He seemed to be speaking not to himself, but to some one close at hand. But no one had joined him: there was no one near him.
“Hell and blazes!” he growled on. “I tell you the bottle’s there! I’ve had it in my hand and seen it with my own eyes not once but a hundred times. Have you done exactly what I told you? The whole of the right side of the cellar, as you went over the left the other day? Well, well—you ought to have found it.”
He was silent for a little while; then he went on.
“It might be as well to try somewhere else and move on to the waste ground at the back of the house, in case they threw the bottle there, before the coup on the express. It’s an open-air hiding-place, and just as good as any other. If Bregeac has searched the cellar, he mayn’t have thought of outside. Go there and look. I’ll wait for you.”
Ralph did not wait to hear any more. He began to understand as soon as Jodot spoke of the cellar. That cellar must run from the front to the back of the house, with an air-hole into the street and another at [[175]]the back. Access to it through the air-hole at the back would be easy.
Quickly he ran upstairs to the first floor and into a back bedroom from which he could look down on the waste ground, to find that he had guessed right. In the middle of the unused building plot, in which stood a board with “For Sale” on it, among a heap of old iron, empty barrels, and broken bottles, a small boy of seven or eight, tiny, incredibly thin in his tightly fitting gray jersey, was searching hard, darting about with the agility of a squirrel. The circle he was searching with the object of finding a bottle, was of very small circumference. If Jodot had been right, the search should not take him long. It did not. In about ten minutes after moving the broken barrels and boxes, the small boy rose and, without wasting time, ran towards the villa, carrying a bottle gray with dust.
Ralph ran down the stairs to the ground floor with the intention of relieving the small boy of his prize. But he could not get the door at the head of the stairs to the basement open, and he hurried to his peep-hole at the dining-room window.
He was just in time to hear Jodot say: “That’s it! You’ve got it! Splendid! Now I’m ‘armed’. Bregeac’s friend won’t be able to give me any more trouble. Hurry up! Get out of sight!”
The small boy got out of sight. He squeezed himself through the opening made by a broken bar in the [[176]]grating and the air-hole and slipped like a ferret into the sack.
Jodot at once rose, hoisted the sack on to his shoulder, and went off.