ks afterwards MacIan had managed to open up communications
which made his meaning plain. By that time the two captives had fully
discovered and demonstrated that weakness in the very nature of modern
machinery to which we have already referred. The very fact that they
were isolated from all companions meant that they were free from all
spies, and as there were no gaolers to be bribed, so there were none to
be baffled. Machinery brought them their cocoa and cleaned their cells;
that machinery was as helpless as it was pitiless. A little patient
violence, conducted day after day amid constant mutual suggestion,
opened an irregular hole in the wall, large enough to let in a small
man, in the exact place where there had been before the tiny ventilation
holes. Turnbull tumbled somehow into MacIan's apartment, and his first
glance found out that the iron spike was indeed plucked from its socket,
and left, moreover, another ragged hole into some hollow place behind.
But for this MacIan's cell was the duplicate of Turnbull's--a long
oblong ending in a wedge and lined with cold and lustrous tiles. The
small hole from which the peg had been displaced was in that short
oblique wall at the end nearest to Turnbull's. That individual looked at
it with a puzzled face.

"What is in there?" he asked.

MacIan answered briefly: "Another cell."

"But where can the door of it be?" said his companion, even more
puzzled; "the doors of our cells are at the other end."

"It has no door," said Evan.

In the pause of perplexity that followed, an eerie and sinister feeling
crept over Turnbull's stubborn soul in spite of himself. The notion of
the doorless room chilled him with that sense of half-witted curiosity
which one has when something horrible is half understood.

"James Turnbull," said MacIan, in a low and shaken voice, "these people
hate us more than Nero hated Christians, and fear us more than any man
feared Nero. They have filled England with frenzy and galloping in order
to capture us and wipe us out--in order to kill us. And they have killed
us, for you and I have only made a hole in our coffins. But though this
hatred that they felt for us is bigger than they felt for Bonaparte, and
more plain and practical than they would feel for Jack the Ripper, yet
it is not we whom the people of this place hate most."

A cold and quivering impatience continued to crawl up Turnbull's spine;
he had never felt so near to superstition and supe