The heavy hinges of the door creaked as he thrust it open and entered. His last match showed him a huddled white heap in one corner, two hands tied behind it, a grey-haired and bleeding head. He turned back and pushed up into the gun-room without more ado. It was empty.
He looked dazedly about him in the bright lamplight, and his eyes fell on a couple of candlesticks. He picked one up and found a full box of matches beside it. From the decanter on the table before the fire he partly filled a glass, and disappeared down the steps again with his candle to show him the way, drawing the panel back into place behind him.
Within the cell door he set down the glass he was carrying and, pulling out a pocket-knife, cut through the cord which secured the wrists of the prone figure in the corner. Its hands fell limply apart and lay palms upward. He did not at once release its ankles, but, stooping over it, pulled it round on to its back—and sprang away from it in such frantic haste that the candle jumped from its holder and left him in darkness again.
He all but brained himself as he rushed for the door, but he got outside and, stunned as he was, set his shoulder to it. It closed with a clang and, as he shot the bolt home, he sank to his knees, breathing brokenly, his forehead on its rusty iron. He righted himself with an effort, but stayed where he was, sitting huddled together against the rock wall, his face damp with cold perspiration. He was blind in the blackness about him and could hear nothing but the trip-hammer beat of his own strained heart.
Its turbulence began to die down by degrees and in time he regained some command of his stupefied faculties.
"It couldn't possibly be," he kept on assuring himself. "I must have been mistaken. It couldn't possibly—"
He pulled his slack limbs up under him, and rose, slowly, forcing them to obey him.
"But I must make sure," he muttered, and still let himself linger outside the cell door, to listen for any sound from within.
A groan, fainter than the first he had heard, encouraged him.
"Pretty far through, whoever he is," said he to himself, and with another effort of will-power once more pulled back the bolt.