"If you had only kept your damned mouth shut when Brasse was kicking the bucket," cried Captain Dove, very venomously, "Carthew would be keeping him company now. The snake would have got him too. And we'd have won out after all."
Slyne ground his teeth. But that was no moment for futile recrimination, and self-interest served to stay the acrid retort on the tip of his tongue.
"'If this and if that' doesn't make any difference now," he declared evenly. "I'm not going to argue with you. I want to get out of this before worse comes my way."
"But how—" moaned Mr. Jobling, across whose mental vision also were no doubt flashing pictures of Wandsworth Common and Wormwood Scrubbs.
Slyne silenced him with a glance. "I'd very gladly leave you here to your fate, you fat bungler!" said he, with irrepressible bitterness, "if it weren't that you'd turn informer on us. So come on, both of you. We've only one chance left among us. And, but for me, neither of you would have even that." Wherewith, and only pausing to take a long pull at Captain Dove's open bottle, he turned up the staircase, leaving them to follow him or stay where they were, as they chose.
Captain Dove did follow him, curiously, but not forgetting to pocket the other bottle. The shivering lawyer came close at his heels, no less eager to snatch at any possibility of escape.
"Get into a change of clothes," ordered Slyne, as he opened the door of his own room. "And I wouldn't be slow about it, if I were you—for I'm going as soon as I'm ready."
Captain Dove's change did not unduly detain him, since he merely pulled on a pair of serge trousers and a pilot-jacket on top of his other attire. And Mr. Jobling was back in Slyne's room no less promptly. They found it in darkness and Captain Dove uttered a stifled imprecation. But almost immediately, they heard hasty footsteps on the stair without and Slyne reappeared with a coil of thin strong cord in one hand.
"The flagpole-halliards," he explained breathlessly as he shut the door behind him again. "My window looks out on the battlements. We must clamber down. Make the rope secure at this end, Dove, but so that we can pull it after us once we're all down—it's long enough to go double—while I get some things together."
Captain Dove did as he was bidden, so deftly that Slyne had not quite completed his own preparations when the old man called on him to go first.