Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/206

 and with the exception of an old leather couch, was equally without furniture. She surmised that it must have once been used as a storeroom, for the heavy door, she saw, had been fireproofed with sheet-iron, painted and grained to look like wood. A rectangle of bare bricks above it showed where a transom-opening had been later walled up, for screwed to the door-frame still stood the slender rod of a transom shift. In the ceiling, at the far side of the room, was the grill work of a small ventilating flue. But beyond this the room was sealed as tight as a strong box.

"I guess I'm the Crusoe o' this island, all right, all right!" she announced to the walls about her.

But she next gave her attention to the walls, for on more than one occasion in the past she had succeeded in eating her way out through mere plaster and laths. But the walls in question, she discovered as she tapped interrogatively about, seemed to be of solid masonry plastered and then covered with painted burlap.

She went to the heavy leather couch and carefully and noiselessly turned it over. Amid the quadrangle of dust where it had stood she found a small pile of old newspapers, a pair of faded tapestry