Sir Tristram stood for a moment, considering. Then he drew a long-barrelled pistol from his pocket, and with deliberate action cocked it and took careful aim. There was a flash, and a deafening report, and the branch of candles on the table crashed to the ground, plunging the room into darkness.
Sir Tristram, entering the library through the window, heard the valet shriek: ‘My God, he must have got out! No one else could have fired that shot!’
‘Oh, could they not?’ murmured Sir Tristram, with a certain grim satisfaction.
Half in and half out of the window, his form was silhouetted for a moment against the moonlit sky. The valet gave a shout of warning, and Sir Tristram, coolly taking note of his position from the sound of his voice, strode forward. The valet met him bravely enough, launching himself upon the dimly-seen figure, but he was no match for Sir Tristram, who
evaded his clutch, and threw in a body-hit which almost doubled him up. Before he could recover from it Sir Tristram found him again, and dropped him from a terrific right to the jaw. He crashed to the ground and lay still, and Sir Tristram, his eyes growing accustomed to the darkness, turned his attention to Bundy’s captors. For a few seconds, there was some wild fighting. The groom, leaving Bundy to the butler, tried to grapple with Shield, was thrown off, and rattled in again as game as a pebble. There was no room for science; hits went glaringly abroad, furniture was sent flying, and the confused bout ended in Shield throwing his opponent in a swinging fall.
Bundy, who had very soon accounted for the butler, turned to assist his unknown supporter, but found it unnecessary. He was thrust towards the window, and scrambled through it just as the groom struggled to his feet again. Sir Tristram followed him fast, and two minutes later they confronted one another on the park side of the wicket-gate, both of them panting for breath, the knuckles of Shield’s right hand bleeding slightly and Bundy’s left eye rapidly turning from red to purple.
‘Dang me if I know who you may be!’ said Bundy, breathing heavily. ‘But I’m tedious glad to meet a cove so uncommon ready to sport his canvas, that I will say!’
‘You may not know me,’ said Shield wrathfully, ‘but I know you, you muddling, addle-pated jackass! Where’s Mr Ludovic?’
Bundy, rather pleased than otherwise by this form of address, said mildly: ‘What might you be up in the bows for, master? I misdoubt I don’t know what you’m talking about.’
‘You damned fool, I’m his cousin! Where is he?’
Bundy stared at him, a slow smile dawning on his swollen countenance. ‘His cautious cousin!’ he said. ‘If he hadn’t misled me I should have guessed it, surelye, for by the way you talk you might be the old lord himself ! Lamentable cautious you be! Oh, l-a-amentable!’
‘For two pins I’d give you into custody for a dangerous law-breaker!’ said Shield savagely. ‘Will you answer me, or do I choke it out of you? Where’s my cousin?’
‘Now don’t go wasting time having a set-to with me!’ begged Mr Bundy ‘I don’t say I wouldn’t like a bout with you, but it ain’t the time for it. Mr Ludovic’s got himself into that priest’s hole he was so just about crazy to find.’
‘In the priest’s hole? Then why the devil didn’t he come out when I shot the candles over?’
‘Happen it ain’t so easy to get out as what it is to get in,’ suggested Bundy. ‘What’s more, the cat’s properly in the cream-pot now, for that screeching valet knows where he is, ay, and who he is! He means to watch till his precious master gets home.’
‘He’ll do no watching yet awhile,’ said Sir Tristram. ‘I took very good care to put him to sleep. He’s the only one we have to fear. The butler has never seen my cousin, and I doubt is not in his master’s confidence.’
‘You’m right there,’ corroborated Bundy, ‘he ain’t. But he knows there’s a man in the priest’s hole, because t’other cove told him so.’
‘I can handle him,’ said Shield briefly, and catching his horse’s bridle, set his foot in the stirrup. ‘Stay here, and if I whistle come to the window. I may need you to show me where to find the catch that opens the panel.’ He swung himself into the saddle as he spoke, wheeled the horse, and cantered off towards the gap in the hedge through which Ludovic and Bundy had entered the park.
Mr Bundy, tenderly feeling his contused eye, was shaken by inward mirth for the second time that evening. ‘Lamentable cautious!’ he repeated. ‘Oh ay, l-a-amentable!’
Sir Tristram, breaking through on to the road, turned towards the Dower House, and rode up the neat drive at a canter. Dismounting, he not only pulled the iron bell violently, but also hammered an imperative summons with the knocker on the front door.
In a few minutes the door was cautiously opened on the chain, and the butler, looking pale and shaken, and with a black eye almost equal to Bundy’s, peered out.
‘What the devil’s amiss?’ demanded Sir Tristram. ‘Don’t keep me standing here! Open the door!’
‘Oh, it’s you, sir!’ gasped the butler, much relieved, and making haste to unfasten the chain.
‘Of course it’s I!’ said Sir Tristram, pushing his way past him into the hall. ‘I was on my way home from Hand Cross when I heard unmistakable pistol-shots coming from here. What’s the meaning of it? What are you doing up at this hour?’
‘I’m – I’m very glad you’ve come, sir,’ said the butler, wiping his face. ‘Very glad indeed, sir. I’m so shook up I scarce know what I’m about. It was Gregg’s doing, sir. No, not precisely that neither, but it was Gregg as had his suspicions there was a robbery planned for to-night. He was quite right, sir: we’ve had house-breakers in, and one of them’s hidden in some priest’s hole I never heard of till now. I’ve never been so used in all my life, sir, never!’
‘Priest’s hole! What priest’s hole?’ said Shield. ‘How many house-breakers were there? Have you caught any of them?’
‘No, sir, and there’s Gregg laying like one dead. There was a great many of them. We did what we could, but the candlestick was shot over, and in the dark they got away. It was the one in the panelling Gregg set such store by catching, so I’ve left one of the stable-lads there to keep watch. In the library, sir.’
‘It seems to me you have conducted yourselves like a set of idiots!’ said Sir Tristram angrily, and walked into the library.
The candelabra had been picked up from the wreckage on the floor, and the candles, most of them broken off short by their fall, had been relit. The valet’s inanimate form was stretched on a couch, and the young groom, looking bruised and dishevelled but still remarkably pugnacious, was standing in the middle of the room, his serious grey eyes fixed on the wainscoting. He touched his forelock to Sir Tristram, but did not move from his commanding position.
Shield went over to look at the valet, who was breathing stertorously. ‘Knocked out,’ he said. ‘You’d better carry him up to his bed. Where’s this precious panel you talk of ?’