CHAPTER XXVI--THE THREATENING LETTER
“It was Alf Arnold, the squatter of the lake, who told me of this underground passage,” said Sergeant Dick. “I see it has a concrete flooring. As sure as a button, inspector, Seymour and his wife will return this way, unless they have caught the alarm--heard us breaking in, or, for some other reason, don’t intend coming back. Will you remain here with half the men, and I will take the rest through the passage to the cave and wait there for awhile in hopes of their coming? Do you know, I’ve an idea, too, that that cave will tell us something.”
“You don’t think they were in the house and fled through the passage?”
“No, sir; they couldn’t have got here before us, I’m certain.”
“Very good, sergeant! Select your men. I hope the pretty pair haven’t given us the slip--_will_ return to their nest. Of course, many of these log huts in the wilds, as you know, both here in Canada and across the border in the United States, have underground passages like this to provide a means of escape for the occupants in case of attack by any desperadoes, so its existence proves nothing.”
Sergeant Dick chose his five men, and they dropped down one after the other through the trapdoor in the floor, and followed him on hands and knees along the little tunnel under the ground.
These subterranean galleries in the wild and woolly West are very simply and easily contrived. A trench, some four feet deep and as many wide, is dug in the soil from the house, the floor made hard with concrete or something similar, and the sides boarded up and over. Then the earth and sods of grass are replaced.
As a rule, the exit is in the middle of a thick clump of bushes some forty or fifty feet from the hut, and may be used as a rifle-pit, of course, in case of an attack on the house, the inmates contriving thus to take the assailants in the rear.
Crawling along on all fours in the inky blackness of the tunnel, Sergeant Dick came to a similar trapdoor to that he had descended. Faint rays of light penetrated through cracks in it.
He pushed upward upon it, and it rose on hinges. Standing upright within the aperture, he flashed an electric torch he had been given by Inspector Medhurst, and saw that he was within a small cave, the mouth of which was covered over outside by a thick mass of creeper, through which, however, silvery light faintly struggled.
The moon had peeped out through a break in the clouds and was flooding the plain outside with its ghostly radiance.
Dick scrambled out of the hole, and, turning to the back of the cave, proceeded to flash his torch over it.
All at once he switched off the light, and, stooping over the trap and the trooper getting upon his feet in it, whispered:
“S’sh, I heard something. They are coming, I believe--our quarry! Bid the others come out softly.”
A noise as of heavily booted feet on hard rock had reached his quick, trained ear. It came not from outside the cave, _but from the roof at the back_.
Or was it only his fancy that it did?
Silently the troopers drew themselves up out of the hole in the cave floor, and lowered the trap in place again behind them. The moon-light, which entered through the interstices of the creeper marking the entrance to the cave, was just sufficient to show each man his neighbor’s dim silhouette or outline.
The noise without or beyond the cave continued, and grew louder, now changing to the sounds that a man makes in climbing a ladder--the sound of heavy boots clumping up wooden rungs.
And then to the amazement and momentary superstitious horror of the troopers a bright light shot into the cave above a ledge close to the roof at the back!
The light grew stronger, and danced about, accompanied by a rubbing, rustling noise, then resolved itself into a glowing orb, which moved about on top of the shelf and almost immediately turned its back, so to speak, on the cave.
“I’m all right now, Martha,” said a gruff voice. “Here’s the torch if you wants it, and shove the ladder along.”
Sergeant Dick and his fellow-troopers were all standing around the cave, with rifles at the ready and eyes riveted upon that lighted shelf over their heads. They were invisible in the darkness to the fellow on the ledge. He had his own light in his eyes for one thing, and, as related, he did not flash his torch around the cave but handed it back to his companion in the inner depths.
His dark, shapeless figure could just be discerned in the halo of the torch, squirming and pulling at something within another little tunnel measuring about three feet in diameter.
The end of a ladder protruded from this second tunnel.
He and his companion were pulling it through, and he now proceeded to lower it to the floor of the cave.
As he placed it in position, Sergeant Dick sprang forward, revolver in hand, and bounded swiftly up it.
The young police officer’s swiftness, however, was almost a case of more haste less speed. For the ladder, insecurely set half turned under him. But he saved himself by clutching the shelf of rock with his left hand, and luckily the ladder did not slip aside, so that he was not thrown off it.
He promptly grabbed then with his left hand at the man, even as the latter uttered a yell of fright and made to wriggle back inside the tunnel.
Sergeant Dick caught the man by the collar, and, holding him tightly, sprang up the remaining rungs of the ladder and thrust his head, shoulders, and revolver into the tunnel at the second human form he could dimly perceive within it by the light of the electric torch.
