He
tried counting sheep. He tried going over his past life in his mind from
the earliest moment he could recollect, and thought he had never
encountered a duller series of episodes. He found a temporary solace by
playing a succession of mental golf-games over all the courses he could
remember, and he was just teeing up for the sixteenth at Muirfield,
after playing Hoylake, St. Andrew's, Westward Ho, Hanger Hill,
Mid-Surrey, Walton Heath, and Sandwich, when the light ceased to shine
through the crack under the door, and he awoke with a sense of dull
incredulity to the realisation that the occupants of the drawing-room
had called it a day and that his vigil was over.

But was it? Once more alert, Sam became cautious. True, the light seemed
to be off, but did that mean anything in a country-house, where people
had the habit of going and strolling about the garden to all hours?
Probably they were still popping about all over the place. At any rate,
it was not worth risking coming out of his lair. He remembered that
Webster had promised to come and knock an all-clear signal on the door.
It would be safer to wait for that.

But the moments went by, and there was no knock. Sam began to grow
impatient. The last few minutes of waiting in a cupboard are always the
hardest. Time seemed to stretch out again interminably. Once he thought
he heard footsteps but they led to nothing. Eventually, having strained
his ears and finding everything still, he decided to take a chance. He
fished in his pocket for the key, cautiously unlocked the door, opened
it by slow inches, and peered out.

The room was in blackness. The house was still. All was well. With the
feeling of a life-prisoner emerging from the Bastille, he began to crawl
stiffly forward; and it was just then that the first of the disturbing
events occurred which were to make this night memorable to him.
Something like a rattlesnake suddenly went off with a whirr, and his
head, jerking up, collided with the piano. It was only the cuckoo-clock,
which now, having cleared its throat as was its custom before striking,
proceeded to cuck eleven times in rapid succession before subsiding with
another rattle; but to Sam it sounded like the end of the world.

He sat in the darkness, massaging his bruised skull. His hours of
imprisonment in the cupboard had had a bad effect on his nervous system,
and he vacillated between tears of weakness and a militant desire to get
at the cuckoo-clo