"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.

The bright night, shining through a small gable window, revealed this outer half of the garret empty, and not furniture or other appurtenance than the hole in the floor up which he had come, and the door into the place of wailing beyond, which was fastened by a long iron spike dropping into a staple that overshot a heavy wooden bar. As he slipped up the spike and took the bar off, Phoebus heard some person in the room below mutter, and lock the great padlock upon the other door, effectually barring his escape by that egress.

"We must take things as they come," thought Jimmy, grimly, "partickler in Pangymonum, whar I am now."

He also reflected that the arrangements of this kidnappers' pen, simple as they seemed, were quite sufficient. If authority should demand to search the house, the double clothes-press below, with the ladder pulled up into the loft, became a harmless closet hung with wardrobe matters, and the inner closet a storeroom for articles of bulk; and no human being could either go up or come down without passing two inhabited floors and three different doors, besides the door to the slave-pen.

This last door Phoebus now threw open and walked into the pen itself, stooping his head to avoid the low entrance.

For some minutes he could not see the contents at all in the total darkness that prevailed, as there was no window whatever in this pen or den, but he heard various voices, and inhaled the strong, close air of many African breaths exhausting the supply of oxygen, and knew that chains and irons were being moved against the boards of the floor.