A week later, the Squire happened to be riding on his white pony along the high road that fringed one side of Knockley Holt, when, to his intense astonishment, he heard the regular monotonous puffing and saw the smoke of a steam engine that was apparently hard at work behind a clump of larches in the distance. Riding up to the spot, he found some score or so of men all busily engaged. They were excavating a hole in the hill-side, filling-in stout timber supports as they got deeper down; the engine on the top being employed to hoist up the earth in big bucketfuls as fast as it was dug out. “What’s all this about?” inquired the Squire of one of the men; “and who’s gaffer here?” “Mr. Bristow, he be the gaffer, sur, and this hole be dug by his orders.” “Oh, ho! that’s it, is it? And how deep are you going to dig the hole, and what do you expect to find when you get to the bottom?” “I don’t rightly know, sur, but I should think we be digging for water.” “A likely tale that! What the dickens should anybody want water for when we haven’t had a dry day for seven weeks?” “Our foreman did say, sur, as how Mr. Bristow was going to have a hole dug clean through, so as to make a short cut like to the other side of the world. Anyhow, it be mortal dry work.” The Squire gave a grunt of dissatisfaction, and rode off. “What queer crotchet has that young jackanapes got into his head now?” he muttered to himself. “It’s just possible, though, that there may be a method in his madness.” CHAPTER V. AT THE THREE CROWNS HOTEL. “Hi! Jean, whose is this luggage?” cried Pierre Janvard one morning to his head waiter. He pointed at the same time to a large portmanteau which lay among a pile of other luggage in the hall of the Three Crowns Hotel, Bath. With that restless curiosity which was such a marked trait in his character, Janvard had a habit of peering about among the luggage of his guests, and even of prying stealthily about their bedrooms when he knew that their occupants were out of the way, and he himself safe from detection. It was not that he hoped to benefit himself in any way, or even to pick up any information that would be of value to him, by such a mode of proceeding; but it had been a habit with him from boyhood to do this kind of thing, and it was a habit that he could by no means overcome. Passing through the hall this morning, his eye had been attracted by a pile of luggage belonging to several fresh arrivals, and he at once began to peer among the labels. The second label that took his eye was inscribed, “Richard Dering, Esq., Passenger to Bath.” Janvard stood aghast as he read the name. A crowd of direful memories rushed to his mind. For a moment or two he could not speak. Then he called Jean as above. “That portmanteau,” answered Jean, “belongs to a gentleman who came in by the last train. He and another gentleman came together. They wanted a private sitting-room, and I put them into number twenty-nine.”