We had established the practice of barring all the gates and doors at nightfall. There was no way of guarding against an attack from the lake, whose frozen surface increased the danger from without; but we counted on our night patrol to prevent a surprise from that quarter. I was well aware that I must prepare to resist the militant arm of the law, which Pickering would no doubt invoke to aid him, but I intended to exhaust the possibilities in searching for the lost treasure before I yielded. Pickering might, if he would, transfer the estate of John Marshall Glenarm to Marian Devereux and make the most he could of that service, but he should not drive me forth until I had satisfied myself of the exact character of my grandfather’s fortune. If it had vanished, if Pickering had stolen it and outwitted me in making off with it, that was another matter.
The phrase, “The Door of Bewilderment,” had never ceased to reiterate itself in my mind. We discussed a thousand explanations of it as we pondered over the scrap of paper I had found in the library, and every book in the house was examined in the search for further clues.
The passage between the house and the chapel seemed to fascinate Larry. He held that it must have some particular use and he devoted his time to exploring it.
He came up at noon—it was the twenty-ninth of December—with grimy face and hands and a grin on his face. I had spent my morning in the towers, where it was beastly cold, to no purpose and was not in a mood for the ready acceptance of new theories.
“I’ve found something,” he said, filling his pipe.
“Not soap, evidently!”
“No, but I’m going to say the last word on the tunnel, and within an hour. Give me a glass of beer and a piece of bread, and we’ll go back and see whether we’re sold again or not.”
“Let us explore the idea and be done with it. Wait till I tell Stoddard where we’re going.”
The chaplain was trying the second-floor walls, and I asked him to eat some luncheon and stand guard while Larry and I went to the tunnel.
We took with us an iron bar, an ax and a couple of hammers. Larry went ahead with a lantern.
“You see,” he explained, as we dropped through the trap into the passage, “I’ve tried a compass on this tunnel and find that we’ve been working on the wrong theory. The passage itself runs a straight line from the house under the gate to the crypt; the ravine is a rough crescent-shape and for a short distance the tunnel touches it. How deep does that ravine average—about thirty feet?”
“Yes; it’s shallowest where the house stands. it drops sharply from there on to the lake.”
“Very good; but the ravine is all on the Glenarm side of the wall, isn’t it? Now when we get under the wall I’ll show you something.”
“Here we are,” said Larry, as the cold air blew in through the hollow posts. “Now we’re pretty near that sharp curve of the ravine that dips away from the wall. Take the lantern while I get out the compass. What do you think that C on the piece of paper means? Why, chapel, of course. I have measured the distance from the house, the point of departure, we may assume, to the chapel, and three-fourths of it brings us under those beautiful posts. The directions are as plain as daylight. The passage itself is your N. W., as the compass proves, and the ravine cuts close in here; therefore, our business is to explore the wall on the ravine side.”
“Good! but this is just wall here—earth with a layer of brick and a thin coat of cement. A nice job it must have been to do the work,—and it cost the price of a tiger hunt,” I grumbled.
“Take heart, lad, and listen,”—and Larry began pounding the wall with a hammer, exactly under the north gate-post. We had sounded everything in and about the house until the process bored me.
“Hurry up and get through with it,” I jerked impatiently, holding the lantern at the level of his head. It was sharply cold under the posts and I was anxious to prove the worthlessness of his idea and be done.
Thump! thump!
“There’s a place here that sounds a trifle off the key. You try it.”
I snatched the hammer and repeated his soundings.
Thump! thump!
There was a space about four feet square in the wall that certainly gave forth a hollow sound.
“Stand back!” exclaimed Larry eagerly. “Here goes with the ax.”
He struck into the wall sharply and the cement chipped off in rough pieces, disclosing the brick beneath. Larry paused when he had uncovered a foot of the inner layer, and examined the surface.
“They’re loose—these bricks are loose, and there’s something besides earth behind them!”