us behind
that mass of ancient timber?

Woodley was the first to move. He walked up to the door, tried it with
his shoulder, and finding it fast, rapped on it with his knuckles, as
though he expected some ghostly porter to answer his summons.

Again we stood, waiting and listening; then, just as I was about to
speak, a gust of air came sweeping down the passage, causing our lamp
to flicker, and the ghostly music burst out again close to where we
stood, as though the goblin minstrel were piping defiance at us from
the farther side of the door. I grabbed Woodley by the arm; but to my
surprise the man burst into a roar of laughter, which mingled strangely
with the weird howl that rose and fell in total disregard of this
audacious interruption.

"Ho, ho!" laughed George. "To think that we should have been scared by
that! Bless me, nothing but the wind blowing through a keyhole!"

A moment's examination proved his statement to be correct. The gusts
of air driven along the tunnel transformed the wide, old-fashioned
keyhole into a sort of musical instrument; something in the formation
of the lock must, I think, have lent itself to producing an unusually
strange effect as the wind hummed and whistled through the hole. Here,
at all events, was an explanation to the mystery; but in my case the
sudden relaxing of overstrung nerves made me little inclined to join in
my companion's laugh. I leaned up against the side of the passage,
gasping for breath, while the throbbing of my heart seemed to hammer
through my whole frame.

By the time I had somewhat recovered from the reaction caused by our
discovery, George had carefully examined the door. It was fast and
firm as a rock, though on one side, where the ponderous framework
seemed to have shrunk or sunk, there were chinks into which I could
have inserted the end of my finger; through these, too, the stronger
gusts of air sighed and hummed as though in accompaniment to the whoop
and wail of the keyhole.

"It's the lock that holds it," said George, returning to my hands the
lamp which he had borrowed to aid him in his investigations. "If we
could find one of these beams or uprights loose, and use it as a
battering-ram, we might soon burst it open."

What the object of a door in such a place could be we had no notion,
nor, I believe, did we trouble to think. What concerned us was that it
stood between us and our hopes of liberty; and having no tool with
which to pick