After
the first hasty survey, the boy held his fingers over the bulb of the
flashlight so that only the faintest glimmer escaped to light their
path.
The passage was short, ending abruptly in a low bricked room. Save for
themselves, a tangle of rotting rope in a far corner, and two lively
black beetles, it was empty.
"Val," Ricky's throaty whisper reached him, "can't you guess what this
is? The first pirate Ralestone's storage-house!"
It was a likely enough explanation--though nothing could have been
stored there very long; the place was too damp. Beads of slimy moisture
from the walls dripped slowly down, shining like silver in the light.
At the other side of the room was a corridor branching away. But this
they barely glanced into, little knowing how that neglect was to prove
disastrous in the end. It was the main door to their right which
interested them most, for that led, so far as Val could determine,
toward the house. And that must have been the one the mysterious
visitors had followed.
Thus they came into the second of their pirate ancestor's store-rooms.
This one was long and narrow. Three wooden casks eaten with decay and
spotted with fungus stood against the wall, testifying to the use to
which this chamber had been put, though the all-pervading damp could not
have been good for the wine.
Again a dark archway tempted them on, and the third room into which they
came had a more grim reminder of the scarlet past of the house.
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