darkness Willis thought
he had reached the front of the wharf, but he soon saw he was still
in the cellar. The roof ran on at the same level for some twenty feet
farther, and the side walls, here about five feet apart, went straight
down from it into the water. Across the end was a wall, sloping outwards
at the bottom and made of horizontal pit-props separated by spaces of
two or three inches. Willis immediately realized that these props must
be those placed behind the inner or raking row of piles which supported
the front of the wharf.

Along one side wall for its whole length was nailed a series of
horizontal laths twelve inches apart. What their purpose was he did not
know, but he saw that they made a ladder twenty feet wide, by which a
man could work his way from the passage to the end wall and reach the
water at any height of the tide.

Above this ladder was an object which at first puzzled the inspector,
then as he realized its object, it became highly illuminating. On a
couple of brackets secured to the wall lay a pipe of thin steel covered
with thick black baize, and some sixteen feet long by an inch in
diameter. Through it ran the light copper pipe which was connected
at its other end to the pump. At the end of the passage this pipe had
several joints like those of a gas bracket, and was folded on itself
concertina-wise.

The inspector stepped on to the ladder and worked his way across it to
the other end of the steel pipe, close by the end wall. The copper pipe
protruded and ended in a filling like the half of a union. As Willis
gazed he suddenly grasped its significance.

The side of the Girondin, he thought, would lie not more than ten feet
from where he was standing. If at night someone from within the cellar
were to push the end of the steel tube out through one of the spaces
between the horizontal timbers of the end wall, it could be inserted
into a porthole, supposing one were just opposite. The concertina joints
would make it flexible and allow it to extend, and the baize covering
would prevent its being heard should it inadvertently strike the side
of the ship. The union on the copper tube could then be fixed to some
receptacle on board, the brandy being pumped from the ship to the tun.

And no outsider could possibly be any the wiser! Given a dark night and
careful operators, the whole thing would be carried out invisibly and in
absolute silence.

Now Willis saw the object of the peculiar const