“Gee! But isn’t this a jolly place, if you don’t care what you say.” A rat almost as big as a small rabbit had made a dash over Billy’s feet. He also had just dodged a bat that had flapped straight at his head.
[114]
“You’re a good way underground, my boy,” said Henri, “and I guess it’s been many a day since anybody hit this trail. It is called ‘Monk’s Walk.’ Jules, Francois and myself explored this passage one day when we didn’t have anything else to do, but had no desire to do it more than once. Our old butler, he was ninety when he died, showed us how to get in here, and he had a long story to tell about a hair-raising happening here a century ago. But that’s another thing that will keep for the campfire.”
The journey through this rat and bat infested passage seemed an age in the making. The floor was damp and slippery and each of the boys had a fall, but, happily, without injury.
It was really less than half an hour that was consumed in going from the crypt of the chapel to the door opening into “Old Round Tower,” but Billy declared that he was much older when he got there than when he started.
“‘It’s dead for sleep I am,’ as Mike said,” further declared the boy from Bangor, “and I’ll bet it’s past midnight this very minute. Twenty minutes of, anyhow,” looking at his watch. “And hasn’t this been a day and a half for full measure? Something doing every minute.”
Reddy felt the same way, but there was no use telling Billy so, because Billy did not take kindly to the French language.
[115]
Henri himself, if the truth be known, was fighting to keep his eyes open.
So on the bottom floor of “Old Round Tower” the boys stretched themselves, and with knapsack pillows as hard as the floor itself they dozed into uneasy slumber, which lasted until the dawn of a new day.
The sleepers were startled by the roar of cannon. Not that the roar of cannon was unusual to these now veterans in the ways of war, but the booming seemed particularly close this morning, and in a locality that had, as stated before in this chronicle, heretofore escaped shelling.
“I thought that French general had gone to seek trouble when the whole push galloped away yesterday,” was Billy’s first after-waking remark.
“Pity they hadn’t taken that dining-hall chasseur with them.”
Henri in this moment of alarm, had a thought for the busybody who had tracked them from pillar to post a few hours ago.
A shell landed with tremendous explosion in the courtyard of the chateau; another, and another, until the whole place was shaken in every foundation, the air was aflame with the shrieking projectiles, and crash after crash made a din that was deafening.
“Us for the tunnel!” cried Henri, as a round-shot[116] clipped the side of the tower above them and sent d............