Page:Tudor Jenks--The defense of the castle.djvu/174

148 pen, and said with some pride: "There—if I was captured, I nevertheless made good use of my eyes. Yet, Master Hugh, confess that I have told you nothing which you had not well-nigh guessed already. Is it not so?"

Hugh hesitated, and the Friar laughed. "Do not fear to hurt my pride, man! After what I have been through to-day, I have little enough of pride left. I know well there is nothing new to you in what I have noted upon your chart. But there is something more I have learned—something that cannot well be put upon your chart, since that pictures only the surface of the ground."

"A mine?" Edgar asked.

"A mine!" said the Friar. "And that is more than Luke bargained for. You may be sure he never meant me to know that his sappers were at work beneath the walls. I should not have known it except that as we passed the front of that ugly shed of theirs, I heard the stroke of picks far below. The shed collected the sound as a sea-shell gives back the sound of the sea, and I am sure that sappers are at work not far from the great gate of the castle. They have not gone deep enough to have passed under the moat itself, and so they must have tunneled the mound beneath the cat, and thus have gained entrance to the foundations.