“gee! but isn’t this a jolly place, if you don’t care what you say.”
a rat almost as big as a small rabbit had made a dash over billy’s feet. he also had just dodged a bat that had flapped straight at his head.
[114]
“you’re a good way underground, my boy,” said henri, “and i guess it’s been many a day since anybody hit this trail. it is called ‘monk’s walk.’ jules, francois and myself explored this passage one day when we didn’t have anything else to do, but had no desire to do it more than once. our old butler, he was ninety when he died, showed us how to get in here, and he had a long story to tell about a hair-raising happening here a century ago. but that’s another thing that will keep for the campfire.”
the journey through this rat and bat infested passage seemed an age in the making. the floor was damp and slippery and each of the boys had a fall, but, happily, without injury.
it was really less than half an hour that was consumed in going from the crypt of the chapel to the door opening into “old round tower,” but billy declared that he was much older when he got there than when he started.
“‘it’s dead for sleep i am,’ as mike said,” further declared the boy from bangor, “and i’ll bet it’s past midnight this very minute. twenty minutes of, anyhow,” looking at his watch. “and hasn’t this been a day and a half for full measure? something doing every minute.”
reddy felt the same way, but there was no use telling billy so, because billy did not take kindly to the french language.
[115]
henri himself, if the truth be known, was fighting to keep his eyes open.
so on the bottom floor of “old round tower” the boys stretched themselves, and with knapsack pillows as hard as the floor itself they dozed into uneasy slumber, which lasted until the dawn of a new day.
the sleepers were startled by the roar of cannon. not that the roar of cannon was unusual to these now veterans in the ways of war, but the booming seemed particularly close this morning, and in a locality that had, as stated before in this chronicle, heretofore escaped shelling.
“i thought that french general had gone to seek trouble when the whole push galloped away yesterday,” was billy’s first after-waking remark.
“pity they hadn’t taken that dining-hall chasseur with them.”
henri in this moment of alarm, had a thought for the busybody who had tracked them from pillar to post a few hours ago.
a shell landed with tremendous explosion in the courtyard of the chateau; another, and another, until the whole place was shaken in every foundation, the air was aflame with the shrieking projectiles, and crash after crash made a din that was deafening.
“us for the tunnel!” cried henri, as a round-shot[116] clipped the side of the tower above them and sent down a hail of stone chips.
the boys got out from under that tower in a hurry, and fortunate for them that they did. two or three minutes later the whole structure collapsed under the terrific impact of the shelling.
when the trio ran through the tunnel door, it was sealed behind them by tons of riven stone.
pale to the lips and trembling as if with acute ague, the boys weakly stumbled down the tunnel’s descending course.
the earth above and about them quaked and shivered as the storm of powder and lead raged outside.
the same powerful engines of destruction that had blasted and silenced the french barrier forts had been turned on the chateau and its surroundings. such buildings were as paper before this cannonading.
the walls of the tunnel were holding as far as the boys had proceeded. but they had yet to traverse the line in low ground, where they had noted, in coming, the sagging roof and leaning walls, which even then had almost choked up the passage.
with these conditions made worse by the artillery shake-up, it would be a close call if the boys escaped burial alive. there was no way out at the rear.
a shut off ahead—and that would be the end.
[117]
but for the lanterns it is doubtful if the boys could have refrained from running wild, and dashing into obstructions without care or reason.
they at least did not have the added horror of total darkness with which to contend.
as the descent grew sharper so grew the nerve strain of the travelers.
they passed the first point of danger on hands and knees. between the roof and the floor there was the scant margin of three feet.
at the next the barrier presented an even tighter squeeze.
then a clearer way for ten or fifteen yards.
here it was that the lantern shafts of light ahead showed in one appalling instant a shifting of earth; first dust, then clods and small stones.
the passage was closing in!
the boys stood for a second as if petrified in their tracks.
pour vos vies, courez! (for your lives, run!)
reddy’s shrill voice broke the spell, and the three dashed for the fast closing aperture. billy, in the lead, essayed to step aside and let the others get through first, but henri countered the movement with a violent push against the back of his friend and a reach for reddy’s neck—the one boy he pushed through and the other he dragged, himself falling, full length, on his face, but safe on the other side of the death trap!
[118]
none too soon, for henri’s legs were powdered with the dust from the earth mass that had fallen in a lump just behind him!
“glory be!”
billy said it with more fervency than ever before.
“glory be!”
he said it again with grateful heart.
they were on the gradual ascent, and finally rested under the slab that would let them out into the free air.
no matter what they might be called upon to face there—it would be in the open.
glory be!