“Keep still, you in there, or I shoot,” he roared. “Keep as you are. Put your hands in front of you. I’ve got the drop on you, as you can see. Come up, men some of you, quick, and relieve me of the husband here.”
Three of the troopers sprang up the ladder behind him, while the other two held it firm. Bill, or “Bud” Seymour, too amazed, apparently, to be able to offer any resistance, was hauled down from the shelf, neck and crop, and head first, by the three troopers, allowing the sergeant to crawl into the narrow tunnel and lay hold of Martha Seymour.
Fierce and bold as the woman was in the ordinary way, she had not dared to disobey John Dick’s mandate to lie still and keep where she was. As a matter of fact, she, like her husband, seemed to have her energies paralyzed--to be bereft of the power of volition or action by the unexpected attack.
Sergeant Dick, too, had promptly snatched the electric torch from the outstretched hand and was shining the light blindingly in her bewildered, horror-stricken eyes.
The tunnel was so narrow the pair had had to wriggle along it on their stomachs and her prone position was therefore also against her.
Leaning still farther in, Sergeant Dick grasped her by the wrist now, and, backing and exerting all his strength, began to pull her bodily out of the tunnel.
He had got her half out of it when two of the troopers came to his aid, and, between them, they dragged her helplessly forth on to the shelf, then bore her down the ladder to the cave floor.
She was dressed as a man, and in the dark it really would have been hard to tell that she was not one. Like her husband, she was big and burly, and her face was red and coarse, and bloated even worse than his, while her eyes and mouth were hard and cruel-looking, whereas his were weakly vicious.
They both wore overcoats, “wide-awake” hats, and topboots.
“So you’ve got us, have ye? Well, what are ye goin’ to do with us now you’ve caught us?” asked the woman with an attempt at mockery, as if she entertained some faint hope that their captors did not associate them with the dreaded White Hood gang, or might very easily be imposed upon. “Who do you think ye’ve got hold of, anyway? What fules you all are! Don’t you know us? Yon’s Bill Seymour, and I’m his wife.”
“We are quite aware of that, Mrs. Seymour, and we also know you to be two of the White Hood gang. You two are alone, I take it. There are no more of you coming through that interesting little tunnel?”
“Curse you! I recognizes you. You are the police sergeant we was--”
The woman stopped and bit her tongue, in evident concern at having so unequivocally betrayed herself.
“Why don’t you finish, Mrs. Seymour? Whom you and your ruffianly fellow-rustlers were going to hang, when my comrades here came up so unexpectedly and timely.”
“Curse you! Oh, curse you!” was all the infuriated and mortified woman could find to say.
Her husband broke out into bitter reproaches against her, for having let her tongue run away with her and betray them both as it had done.
Sergeant Dick sent one of the troopers across the open space outside the cave to the hut to fetch Inspector Medhurst, and that officer came quickly. Needless to say, he was delighted over the capture.
“Search their pockets, men,” he ordered. “We may find evidence upon them of their own guilt and the identities of their late companions.”
A brace of automatic pistols was found upon either prisoner. The pair had already been relieved of their rifles of course.
And then one of the troopers, searching Bill Seymour, found in an inner pocket a folded scrap of paper, which he handed to Medhurst.
The inspector unfolded it eagerly, and flashed an electric torch upon it.
In a reddish fluid, presumably blood, was scrawled upon it:
“To old Alf Arnold and his little lot at ‘Water Carstle,’--We was fules to let you and your sons orf so light, and, now that cussed policeman who was a-stayin’ wid you ’as escaped us, we believes some of you set the traps on to us. So, look out! The White Hoods hev sworn revenge upon all on you, and we ull burn the b’ilin’ lot on you one night afore long in your bloomin’ ‘Water Carstle.’ Ef you did beat orf the redskins, you won’t us, so, again we says, look out!”
Inspector Medhurst read this precious effusion out aloud.
“H’m! Ha!” he observed. “We must take means at once, sergeant, to protect the Arnolds and entrap the rest of these ruffians around ‘Water Castle.’ They may strike there at once when they learn of the arrest of these two. Take your five men again, now, and explore this second tunnel--see where it leads to. If you come upon the trail of others of the band, let me know at once, and we’ll try to run the wretches down. Let me know immediately in any case what’s on the other side of this tunnel.”
John Dick saluted without a word, and, bidding the five troopers follow him again, mounted the ladder and wriggled head first, inside the hole behind the rocky shelf.