So I forbore and sat down, leaning my aching head against the cool wall, to wait for Olaf's return. There would be time to shout when I heard voices again, and it was not good to make much noise in that place after the blow of a club that had set my ears ringing already. Then I fell to thinking of Sexberga, and those thoughts were pleasant enough. And idly I began to sharpen my seax again on a great square stone that was handy in the wall as I sat, but it was very soft, and crumbled away under the steel without doing it much good. Now, when one is waiting and thinking, one will play with an idle pastime for the sake of keeping one's hands amused as it were, and so I went on working the long slit in the stone, which the blade was making, deeper and deeper. The sand trickled from it in a stream, and then all of a sudden I became aware that I had pierced through the stone into a hole behind, and I bent over to see how this could be. The stone was not more than an inch or two thick, and there was certainly a hollow which it closed, and when I saw that I broke and worked away more of it until I could get my hand in. Then I found that I could feel nothing, for the place was deep. So I made the hole bigger yet, and put my arm in. Then I found the back and one side of a stone-cased chest in the wall, as it were, of which the stone I had bored was the door, though this was to all appearance like several other of the larger blocks that the place was built of. When I reached downwards my hand could just touch what felt like rotten canvas, and at that I began to work again at the hole. The stone was too strong to break, though it seemed thin, and I was so intent on this, that the voices I had longed to hear made me start. "He was hereabouts, master, when I last saw him," said one whom I thought was Spray the smith. "I will hang you up if he is lost," said Wulfnoth's voice. Then I sprang up and shouted, and the vault rang painfully in my ears. It was Olaf who called back to me. "Ho, Redwald where are you?" "Under the house, in a pit," I answered, standing under the opening. Then someone came tramping above me, and the next moment Spray's leather-hosed leg came through the hole, and he nearly joined me. Thereat others laughed, and he climbed up quickly enough, for it was an ill feeling to be hanging over an unknown depth. "Lower me down a rope," I said, as I saw his face peering into the place with some others. There seemed to be a ladder handy, for the next minute its end came down, and at once I picked up my sword and climbed out. Olaf stood in the doorway now with Relf. "It is easy to see how my cousin got into that place," he said to Relf, pointing to my helm, which was sorely dinted. The big thane looked and laughed. "That is what felled him. But I knew not of this pit," he said, looking past me into the house where Spray and the men stood round the hole. Then the smith said: