With a thrill of excitement he ran his hands over the heavy nails.
“Open! Open!” he cried, beating upon the panel with his fists; and pressing his ear against it afterwards, he heard the racket echo emptily through the house.
“Open! Open!” he cried again, and, turning to the sergeant of the patrol, bade him find a heavy beam. Even with that used as a battering ram it took the patrol a good half hour to smash in the little door, so stout it was, so strong the bolts and bars. But the work was done at last. Gerard darted in and found himself in a house, small but exquisite in its decorations, its thick cushions of linen worked with the old silk embroideries of Fez, its white-tiled floors spread with carpets of the old Rabat patterns. But from roof to court the house was empty.
Gerard went through every room with the keen eye of a possible tenant with an order to view; and found precisely nothing. Had he come a week ago, he would have discovered on the upper floors furniture of a completely European make. All that, however, was safely lodged now in a storehouse belonging to Si El Hadj Arrifa, and the upper floors were almost bare. Gerard had left the patio to the last, and whilst he stepped here and there he heard a tinkling sound very familiar to his ears.
In a corner of an alcove the sergeant was bending down.
“What’s that, Beauprè?” Gerard cried again, and the sergeant stood up and faced him. He was holding in his hands the blue tunic of an officer; and on the breast of it a row of the big French medals tinkled and glinted.
Gerard took the tunic reverently from the sergeant’s hands. It was all cluttered with blood, and stabbed through and through. It had the badges of Paul’s rank, and still discernible on a linen label inside the collar was Paul’s name. It was here, then, in this house, that Paul Ravenel had been done to death. The tunic which Gerard held in his hand was the conclusive proof. He stood in the centre of the patio, so pleasant, so quiet now, with the shafts of bright sunlight breaking upon the tiles. Who had lived here? What dreadful scene had been staged in this empty house? Gerard shivered a little as he thought upon it. The knives at their slow work—the man, his friend, slowly losing, whilst the heart still beat and the nerves stabbed, all the semblance of a man!