XVIN THE FOG
CHAMPE nodded and we passed together behind the row of casks concealing the low arched doorway. Wedging the candle in a niche of the stone wall we made another examination of the mysteriously fastened door. Common sense cried aloud that it must be openable in some way from the inside; that no door save that of a jail was ever built otherwise.
“Maybe it will be one of these jamb stones that will unlock it,” Champe suggested; so we laid hold and pushed and pulled on first one and then another of the stones framing the opening. At the third trial we found one that seemed slightly loose and gave a little, and after that, stuck fast and gave no more. But when we put our united strength to it again, it yielded slowly, leaving an angled opening to some dark space beyond, in which Champe was presently thrusting an exploring arm.
“I have it,” he declared. There was a sound as of wooden bolts leaving their sockets, and the door swung open to my shoulder-push, heavily because of a weighting of sand-bags with which it was hung, doubtless to deaden sounds from within or without, we did not know which.
“’Tis plain as a pikestaff now why the pickled Dutchman stayed till we came,” was Champe’s muttered comment. “He hadn’t the gizzard in him to move that stone by himself.”
We had crawled safely through the archway, and into a roomy underground passage beyond it, before we heard a squeaking of pulleys betokening a lifting of the kitchen trap-door by means of a block and tackle. Champe was for hurrying, having an outdoor man’s horror of being forced to fight in an underground burrow, but while I shared this reluctance with him to the full, I delayed long enough to close the weighted door for the halt it might impose upon our pursuers. When he saw what I was about, Champe quickly lent a hand, and what was still more to the purpose, his mechanical head. Slipping one of the wooden bar-bolts from its sockets, he braced it angle-wise against the door so that nothing short of a battering-ram could force an opening from the cellar-side.
Our chasers, whoever they were, were down the stair and at the barrier wall by this time, and a bolt-sliding hand was reaching through the jamb-stone hole while we were hammering our brace into place. Champe grinned ferociously and held the candle flame for a single instant to the back of the groping hand, grinning again at the snatched withdrawal and the yell of pain that went with it; whereupon we fled, praying that the underground tunnel might lead us to the boat-house at the foot of the garden, or if not there, at least to the water side.
It did end, as we hoped it might, in the boat-builder’sshop at the water’s edge, and now there was little question but that the boat-house and the cellar served the purpose of a gang of smugglers. Our craft, the light ship’s tender for the acquiring of which we had like to have paid the price of our lives, lay on the launching ways. A stroke of Champe’s sword severed the painter, and with the fresh sea air to wash the vile fumes of the cellar from our lungs, we set our shoulders to the bows, running with the light boat to give it momentum, and flinging ourselves in on either side at the water-taking plunge.
The shapely little craft shot well out from the shore, clearing the beach by a long pistol-shot before it lost headway. For some minute or so we lay motionless and kept silence. There was a light in the house out of which we had just burrowed, but we heard no sounds of a fresh alarm. The sergeant chuckled as if he had just come from a merrymaking.
“I think they’ll be all muddle-headed Dutchmen in that smuggling brotherhood, Captain Dick!” he scoffed gently. “To think they wouldn’t leave a few stout fellows to guard the boat-shop when they knew that rabbit-burrow would take us straight to it!”
“We’ll not quarrel with any muddle-headedness of that sort,” I said; and thereupon we shipped the oars noiselessly and pulled softly away from the shore, turning the boat’s head southward and westward only when we felt sure we had gained an offing which would carry us outside of the line of guard ships.
Our guess was good this time. We had pulled cautiously for full half the distance we had to go, andhad safely passed three of the coast-guarding vessels, dim bulks lying between us and the shore, when a fog came creeping up from the lower bay. Champe saw it first and pointed out the hazard it would bring.
“We must pull smarter for it, Captain Dick,” he whispered over his shoulder. “We’ll be no better than blind men in a strange town if that floating cloud catches up with us.”
So he said, and so I thought, and so it presently proved when the fog closed in about us. We had no compass, and could only hold on as nearly as we could guess in the direction we thought we ought to go. Once we made sure we heard the tramp of the sentry on the battlements of the fort, and the low-voiced challenge of guard-relieving,—which would make the time eleven o’clock,—but before we could be certain of these sounds we were tangled again as to our directions, and the next sounds that came to us were the bumping of our boat’s bows against the side of a ship, and a hoarse voice shouting, “Avast there, you lubbers! Unship your oars and lie still or I’ll fire into you!”