"Well?" sneered the old man. "Have you caught your bird?
"Not yet, sir."
He could hear the steps of the others in the next room; and then silence.
"What are they doing there?" he asked suddenly.
"Nothing, sir…. I just bade a man wait on that side."
The man was once more inserting the chisel in the top of the wainscoting; then he presently began to drive it down with the hammer as if to detach it from the wall.
Suddenly he stopped; and at the same instant the old man heard some faint, muffled noise, as of footsteps moving either in the wall or beyond it.
"What is that?"
The man said nothing; he appeared to be listening.
"What is that?" demanded the other again, with a strange uneasiness at his heart. Was it possible, after all! Then the man dropped his chisel and hammer and darted out and vanished. A sudden noise of voices and tramplings broke out somewhere out of sight.