Again the negro waved his hand towards the house, pausing in his suction exactly like a dog. “He,” he said; then bent to suck again. The house of the Governor fronted the Plaza. It was a big house, with a patio. The lower story had no outer windows, no door. Margaret had to climb the stone steps to the balcony, where a chained monkey leaped up and down in the sun, between bites at a plantain. The door leading to the inner part of the house lay open, just as the fugitives had left it. A woman’s shawl was on the floor. One runner had upset the monkey’s saucer of water. A chair had been upset. As Margaret entered the house, with his pistols cocked, he saw something beneath the chair, something bright, which he took to be a snake. It was the scabbard of a sword, flung aside in a soldier’s hurry. Margaret, pausing on the threshold to listen, wondered if Stukeley had flung it there. He listened intently, expecting to see Stukeley coming from the darkness of the corridor. His mind was busy with the thought of Stukeley. What was he to say to him? What was he to do to him? Suppose Stukeley came out fighting? “I must bring him back,” he repeated. “I must bring him back. He must be brought back.” A step sounded on the stairs behind him. It was West, one of the _Broken Heart’s_ seamen. “Beg pardon, sir,” the man said, “may I come with you? There’s maybe some of these Dons in the house.” “Yes,” Margaret answered. “Listen.” They listened in the doorway for a moment; but the house was still, save for the chinking of the monkey’s chain. “Gone, sir, I guess,” said West. “Come on, then,” Margaret said. “Cock your pistols and come on.” They passed through the littered hall into the left-hand corridor. The jalousied shutters were shut on the patio side; but the doors of some of the rooms were open, giving light to the passage. It was a barely furnished house, hung with very old Spanish leather, ant-eaten and mothed and mouldy, falling to pieces. In the first room, a sleeping-room, the mosquito-nets had been torn from the cots, and lay wrecked on the floor with a silver chocolate service. In another, a chair stood against the wall, where a man had stood to snatch arms from a trophy. In another sleeping-room they found the clothes of a man and woman by the cot-sides just as they had been laid the night before, when the couple retired. It was like being in the presence of death to walk that house. It was as though they were looking on the corpse of a house, on a house dug up from the sands, the life of it gone and forgotten, only the pathetic husks left, that had once been helps to men. They opened a shutter and looked out upon the patio. A goat was tethered there, crying to be milked. They heard the stamping of horses. One horse was scraping with his forefeet against the floor of his stall. There was no sign of Stukeley there, no trace of him, nothing to mark his presence.