Part 38 (1/2)

Gard had swept down both his coat and his cloth full of eggs in his sudden entrance. He stood at the bottom of the well to see if they would follow, while Peter's long legs kicked about for foothold. He heard them decide to wait for daylight, and then he noiselessly picked up his coat and his soppy bundle of broken eggs, pushed them into the tunnel, and crawled in after them.

He was trapped, indeed, but he doubted very much if any fisherman on Sark would venture down that tunnel. They were brawny men, used to leg and elbow room, and, as a rule, heartily detested anything in the shape of underground adventure. They might, of course, get over some miners to explore for them. Or they might content themselves with sitting down on top of his hole until he was starved out. In any case, his rope was nearly run; but yet he was not disposed to shorten it by so much as an inch.

As he wormed his way along the tunnel, the recollection of those other openings off the dead man's cave came back to him. He would try them. He pushed on with a spurt of hope.

The tunnel was not nearly so long now that he knew where he was going; in fact, now that nothing but it stood between him and capture, it seemed woefully inadequate.

When his head and elbows no longer grazed rock he dropped his coat and crawled into the chamber. He felt his way round to the dried packages, and cautiously emptied half-a-dozen and prepared them for his use.

This set him sneezing so violently that it seemed impossible that the watchers outside should not hear him. It also gave him an idea.

He struck a light and kindled one of his torches, and the dead man leaped out of the darkness at him as before. That gave him another idea.

Propping up his light on the floor, he emptied package after package of the powdered tobacco into the tunnel, and wafted it down towards the entrance with his jacket. Then with his knife he cut the las.h.i.+ngs from the dead man's hands and feet, and carried him across--he was very light, for all his substance had long since withered out of him--and laid him in the tunnel as though he was making his way out.

If he knew anything of Sark men and miners, he felt fairly secure for some time to come, so he sat himself down, as far as possible from the snuff, and made such a meal as was possible off puffins' eggs, mixed good and bad and unredeemed by any palliating odour and flavour. They were not appetising, but they stayed his stomach for the time being.

It was only then that he remembered that he had left his gun and powder-flask behind him. He had placed them on a ledge just inside the mouth of the tunnel, and in his haste had forgotten to pick them up. He had no intention of using them, however, and he would not go back for them.

When his scanty meal was done, he cautiously emptied a number of the packages and rolled them into torches, and deliberated as to which of the black openings he should attempt first.

That one opposite, out of which the dead man's legs sprawled grotesquely, was the one by which he had entered. This one, then, near which he sat, must run on towards the centre of the island--if it ran on at all; and, since all were equally unknown and hopeful, he would try this first.

His tarred paper torches, though they burned with a clear flame, gave forth a somewhat pungent odour, so he kicked one of the small barrels to pieces, and with three of the staves and a piece of string made a holder which would carry the torch upright, and also permit him to lay it on the ground or push it in front of him, if need be.

The first tunnel ran in about thirty feet, and then the slant of the roof met the floor at so sharp an angle that further pa.s.sage was impossible.

The second, third, and fourth the same; and he began to fear they were all blind alleys leading nowhere.

The openings near his own entrance tunnel he had left till the last, since they obviously led outwards.

Two of them shut down in the same way as all the others, and it was only the dogged determination to leave no chance untried that drove him, with a fresh supply of torches, down the last one of all, the one alongside that out of which the dead man's legs projected.

It took a turn to the left within a dozen feet of the entrance, and, like the rest, it presently narrowed down through a slope in the roof; but just at its narrowest, when he feared he had come to the end, there came a dip in the flooring corresponding to the slope up above, and he found he could wriggle through. Once through, the pa.s.sage widened and continued to widen, and the going became very rough and broken, with piles of ragged rock and deep black pitfalls in between.

Then, of a sudden, he saw the walls and roof of his pa.s.sage fall away, and his light flickered feebly in the darkness of a vast place, and he crouched on the rock up which he had climbed, and sat in wonder.

Somewhere below him he could hear the slow rise and fall of water, dull and heavy and without any splash, like the dumb breathing of a captive monster.

And every now and again there came, from somewhere beyond, a low dull thud, like the blow of a padded hammer, and a distant subdued rustle along the outside of the darkness. He knew it was not inside the place he was in, for he could hear the soft rise and fall of the water quite clearly, but these other sounds came to him from a distance, muted as though his ears had suddenly gone deaf.

”Those dull blows,” he said to himself, ”are the waves on the outside of L'Etat. That low rustling is the rush of them along the lower rocks. The water inside here probably comes in through some openings below tide-level. I am quite safe here, even if they get past the dead man's cave--quite safe until I starve. Unless there are fish to be had”--and he felt a spark of hope. ”And maybe there are devil-fish”--and he s.h.i.+vered and glanced below and about him fearfully.

His homely torch did no more than faintly illumine the rock he sat on and those close at hand, and cast a gigantic uncouth shadow of himself on the rough wall behind. All beyond was solid darkness, blacker even than a black Sark night.

He sat wondering vaguely if any before him had penetrated to that strange place. It was odd and uncanny to feel that his eyes were the very first to look upon it. And then, away in front, and apparently at a great distance above him, he became aware of a difference in the solid darkness. It seemed almost as though it had thinned. His eye had seemed able for a moment to carry beyond the narrow circle of the torch, but when he peered into the void to see what this might mean, it all seemed solid as before.

As his straining eyes sought relief in something visible, their side-glance caught once more that same impression of movement in the darkness. And presently it came again and stronger--a strange greenish fluttering up in the roof--very faint, as though the roof were smoke on which a soft green light played for a moment and vanished.