ruction of the front of
the wharf. It was necessary to have two lines of piles, so that the deck
between might overshadow and screen from view the openings between the
horizontal beams at the front of the cellar. He stood marvelling at the
ingenuity of the plan. No wonder Hilliard and Merriman had been baffled.

But if he were to finish his investigations, he must no longer delay.
He worked back across the side of the cellar, regained the passage, and
returned to the pump-room. Then turning into the other passage, he began
to walk as quickly as possible along it.

The tunnel was barely four feet high by three wide, and he found
progress very tiring. After a slight curve at the mouth it ran straight
and almost dead level. Its construction was the same as that of the
cellar, longitudinal timber lining supported behind verticals and
lintels spaced about six feet apart. When he had gone about two hundred
yards it curved sharply to the left, ran heavily timbered for some
thirty yards in the new direction, and then swung round to the right
again.

"I suppose the railway crosses here," Willis thought, as he passed
painfully round the bends.

The sweat stood in drops on his forehead when he reached the end, and
he breathed a sigh of relief as he realized he could once more stand
upright and stretch his cramped back. He found himself in another
cellar, this time about six feet by twelve. The tramway ran along it,
stopping at the end wall. The place was otherwise empty, save for a
wooden grating or tun-dish with a hinged lid which was fixed between
the rails near the entrance. The telephone wires, which had followed the
tunnel all the way, here vanished into the roof.

Willis concluded he must be standing beneath some part of the
distillery, and a very little thought was required to make clear to
him the raison d'etre of what he saw. He pictured the kegs being pushed
under the tap of the large tun in the pump-room and filled with brandy
pumped in from the Girondin. In imagination he saw Benson pushing his
loaded trucks through the tunnel--a much easier thing to do than to
walk without something to step over--stopping them one by one over the
grating and emptying the contents therein. No doubt that grating was
connected to some vat or tun buried still deeper beneath the distillery,
in which the brandy mingled with the other brandy brought there by more
legitimate means, and which was sold without documentary evidence of its