'I don't know what the devil has come over you,' cried Toussac, turning suspicious eyes upon my protector. 'I never knew you squeamish before, and certainly you were not backward in the affair of the man from Bow Street. This fellow has our secret, and he must either die, or we shall see him at our trial. What is the sense of arranging a plot, and then at the last moment turning a man loose who will ruin us all? Let us snap his neck and have done with it.' The great hairy hands were stretched towards me again, but Lesage had sprung suddenly to his feet. His face had turned very white, and he stood listening with his forefinger up and his head slanted. It was a long, thin, delicate hand, and it was quivering like a leaf in the wind. 'I heard something,' he whispered. 'And I,' said the older man. 'What was it?' 'Silence. Listen!' For a minute or more we all stayed with straining ears while the wind still whimpered in the chimney or rattled the crazy window. 'It was nothing,' said Lesage at last, with a nervous laugh. 'The storm makes curious sounds sometimes.' 'I heard nothing,' said Toussac. 'Hush!' cried the other. 'There it is again!' A clear rising cry floated high above the wailing of the storm; a wild, musical cry, beginning on a low note, and thrilling swiftly up to a keen, sharp-edged howl. 'A hound!' 'They are following us!' Lesage dashed to the fireplace, and I saw him thrust his papers into the blaze and grind them down with his heel. Toussac seized the wood-axe which leaned against the wall. The thin man dragged the pile of decayed netting from the corner, and opened a small wooden screen, which shut off a low recess. 'In here,' he whispered, 'quick!' And then, as I scrambled into my refuge, I heard him say to the others that I would be safe there, and that they could lay their hands upon me when they wished. CHAPTER V THE LAW The cupboard--for it was little more--into which I had been hurried was low and narrow, and I felt in the darkness that it was heaped with peculiar round wickerwork baskets, the nature of which I could by no means imagine, although I discovered afterwards that they were lobster traps. The only light which entered was through the cracks of the old broken door, but these were so wide and numerous that I could see the whole of the room which I had just quitted. Sick and faint, with the shadow of death still clouding my wits, I was none the less fascinated by the scene which lay before me.