His body felt stiff and sore. There must have been a dandy fight in that dingy old room, he reflected with satisfaction. Perhaps the other two men were lying somewhere near him in the darkness. Perhaps they, too, were knocked out. He hoped they were. But no, of course not. Again he remembered the hurried caution, "Not too much of that." He decided to light a match and see where he was, and he fumbled in his pockets with the first instinct of panic he had known. If those brutes had taken his match-box! But they hadn't. He opened it carefully, still with a lingering suggestion of the panic. If he had been a hero of romance, he reasoned, with a dawning grin, that box would have held exactly one match; and he would have had to light that one very slowly and carefully. Then, at the last instant, the feeble flicker would have gone out, leaving it up to him to invent some method of manufacturing light. As it was, however, his fat match-box was comfortably filled, and his cigarette-case, which he eagerly opened and examined by touch, held three, no, four cigarettes. That was luck! His spirits rose, singing. Now for a light! He lit a match, held it up, looked around him, and felt himself grow suddenly limp with surprise. He had expected, of course, to find himself in Shaw's room. Instead, he was in a cellar, which resembled that room only in the interesting detail that it appeared to have no exit. With this discovery, his match went out. He lit another, and examined his new environment as carefully as he could in the brief interval of illumination it afforded. The cellar was a perfectly good one, as cellars go. It was a small, square, hollow cube in the earth, not damp, not especially cold, and not evil-smelling. Its walls were brick. So was its floor, which was covered with clean straw, a discovery that made its present occupant suddenly cautious in handling his matches. He had no wish to be burned alive in this underground trap. The place was apparently used as a sort of store-room. There was an old trunk in it, and some broken-down pieces of furniture. The second match burned out. Affluent though he was in matches, it was no part of the young man's plan to burn his entire supply at one sitting, as it were. For half an hour he crouched in the darkness, pondering. Then, as an answer to certain persistent questions that came up in his mind, he lit a third match. He greatly desired to know where lay the outlet to that cellar, and in this third illumination he decided that he had found it. There must be some sort of a trap-door at the top, through which he had been dropped or lowered. Those wide seams in the whitewashed ceiling must mean the cracks due to a set-in door. Undoubtedly that door had been bolted. Also, even assuming that it was not fastened, the ceiling was fully eight feet above him. There was no ladder, there were no stairs. His third match burned out.