"Who's there?" exclaimed a voice, with a slight lisp in it.
Jimmy discovered that there was a low trap or door near the floor,
opening into this remarkable closet, and he slipped inside and drew his
knife again. The man was heard moving about the narrow room, and he
finally seemed to walk out into the hall and down the stairs.
Feeling around his closet, which was pitch dark, Phoebus found a deep
indentation in it, as of a smaller closet, and the sound of crooning
voices came from above.
"By smoke!" Jimmy mentally exclaimed, "this big closet is nothin' but a
blind fur a stairway in the little closet to climb up to the dungeon
under the big roof."
He stole out again and found the moonlight now streaming upon an empty
pallet and the burly watchman gone, and streaming, too, upon a larger
door in the closet opposite the indentation he had felt, this door
secured by a padlock through a staple fastening an iron bar. The key was
in the padlock, and Jimmy turned it back, drew off the lock and dropped
the bar.
The moment he opened the door an almost insupportable smell came down a
shallow hatchway within, up which leaned a rough step-ladder, movable,
and of stout construction.
"That smell," said Phoebus, entering, and pulling the door close
behind him, "might be wool, or camel, or a moral menagerie from the
royal gardings of Europe, but I guess it's Nigger."
He went up the steep steps with some difficulty, as they were made to
pass only one person, and at the top he entered a large garret, divided
into two by a heavy partition of yellow pine, with a door at the middle
of it, and from beyond this partition came the sounds of crooning and
babbling he had heard.
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