Then he turned to
the butler.
"Come on!" he said brusquely. "Take us there at once!" He glanced at
Eldrick. "I'm beginning to see through it, Mr. Eldrick!" he whispered.
"This maid's caught Pratt for us. Let's hope he's still----"
But before he could say more, and just as the butler opened a door which
led into a corridor at the rear of the hall, a sharp crack which was
unmistakably that of a revolver, rang through the house, waking equally
sharp echoes in the silent room. And at that, Nesta hurried up the
stairway to her mother's apartment, and the men, after a hurried glance
at each other, ran along the corridor after the butler and the footmen.
Pratt came out of his stupor much sooner than Esther Mawson had reckoned
on. According to her previous experiments with the particular drug which
she had administered to him, he ought to have remained in a profound and
an undisturbed slumber until at least five o'clock. But he woke at
four--woke suddenly, sharply, only conscious at first of a terrible pain
in his head, which kept him groaning and moaning in his chair for a
minute or two before he fairly realized where he was and what had
happened. As the pain became milder and gave way to a dull throbbing and
a general sense of discomfort, he looked round out of aching eyes and
saw the bottle of sherry. And so dull were his wits that his only
thought at first was that the wine had been far stronger than he had
known, and that he had drunk far too much of it, and that it had sent
him to sleep--and just then his wandering glance fell on some papers
which Esther Mawson had taken from one of his pockets and thrown aside
as of no value.
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