Chapter 27

THE GLARE OF A MATCH.

When the bartender had taken his departure, Nick found a cigar in one of his pockets, and seated himself to smoke quietly until Phil should return. But when more than half an hour later the cigar was consumed, and he had thrown it aside, he began to feel a sense of uneasiness that the man should be gone so long a time.

However, he realized that it was no easy task that Phil had undertaken, and that he might well occupy an hour or more in accomplishing it.

He had no more cigars to smoke, but he seated himself resolutely in a chair, determined to wait with patience until his messenger should return.

There was a small clock, ticking away merrily on the mantel, at the far end of the room, and the detective watched it while the minute hand worked its way slowly around the dial, until an hour, then an hour and a quarter, and, finally, an hour and twenty minutes had elapsed since the departure of the bartender.

His impatience was now so great, and his natural distrust of the confederate he had employed was so prominent in his mind that he left his chair, having first extinguished the light, and, going to the door, opened it softly and peered outside.

The hallway was in utter darkness, the same as when he was there last, and, although he listened intently, he could not hear the suggestion of a sound from the lower regions of the house. After waiting a few moments longer, he tiptoed forward cautiously to the stairs, and descended them, being careful to step as closely as possible to the spindles of the balustrade, in order that they might not creak beneath his weight, and thus alarm others in the house. In this way he gained the lower floor.

Nick was somewhat handicapped without his flash light, but he remembered quite distinctly the location of the sound he had heard two hours earlier, when the party from the laundry had followed him in, and passed through the hallway to a rear door. Now he sought that door by following carefully along the wall until he came to it.

But, although he searched diligently for many minutes, he could not find so much as a suggestion of a door anywhere.

He remembered then that in all probability there was no perceptible door at all; that the door which was there somewhere was concealed in the wainscoting in some way, or otherwise hidden from casual observation. To have maintained a door of entrance to the saloon from that hallway would have rendered it entirely unnecessary for Grinnel to keep up his private entrance to the saloon from the other street. Nick's only method of finding it now was to light a match, and this he hesitated to do, not knowing what warning its glare might convey to others.

But there was no alternative, and presently he began his search by lighting matches one after another, permitting them to flare up sufficiently for a moment's vision, and then throwing them quickly to the floor, after the manner adopted by burglars when they were engaged in robbing a house before the pocket flash light was invented.

He was not long in discovering the entrance he sought. The walls along the hallway were not plastered; they were merely built up with matched boards, which had stood there unpainted for so long a time that they had achieved a veneer of filth and dirt which made them look, in the flare of the match, like mahogany.

But he could easily see where there was a keyhole cut into one of these boards, and, although around it there was no other evidence of a door, he knew that if he could turn the tumblers in that lock it would be revealed to him.

He went to work with his picklock, and, as he supposed, the instant the bolt of the lock was shot back the door opened easily and noiselessly in his grasp, and from beyond it he could at once hear the murmur of distant voices; also very far ahead of him, and beneath what was evidently another door, he could perceive a gleam of light.

He stepped through, and closed it after him, but, realizing that it was more than likely that he might wish to leave in a hurry, he left it unlocked.

And now he tiptoed forward to the door beneath which the light shone, and, getting upon his hands and knees, held his ear down where he could hear with more distinctness.

The effect was almost the same as if he were inside the saloon. Strangely enough, also, it was Madge's voice that came to him first, for it appeared that she was seated near that very door, and by the answers that were returned to her, Nick knew that no less a person than Mike Grinnel himself was her companion. And they were speaking in low tones, but, nevertheless, every word they uttered could be heard distinctly by the detective.

It was in the midst of their conversation, evidently, that Nick began to listen, and Madge was saying:

"I swore then, Mike, that I would be even with him, and that if I ever succeeded in getting out of that prison where he put me I would never rest another minute until Nick Carter was placed beyond the power of injuring anybody."

"You bit off a little more than you could chew, didn't you, Madge?" asked Mike Grinnel, in his slow, even voice, in which he never permitted a sign of emotion.

"No, I didn't," she retorted. "I made some mistakes, maybe. I shouldn't, for instance, have written him the letter I did."

"What was the letter, Madge?"

"Like a fool I wrote him a threatening letter, in which I told him to look out for me. That was my vanity, I suppose. I wanted him to know that I was on his track. I wanted to worry him; to give him something to think of, and a lot of things to look out for."

"Well, what then, Madge?"

"It was then, Mike, that I began to get the guns together, Slippery Al, and Gentleman Jim, and the others, and, of course, I made this place our headquarters."

"That, Madge, is just what you shouldn't have done. That's what I'm finding fault with you about now.

"Well," she said, "it's done, and it can't be helped; and Nick Carter has been here, and he's gotten away again; but, all the same, we've got Chick in our power, and if I do to him as I feel like doing now, he will regret the day that he ever took my trail."

"If you leave him where he is now, Madge, he'll do that," said Grinnel, laughing softly.

"Why, what would happen to him there?" she demanded quickly.

"For one thing the rats would probably eat him up before very long, and it wouldn't be the first meal of that kind they've had down there, either."

"You didn't tell me where you put him," said Madge.

"I don't tell anybody exactly where that place is, Madge. It's a little hole that I've dug out underneath the cellar of this house; if it was anywhere in the old country it would be called a dungeon; as it is, I call it the grave--people who go there have a habit of never coming out again."

The detective was anxious to know what had become of Phil, the bartender. It was evident that the man had done nothing to betray the detective, since these two were talking so quietly just inside the door where Nick was listening.

The next words, while they did not exactly reassure him, made him think that, after all, the bartender might be carrying out his contract by attempting to set Chick at liberty himself.

"Is that where you sent Phil a few moments ago?" she asked. "Down there to the dungeon where you put Chick?"

The detective could hear Grinnel chuckle and then reply:

"Yes, Madge, I sent him down there to fasten the young fellow up, so that there would be no chance of his getting loose. You see, he was senseless when we chucked him in there, and I forgot to make him fast, as a sailor would say, but there are staples in the wall down there, and there are chains fastened to those staples, and there are nice little steel bracelets at the end of those chains, that fit beautifully around a man's ankles. I sent Phil down to lock them fast."

"I thought nobody knew where that place was except yourself," said Madge quickly.

"Oh, Phil's all right. I have to have some confidence in my men here, or I couldn't run the place."

"All the same," the detective heard her murmur, "I'd rather you had left Chick to me. They're a slippery lot, those detectives, and I shall be uneasy----"

The detective heard no more of what was said, for at that instant he was greatly startled by hearing a sound behind him, and evidently beneath him, the consequence being that he paid no further attention to the conversation beyond the door.

Indeed, he drew back away from it, and softly rose to his feet, in order that he might be thoroughly prepared for anything that should happen; and while he stood there he was conscious of a cold, damp draught of air blown into his face--air that smelled as if it might come from the cellar--and he was somehow conscious that a trapdoor had been lifted, while the next moment he was aware that somebody was climbing through it into that narrow hallway--somebody who was not more than ten or twelve feet away from him. How he had wished for his little flash light then.

Once he imagined that he could hear a faint whisper, and a sharp, warning hiss for silence immediately following it.

Then it came back to him suddenly, all that he had heard Mike Grinnel say to Madge about the dungeon in the house, and the bartender's errand to it.

He thought then that the people who had raised themselves through the trap--and he was sure that there were two of them--must be Phil and Chick, the latter having been liberated by the former; and, acting upon the impulse of the moment, he struck a match and held it into the faces of the two men. The glare of the match shone directly into the face of Chick.