account.

But Kettle was, as I have said, wedged in with darkness, and for the
present, revenge must wait until he could see the man he wanted to shoot
at. He scrambled to his feet, and fumbled in his pocket for a match. He
found one, struck it on the sole of his trim white shoe, and
reconnoitred quickly.

The place he was in was round and bottle shaped, measuring some ten feet
across its floor, and tapering to a small square, where the trap gave it
entrance above. It was a prison clearly, and there was evidence that it
had been recently used. It was clear also that the only official way of
releasing a prisoner was to get him up by a ladder or rope through the
small opening to which the sides converged overhead. Moreover, to all
common seeming, the place was simply unbreakable, at least to any
creature who had not either wings or the power of crawling up the
under-side of a slant like a fly.

But all these things flashed through Kettle's brain in far less time
than it takes to read them here. He had only two matches in his
possession, and he wished to make all possible use of the first, so as
to keep the second for emergencies; and so he made his survey with the
best of his intelligence and speed.

The walls of this bottle-shaped prison were of bricks built without
visible mortar, and held together (it seemed probable) by the weight of
earth pressing outside them; but just before the match burned his
fingers and dropped to the floor, where it promptly expired, his eye
fell upon an opening in the masonry. It was a mere slit, barely three
inches wide, running vertically up and down for some six courses of the
brick, and it was about chin-high above the ground.

He marked this when the light went out, and promptly went to it and
explored it with his arm. The slit widened at the other side, and there
was evidently a chamber beyond. He clapped his hands against the lip of
the slit, and set his feet against the wall, and pulled with the utmost
of his strength. If once he could widen the opening sufficiently to
clamber through, possibilities lay beyond. But from the weight of wall
pressing down above, he could not budge a single brick by so much as a
hairs-breadth, and so he had to give up this idea, and, stewing with
rage, set about further reconnoitring.

The darkness put his eyes out of action, but he had still left his hands
and feet, and he went round with these, exploring carefully.

Presently his search was rewa