The shaft of luminance broke on the table at the end of the corridor. The Saint had turned the box round, and from the side elevation its function was more easily deducible. Even so, it was creditably astute of Orace to stop dead in his tracks and turn suddenly to an examination of the door through which they had just come. He found the scar in the wood where the bullet had splintered it, and went back to make a study of the ground outside.
“Naow!” he announced at length. “That didn’t catch Mr. Templar, like it ud uv cort me fee adn’t put it ahter action.”
He went down the passage again, keeping to the centre, so that she was forced to walk behind him and be shielded by his body. Her hand was on the automatic in her pocket, and, though every one of her nerves was tense and tingling, her muscles felt strangely cold and calm. Just as a boxer, trained to a milligramme, is a bundle of tortured nerves up to the moment he enters the ring, when all at once his brain becomes clear and ice-cold as an Arctic sky and his body soothes down in a second into smooth efficiency—so Patricia’s agony of fear and anxiety had frozen into a grim chilled-steel determination. The Saint had been there: they were on his track. The suspense and anguish of inaction was over.
Orace had halted just before he came to the open door.
“We better lookaht ’ere,” he said.
She was looking round his shoulder as he turned the ray of the torch into the room, and they both saw the emptiness of it and the yawning square hole in the floor just inside the threshold.
Orace heard the girl give a strangled cry that choked in her throat. She would have rushed past him, but he caught and held her, though she fought him like a fury.
“Wyte—in a minnit!” he urged hoarsely.
He kept her back and edged towards the trap-door, testing the soundness of the floor inch by inch as he advanced. It was not until he had thus satisfied himself about the safety of the footing right up to the edge of the opening that he would allow her to approach it.
They knelt down and turned the light of the torch into the gap. It shot down far into the blackness till it lost itself in space. Higher up they could see that the shaft was circular and lined with green, slimy brick. Evidently they were looking down the remains of a well over which the Old House had been built: Patricia thought that she could detect a faint glimmer of reflection of the torch’s light from the surface of the water. Orace fetched one of the empty beer bottles from across the room, and they dropped it down the pit. It seemed an eternity before the hollow sound of the splash returned to their ears.