To all appearances the spacious cellar was as we had left it an hour before, though I could not rid myself of the notion that the smell of the liquor was vastly stronger. We passed again between the rows of casks, the sergeant with the flaring candle held high. In the farthest corner the bunch of tangled cords still lay where the boat-builder, escaping from his bonds, had flung it down. “Nothing different,” was Champe’s remark; and then some devil of suggestion put the idea into his head which was like to cost us more than we knew how to pay. “Sound the casks,” he said. “Maybe some of them are empty.” I began it on my side with my sword-hilt, and the first resounding thwack brought the catastrophe. As if the blow had touched a hidden spring, the head flew out of the up-ended cask near the trap, and a dripping, reeking little man climbed agilely out of it and darted up the steep stair, with Champe and me knocking each other down in the effort to overtake him. Followed swiftly the crash of the trap-door falling into place, and intermittent thunder as of a brick wall tumbling into sections upon the floor above--thunder eloquent of the fact that the fugitive was taking a leaf out of Champe’s own book and weighting the trap for us as the sergeant had weighted it for him. The wind, or the shock of the falling door, had extinguished our candle, and we were in total darkness. But Champe had his flint and steel and tinder box, and the tallow dip, for what small good it might do us, was soon flaring again. “That was a master bright idea of yours, Sergeant Champe,” I commented grimly, when the noise overhead had ceased, and we were left to silence and our own thoughts. “If you had only added that we should begin with the cask which was most likely to hold our Jack-in-the-box--but it came wrong end foremost, like everything else in this wretched mission of ours!” Champe was smacking his lips reminiscently and paying scant attention to my irony. “Never say I can’t tell soaked boots when I taste them,” he broke out triumphantly. Then the disgust of it suddenly overcame him and he spat again. “Yah! when next I lay hands on that Dutchman, I’ll make him drink every drop of it he has left behind.” “‘First catch your hare,’” I quoted. “As matters stand now, we are the trapped ones, and it was very neatly done. I think we are likely to stay here until this boat-builder can go and find some of his smuggler friends to help him collect his bill for damages. And it will be a pretty long score, too, wouldn’t you say?” “Long enough,” was the reply; “though I didn’t mishandle him any more than I had to, to make sure of the boat for to-night. A boat we must have, says you; and orders are orders, for Jack Champe. But let’s try a push on that trap--until we find out if he’s piled the whole oven a-top of us.”