The chimney, as I well knew by our experience in cleaning it, was
too narrow to give passage to any one above the size of a small
boy.
I looked upward as that comforting reflection crossed my mind--I
looked up, and saw, as plainly as I see the paper I am now
writing on, the point of a knife coming through the inside of the
roof just over my head. Our cottage had no upper story, and our
rooms had no ceilings. Slowly and wickedly the knife wriggled its
way through the dry inside thatch between the rafters. It stopped
for a while, and there came a sound of tearing. That, in its
turn, stopped too; there was a great fall of dry thatch on the
floor; and I saw the heavy, hairy hand of Shifty Dick, armed with
the knife, come through after the fallen fragments. He tapped at
the rafters with the back of the knife, as if to test their
strength. Thank God, they were substantial and close together!
Nothing lighter than a hatchet would have sufficed to remove any
part of them.
The murderous hand was still tapping with the knife when I heard
a shout from the man Jerry, coming from the neighborhood of my
father's stone-shed in the back yard. The hand and knife
disappeared instantly. I went to the back door and put my ear to
it, and listened.
Both men were now in the shed.
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