Page:Guy Boothby--A Bid for Fortune.djvu/162

152 captive in my hand. By this time another idea had come to me. If we wanted to bring Nikola and his gang to justice and to discover their reason for hatching this plot against us, it would not do to ask the public at large for help and I must own, in spite of our long imprisonment, I was weak enough to feel a curiosity as to their motive. No! It must be to the beggar who passed the house every morning that we must appeal.

"This letter concerns you more than me," I said to my companion. "Have you a lead pencil in your pocket?"

He had, and immediately threw it across to me. Then taking a small piece of paper from my pocket I set myself to compose the following in French and English:

"If this should meet the eye of the individual to whom a young Englishman gave half-a-sovereign in charity three weeks ago, he is implored to assist one who assisted him, and who has been imprisoned ever since that day in the room with the blank wall facing the street and the boarded-up window on the right hand side. To do this he must obtain a small file and discover a way to convey it into the room by means of the small pipe leading through the blank wall into the street; if this could be dislodged it might be pushed in through the aperture thus made. On receipt of the file an English five-pound note will be conveyed to him in the same way as this letter, and another if secrecy is observed and those imprisoned in the house escape."

This important epistle had hardly been concocted before the door was unlocked and our dusky servitor entered with the evening meal. He had long since