Now all alert as a gray wolf sniffing a strange trail that cuts his own, I warily lifted the trap to a finger's breadth. The crack of light dazzled me; gradually my blurred sight grew clearer; I saw a low, oblong window under the eaves of the steep, pointed roof; and, through it, the sunlight falling on the bare floor of a room all littered with papers, torn letters, and tape-bound documents of every description. Could these be the Butler papers? I had heard that all documents had been seized by the commissioners after the father and son had fled. But the honorable commissioners of sequestration had evidently never suspected this stairway.
In spite of myself I started! _How_ had I, then, entered it? Somebody must have mounted it before me, leaving the secret door open in the cellar, and I, groping about, had chanced upon it. But whoever left it open must have been acquainted with the house--an intimate here, if not one of the family!
When had this unknown entered? Was any one here _now_? At the thought my skin roughened as a dog bristles. Was I alone in this house?
Listening, motionless, nostrils dilated, every sense concentrated on that narrow crack of light, I crouched there. Then, very gradually, I raised the trap, higher, higher, laying it back against the upright of white oak.
I was in a tiny room--a closet, lighted by a slit of a window. Everywhere around me in the dust were small moccasin prints, pointing in every direction. I could see no door in the wooden walls of the closet, but I stepped out of the stair-well and leaned over, examining the moccasin tracks, tracing them, until I found a spot where they led straight up to the wall; and there were no returning tracks to be seen. A chill crept over me; only a specter could pass through a solid wall. The next moment I had bent, ear flattened to the wooden wainscot. _There was something moving in the next room!_
Motionless, intent, holding my breath, I listened at the paneled wall. Through the wainscot I could hear the low rustling of paper; and I seemed to sense some heavier movement within, though the solid floor did not creak, nor a window quiver, nor a footfall sound.
And now my eyes began traveling cautiously over the paneled wall, against which I had laid my ear. No crack or seam indicated a hidden door, yet I knew there must be one, and gently pressed the wainscot with my shoulder. It gave, almost imperceptibly; I pressed again, and the hidden door opened a hair's breadth, a finger's breadth, an inch, widening, widening noiselessly; and I bent forward and peered into another closet like the one I stood in, also lighted by a loop for rifle-fire. As my head advanced, first a corner of the floor littered with papers came into my range of vision, then an angle of the wall, then a shadowy something which I could not at first make out--and I opened the door a little wider--scarcely an inch--holding it there.