He rolled up one of the empty wrappers like a torch, and lit it, and looked about him.

His first hasty glance fell on the dead man, and he got another shock from the fact that his feet were lashed together with stout rope, and probably his hands also, for they were behind his back, and he lay face upward.  His coat and short-clothes and buckled shoes spoke of long by-gone days, and the skin of his face was brown and shrivelled, so that the bones beneath showed grim and gaunt.

Beyond him was a great heap of the same small packages of tobacco, and alongside them a pile of small kegs.  Gard lit another of his torches, and stepped gingerly over to them.  He sounded one or two, but found them empty.  Time had shrunk their stout timbers and tapped their contents.

Then he held up his flickering light and looked quickly round this prison-house which had turned into a tomb, and shivered, as a dim idea of what it all meant came over him.

It was a large, low, natural rock chamber, and all round the walls were black slits which might mean it passages leading on into the bowels of the island.  To investigate them all would mean the work of many days.

The dead man, the perished packages, the empty kegs—­there was nothing else, except his own boot lying in the mouth of the largest of the black slits, as though anxious on its own account to be gone.

The still air was already becoming heavy with the pungent smoke of his torches.  He stepped cautiously across to the body again, and picked a couple of buttons from the coat.  They came off in his hand, and when he touched the buckles on the shoes they did the same.  Then he turned and made for his waiting shoe just as his last torch went out.

The smell of the fresh salt air, when he wriggled out into the well, was almost as good as a feast to him.  He climbed hastily to the surface, and, as he crept out from under the topmost slab, took careful note of its position, and then scored with a piece of rock each stone which led up to it.  For, if ever he should need an inner sanctuary, here was one to his hand, and evidently quite unknown to the present generation of Sark men.

He recovered his eggs, and crept round the shoulder of the rock.  The gale pounced on him like a tiger on its half-escaped prey.  It beat him flat, worried him, did its best to tear him off and fling him into the sea.  But—­Heavens!—­how sweet it was after the musty quiet of the death-chamber below!

Inch by inch, he worked his way back in the teeth of it, and crawled spent into his bee-hive.  Then, ravenous with his exertions, he broke one of his eggs into his tin dipper, and forthwith emptied it outside, and the gale swept away the awful smell of it.

The next was as bad, and his hopes sank to nothing.

The third, however, was all right.  He mixed it with some cognac and whipped it up with a stick, and the growlers inside fought over it contentedly.