PRISONERS AGAIN
"Do you hear footsteps?" Archer breathed.
Tom listened, keen and alert. "No," he said at last. "There's no one
coming."
"What do you s'pose it was?"
"I don't know. Sit down and don't get excited."
But Tom was trembling himself, and it was not until five or ten minutes
had passed without sound or happening that he was able to get a grip on
himself.
"Push up the door a little and listen," suggested Archer.
Tom cautiously pressed upward, but the door did not budge. "It's stuck,"
he whispered.
Archer rose and together they pressed, but save for a little looseness
the door did not move.
"It's caught outside, I guess," said Tom. "Maybe the iron hasp fell into
the padlock when I put it down, huh?"
That, indeed, seemed to be the case, for upon pressure the door gave a
little at the corners, but not midway along the side where the fastening
was. Archer turned cold at the thought of their predicament, and for a
moment even Tom's rather dull imagination pictured the ghastly fate made
possible by imprisonment in this black hole.
"There's no use getting excited," he said. "We get some air through the
cracks and after dark she'll be here, like she said. It's beginning to
get dark now, I guess."
But he could not sit quietly and wait through the awful suspense, and he
pressed up against the boards at intervals all the way along the four
sides of the door. On the side where the hinges were it yielded not at
all. On the opposite side it held fast in the center, showing that by a
perverse freak of chance it had locked itself. Elsewhere it strained a
little on pressure, but not enough to afford any hope of breaking it.
"If it was only lowerr," Archer said, "so we could brace our shoulderrs
against it, we might forrce it."
"And make a lot of noise," said Tom. "There's no use getting rattled;
we'll just have to wait till she comes."
"Yes, but it gives you the willies thinkin' about what would happen----"
"Well, don't let's think of it, then," Tom interrupted. "We should
worry." And suiting his action to the word, he seated himself, drew up
his knees, and clasped his hands over them. "We'll just have to wait,
that's all."
"What do you suppose that sound was?" Archer asked.
"I don't know; some kind of a gun. It ain't the first gun that's been
shot off in Europe lately."
For half an hour or so they sat, trying to make talk, and each pretended
to himself and to the other that he was not worrying. But Tom, who had a
scout's ear, started and his heart beat faster at every trifling stir
outside. Then, as they realized that darkness must have fallen, they
became more alert for sounds and a little apprehensive. They knew
Florette would come quietly, but Tom believed he could detect her
approach.
After a while, they abandoned all their pretence of nonchalant
confidence and did not talk at all. Of course, they knew Florette would
come in her own good time, but the stifling atmosphere of that musty
hole and the thought of what _might_ happen----
Suddenly there was a slight noise outside and then, to their great
relief, the unmistakable sound of footfalls on the planks above them,
softened by the thick carpet of matted vine.
"Sh-h, don't speak!" Tom whispered, his heart beating rapidly. "Wait
till she unfastens it or says something."
For a few seconds--a minute--they waited in breathless suspense. Then
came a slight rustle as from some disturbance of the vine, then
footfalls, again, modulated and stealthy they seemed, on the door just
above them. A speck of dirt, or an infinitesimal pebble, maybe, fell
upon Archer's head from the slight jarring of some crack in the rough
door. Then silence.
Breathlessly they waited, Archer nervously clutching Tom's arm.
"Don't speak," Tom warned in the faintest whisper.
Still they waited. But no other sound broke upon the deathlike solitude
and darkness....