Standish’s face, as she spoke, was foolishly vacant.  Then, a lurid blaze began to flicker behind his ice-blue eyes, and a brickish color surged into his face.  Wheeling on Gavin, he cried, his voice choked and hoarse: 

“If this crazy yarn is true, Brice, I swear to God I had no knowledge or part in it!  And if it’s true, the man who did it shall—­”

“That can wait,” put in Brice, incisively.  “I only let her waste time by telling it, to see how it would hit you and if you were the sort who is worth saving.  You are.  The Caesar crowd has found where the tunnel-opening is,—­the masked opening, back in the path.  And the last of them is on his way here, underground.  The tunnel comes out, I suppose, in that high-fenced enclosure behind the house, the enclosure with the vines all over it and the queer little old coral kiosk in the center, with the rusty iron door.  The kiosk that had three bulging canvas bags piled alongside its entrance, this morning,—­probably the night’s haul from the Caesar’s Estuary cache, waiting for Hade to get a chance to run it North.  Well, a bunch of the Caesars are either in that enclosure by now, or forcing a way out through the rusty old’rattletrap door of the kiosk.  They—­”

“The Caesars?” babbled Standish.  “What what ‘kiosk’ are you talking about?—­I—­That’s a plantation for—­”

“Shut up!” interrupted Brice, annoyed by the pitiful attempt to cling to a revealed secret.  “The time for bluffing is past, man!  The whole game is up.  You’ll be lucky to escape a prison term, even if you get out of to-night’s mess.  That’s what I’m here for.  Barricade the house, first of all.  I noticed you have iron shutters on the windows, and that they’re new.  You must have been looking for something like this to happen, some day.”

As he spoke, Brice had been moving swiftly from one window to another, of the rooms opening out from the hallway, shutting and barring the metal blinds.  Claire, following his example, had run from window to window, aiding him in his self-appointed task of barricading the ground floor.  Milo alone stood inert and dazed, gaping dully at the two busy toilers.  Then, dazedly, he stumbled to the front door and pushed it shut, fumbling with its bolts.  As in a drunken dream he mumbled: 

“Three canvas bags, piled—?”

“Yes,” answered Brice busily, as he clamped shut a long French window leading out onto the veranda, and at the same time tried to keep Bobby Burns from getting too much in his way.  “Three of them.  I gather that Hade had taken them up to the path in his yacht’s gaudy little motorboat and carried them to the tunnel.  I suppose you have some sort of runway or hand car or something in the tunnel to make the transportation easier than lugging the stuff along the whole length of stumbly path, besides being safer from view.  I suppose, too, he had taken the stuff there and then came ahead, with his mocking-bird signal, for you to go through the tunnel with him from the kiosk, and bring them to the enclosure.  Probably that’s why I was locked into my room.  So I couldn’t spy on the job.  The bags are still there, aren’t they?  He couldn’t move them, except under cover of darkness.  He’ll come for them to-night ....  He’ll be too late.”