“Perhaps the vagrants discovered it and carried it off,” suggested the up-to-date man.
“Not in the chimney-places,” fretted Floyd-Rosney, “which makes it all the more aggravating. The solid stone hearths are laid on solid masonry, each is constructed in the same way, and you couldn’t hide a hair-pin in one of them. Why did they tear them _all_ up?”
But fires were finally started in two of the rooms on the ground floor where the hearths were found intact. They were comparatively dry, barring an occasional dash of the rain through the broken glass of one of the windows, the ceilings being protected from leakage by the floor of the upper story. Floyd-Rosney began to feel that this was sufficient accommodation for the party under the peculiar difficulties that beset them. The scarcity of wood rendered the impairment of the fire-places elsewhere of less moment. The sojourners were fain to follow the example of the lawless intruders hitherto, who tore up the flooring of the rear verandas, the sills of the windows, the Venetian blinds for fuel. This vandalism, however, in the present instance, was limited, for its exercise required muscle, and this was not superabundant. True, the Captain’s forethought had furnished them with an axe, and also a cook, in the person of one of the table waiters, understood to be gifted in both walks of life. There was present, too, the Major’s negro servant, who, although sixty years of age, was still stalwart, active and of unusual size. But neither of these worthies had hired out to cut wood.
The crisis was acute. Floyd-Rosney offered handsome financial inducements in vain and then sought such urgency as lay in miscellaneous swearing. His language was as lurid as any flames that had ever flared up the great chimney, but ineffective. The group stood in a large apartment in the rear, apparently a kitchen, of which nearly half the floor was already gone, exhaled in smoke up this massive chimney. It occupied nearly one side of the room, and still a crane hung within its recesses and hooks for pots. There was also a brick oven, very quaint, and other ancient appurtenances of the culinary art, hardly understood by either of the modern claimants of ownership, but of special interest to the up-to-date man who had followed them out to admire the things of yore, so fashionable anew.