Adventure and adventurers -- Fiction; Short stories
found in the second cellar, enlarging the hole communicating with the
vaults of the great public building. At the first alarm, several comrades
bolted through impulsively into the aforesaid vault, where, of course, had
this been a genuine raid, they would have been hopelessly trapped. We did
not bother about them for the moment. They were harmless enough. The top
floor caused considerable anxiety to Horne and myself. There, surrounded
by tins of Stone’s Dried Soup, a comrade, nick-named the Professor (he was
an ex-science student) was engaged in perfecting some new detonators. He
was an abstracted, self-confident, sallow little man, armed with large
round spectacles, and we were afraid that under a mistaken impression he
would blow himself up and wreck the house about our ears. I rushed
upstairs and found him already at the door, on the alert, listening, as he
said, to ‘suspicious noises down below.’ Before I had quite finished
explaining to him what was going on he shrugged his shoulders disdainfully
and turned away to his balances and test-tubes. His was the true spirit of
an extreme revolutionist. Explosives were his faith, his hope, his weapon,
and his shield. He perished a couple of years afterwards in a secret
laboratory through the premature explosion of one of his improved
detonators.
</p>
<p>
“Hurrying down again, I found an impressive scene in the gloom of the big
cellar. The man who personated the inspector (he was no stranger to the
part) was speaking harshly, and giving bogus orders to his bogus
subordinates for the removal of his prisoners. Evidently nothing
enlightening had happened so far. Horne, saturnine and swarthy, waited
with folded arms, and his patient, moody expectation had an air of
stoicism well in keeping with the situation. I detected in the shadows one
of the Hermione Street group surreptitiously chewing up and swallowing a
small piece of paper. Some compromising scrap, I suppose; perhaps just a
note of a few names and addresses. He was a true and faithful ‘companion.’
But the fund of secret malice which lurks at the bottom of our sympathies
caused me to feel amused at that perfectly uncalled-for performance.
</p>
<p>
“In every other respect the risky experiment, the theatrical coup, if you
like to call it so, seemed to have failed. The deception could not be kept
up much longer; the explanation would bring about a very embarrassing and
even grave situation. The man who had eaten the paper would be furious.
The fellows who had bolted away would be angry, too.
</p>
<p>
“To add to my vexation, the door communicating with the other cellar,
where the printing-presses were, flew open, and our young lady
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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