror-stricken face, its light also fell full on the form of Richard Peveril standing before him and staring in blankest amazement.
"Plaze, good Mister Spook—I mean yer Honor—Oh, Holy Fathers! what will I say?" stammered the poor fellow, in such faltering accents that Peveril broke into a roar of laughter.
"Mike Connell!" he cried; "wherever did you come from? and what has happened? You look as though you had seen a ghost!"