"The moat, sir?"
"Call it what you like. Anyway, he's there, fishing, and he told me to tell you to take him out something to drink."
Immediately, Sturgis, the lecturer, with a change almost startling in its abruptness, became Sturgis, the butler, once more. The fanatic rabbit-gleam died out of his eyes.
"Very good, sir."
"I should hurry. His tongue was hanging out when I left him."
For an instant the butler wavered. The words had recalled to his mind a lop-eared doe which he had once owned, whose habit of putting out its tongue and gasping had been the cause of some concern to him in the late 'seventies. But he recovered himself. Registering a mental resolve to seek out this new-made friend of his later and put the complete facts before him, he passed through the green baize door.
Soapy, alone at last, did not delay. With all the pent up energy which had been accumulating within him during a quarter of an hour which had seemed a lifetime, he swung the hatchet and brought it down. The panel splintered. The lock snapped. The door swung open.
There was an electric switch inside the cupboard. He pressed it down and was able to see clearly. And, having seen clearly, he drew back, his lips trembling with half-spoken words of the regrettable kind which a man picks up in the course of a lifetime spent in the less refined social circles of New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago.
The cupboard contained an old raincoat, two hats, a rusty golf club, six croquet balls, a pamphlet on stock-breeding, three umbrellas, a copy of the Parish Magazine for the preceding November, a shoe, a mouse, and a smell of apples, but no suitcase.
That much Soapy had been able to see in the first awful, disintegrating instant.