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"That's why we didn't fall all the way to the floor below. I wonder how we're going to get down?" Estelle followed him, still frightened for fear of the building falling upon them. Some of the long floor-boards stretched over the edge of the vault and rested on a tall, bronze grating that protected the approach to the massive strong-box. Arthur tested them with his foot.
The negro, whose teeth were chattering from cold, fright, and exhaustion, eagerly drank off the spirit. Vincent, who was wet to the skin with the spray, took a little himself, and then settled himself as comfortably as he could on the floor-boards in the stern of the boat, and quietly thought out the position. The wind was still rising, and a thick haze obscured the land.
Two steps down and one up, and just when you aren't 'specting it." "You'd better go easy," Ken counseled, "until you've had a personally conducted tour. You'll break your neck." "I'm being careful. And I know already about this door. There's a kink in the wall and then a hump in the floor-boards just before you get there. It's an exciting house."
I knew that the broken gold was safely at the bottom of the Seine, but where were the gems? It was all very well for Duperré to bluff, but they would, I felt convinced, eventually be found. The police, not content with searching the personal belongings of my friend, took up the floor-boards, and even stripped some paper from the wall and carefully examined every article of furniture.
Then the marines began with the axes and crowbars with which they were provided to tear up the floor-boards and break down the rafters and beams. Then grapnels fastened to long ropes were fixed on the top of the brickwork, a score of hands caught hold, and the lightly-built wall readily yielded to the strain, coming down in great masses.
A new batch of "cases" had just arrived. More were being brought in on stretchers. They were laid down in rows on the floor-boards. The colonel bent down to some of them and drew their blankets back, and now and then felt a man's pulse. Most of them were unconscious, breathing with the hard snuffle of dying men. Their skin was already darkening to the death-tint, which is not white.
There was but one thing to be done, the floor-boards must come up. I got a hatchet, but could do nothing. I called father; he brought a crowbar and pried up the board, then crawled under it and found the screw. I took good care not to lose it a second time. "The instrument was fairly mounted when the clouds mounted to keep it company, and the comet and I again parted.
'It was nine before we had finished replacing the pigs in the hold, a filthy but delicate operation, as they fit like a puzzle, and if one is out of place the floor-boards won't shut down. Coming on deck after it, we saw to our surprise the Blitz, lying at anchor in the Schill Balje, inside Spiekeroog, about a mile and a half off.
Here also, beneath the floor-boards of a cupboard in one of the bedrooms, is a concealed chamber with a fixed shelf, presumably provided to act as a sort of table for the unfortunate individual who was forced to occupy the narrow limits of the room.
It is sufficient to say that some minutes later the Hun prised the floor-boards up with his bayonet, and Boudru, from that moment, without warning, or leaving any trace, disappeared from the world. He returned in the fullness of time. And this was the way of it. For the hundredth time that day, the Hun had gone into the bedroom to look out of the bulgy bedroom window.
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