He came up at noon—it was the twenty-ninth of December—with grimy face and hands and a grin on his face. I had spent my morning in the towers, where it was beastly cold, to no purpose and was not in a mood for the ready acceptance of new theories.
“I’ve found something,” he said, filling his pipe.
“Not soap, evidently!”
“No, but I’m going to say the last word on the tunnel, and within an hour. Give me a glass of beer and a piece of bread, and we’ll go back and see whether we’re sold again or not.”
“Let us explore the idea and be done with it. Wait till I tell Stoddard where we’re going.”
The chaplain was trying the second-floor walls, and I asked him to eat some luncheon and stand guard while Larry and I went to the tunnel.
We took with us an iron bar, an ax and a couple of hammers. Larry went ahead with a lantern.
“You see,” he explained, as we dropped through the trap into the passage, “I’ve tried a compass on this tunnel and find that we’ve been working on the wrong theory. The passage itself runs a straight line from the house under the gate to the crypt; the ravine is a rough crescent-shape and for a short distance the tunnel touches it. How deep does that ravine average—about thirty feet?”
“Yes; it’s shallowest where the house stands. it drops sharply from there on to the lake.”
“Very good; but the ravine is all on the Glenarm side of the wall, isn’t it? Now when we get under the wall I’ll show you something.”