“Go down there with your lantern and look for the exit,” said Ronicky Doone.  “I’ll stay back here and see that we get our farewell all fixed up.”

The damp cellar air seemed to affect the throat of the fat man.  He coughed heavily.

“Say, Ronicky,” said Jerry Smith, “looks to me that you’re carrying this pretty far.  Let’s take a chance on what we’ve got ahead of us?”

The fat man was chuckling:  “You show a touching trust in me, Mr. Doone.”

Ronicky turned on him with an ugly sneer.  “I don’t like you, Fernand,” he said.  “They’s nothing about you that looks good to me.  If I knew half as much as I guess about you I’d blow your head off, and go on without ever thinking about you again.  But I don’t know.  Here you’ve got me up against it.  We’re going to go down that tunnel; but, if it’s blind, Fernand, and you trap us from this end, it will be the worst day of your life.”

“Take this passage, Doone, or turn around and come back with me, and I’ll show some other ways of getting out—­ways that lie under the open sky, Doone.  Would you like that better?  Do you want starlight and John Mark—­or a little stretch of darkness, all by yourself?” asked Fernand.

Ronicky Doone studied the face of Fernand, almost wistfully.  The more he knew about the fellow the more thoroughly convinced he was that Fernand was bad in all possible ways.  He might be telling the truth now, however—­again he might be simply tempting him on to a danger.  There was only one way to decide.  Ronicky, a gambler himself, mentally flipped a coin and nodded to Jerry.

“We’ll go in,” he said, “but man, man, how my old scars are pricking!”

They walked into the moldy, damp air of the tunnel, reached the corner, and there the passage turned and ended in a blank wall of raw dirt, with a little apron of fallen debris at the bottom of it.  Ronicky Doone walked first, and, when he saw the passage obstructed in this manner, he whirled like a flash and fired at the mouth of the tunnel.

A snarl and a curse told him that he had at least come close to his target, but he was too late.  A great door was sliding rapidly across the width of the tunnel, and, before he could fire a second time, the tunnel was closed.

Jerry Smith went temporarily mad.  He ran at the door, which had just closed, and struck the whole weight of his body against it.  There was not so much as a quiver.  The face of it was smooth steel, and there was probably a dense thickness of stonework on the other side, to match the cellar walls of the house.

“It was my fool fault,” exclaimed Jerry, turning to his friend.  “My fault, Ronicky!  Oh, what a fool I am!”

“I should have known by the feel of the scars,” said Ronicky.  “Put out that flash light, Jerry.  We may need that after a while, and the batteries won’t last forever.”