"Oh, Jaro, and he was such a nice old man. Who could have done it?"
Jaro straightened, said, "One of Albert Peet's renegade whites."
"Ugh! And to think I worked for that man."
But Jaro wasn't listening. He had gone behind the desk. "This is how they got him," he said, excitement in his voice. It was, Joan sensed, the excitement of the man hunter when he grows hot on the trail of his quarry. There was a cold and ruthless edge to his voice which she had not heard before, and for the first time she found herself a little afraid of this strange man about whom she really knew so little. Hesitantly she edged after him.
Behind the desk, she saw a panel gaping ajar in the stone wall. It was the same kind of panel which gave admittance to the secret passages on the lower levels. Jaro was nowhere in sight.
"In here," he called, and Joan thought of the baying of wolves running strong on a hot scent. She bit her lip, slipped into the blackness after him.
"Jaro, where are you?"
"This must be how they got him," he said from the darkness beside her. "When that gunman—the little one who was abducted along with the Red Witch, you remember—when he escaped he must have stumbled on these passages, I suppose that was the important information he had for Albert Peet."
"They couldn't have gone very far," suggested Joan.
"No," said Jaro. "Not very far, I hope." He closed the panel. At once the darkness gathered about them, pressed in on them from every side. It was so dark that the girl could bring her hand right up to her face without being able to distinguish a thing.