“Will this show you I’m serious?” she panted. “I’d hate to have to hurt you, Orace; but I will if you drive me to it. I’ve got to go.” He waited without stirring for a long time. He could easily have grabbed her wrist and taken the gun from her, but it was the sob in her voice that stopped him. “Orlright,” he said at last. “If it’ll myke it easier for yer. . . .” She knew then that he feared the worst. They hurried on down the hill. She remembered his limp and let him set the pace, but he managed to struggle on at a good jog-trot in spite of his lameness. They went through the village until the black bulk of the Old House loomed before them. “Will ya lead the wy, miss, since yer ere? I dunno this plice too well.” She took him round by the approach the Saint had used, but there was no need for the same caution, for the moon would not rise for another three hours. He stopped her at the door. “Lemme go fust.” He thrust her behind him and blocked the way by his greater strength and weight, and she had to obey. She heard him fumble in his pockets, and then he kicked open the door and at the same moment a beam of light stabbed down the passage from the electric torch in his hand. “See them footmarks?” he whispered. “Men’s bin ’ere lytely, and I’ll betcha they wuz Tiger Cubs.” The shaft of luminance broke on the table at the end of the corridor. The Saint had turned the box round, and from the side elevation its function was more easily deducible. Even so, it was creditably astute of Orace to stop dead in his tracks and turn suddenly to an examination of the door through which they had just come. He found the scar in the wood where the bullet had splintered it, and went back to make a study of the ground outside. “Naow!” he announced at length. “_That_ didn’t catch Mr. Templar, like it ud uv cort me fee adn’t put it ahter action.” He went down the passage again, keeping to the centre, so that she was forced to walk behind him and be shielded by his body. Her hand was on the automatic in her pocket, and, though every one of her nerves was tense and tingling, her muscles felt strangely cold and calm. Just as a boxer, trained to a milligramme, is a bundle of tortured nerves up to the moment he enters the ring, when all at once his brain becomes clear and ice-cold as an Arctic sky and his body soothes down in a second into smooth efficiency—so Patricia’s agony of fear and anxiety had frozen into a grim chilled-steel determination. The Saint had been there: they were on his track. The suspense and anguish of inaction was over. Orace had halted just before he came to the open door. “We better lookaht ’ere,” he said. She was looking round his shoulder as he turned the ray of the torch into the room, and they both saw the emptiness of it and the yawning square hole in the floor just inside the threshold.