Dangerous Cargo by Hulbert Footner

and the rest was easy. When I sat up clear of
the ropes and the suffocating quilt, a voice near me asked:
    “Are you all right, Bella?”
    The quiet tones put new heart into me. I schooled my voice to answer as
steadily as she had asked: “All right!” Upon putting out my hand I found that
she too had freed herself. Wherever we were it was black as the pit.
    Mme. Storey wasted no time in lamentations. “Let’s figure this out,” she
said. “When we drove across the bridge over the inlet we turned into a street
on our right. Feng Lee’s joint was on the right-hand side of that street. We
were carried out through the back of his premises. Therefore this must be his
go-down on the shore of the inlet. Hence the sound of lapping water.”
    Meanwhile, I had started to explore our prison on hands and knees, feeling
before me as I went.
    “Wait a minute,” she said. “I’ll show a light.”
    She had been seized so quickly that the rope had caught her little handbag
under her arm, and she still had it. I heard her tapping a cigarette. She got
her lighter and struck it. The little flame revealed her quiet face almost
smiling, you would have said. She drew on the cigarette and held the lighter
aloft so we could see.
    A small chamber, perhaps ten by ten and eight feet high, all tightly
sealed in with smooth, matched boards. The walls gave back a dull sound when
rapped with the knuckles; double walls insulated with some sound-deadening
material. The door was so snugly fitted that we had some difficulty in
finding it. The keyhole did not come through to our side.
    “About eight hundred cubic feet of air,” I said casually. “How long will
that last for two?”
    “The oxygen will be gone before morning,” said Mme. Storey, “but, of
course, we can drag on for a while after that.” She dropped her cigarette and
trod out the spark. “No use feeding our oxygen to the gasper.”
    Apart from the door, there was nothing to break the smooth walls of our
cell except a big hook depending from the middle of the ceiling. Mme. Storey
took a good look at it, and shut off the tiny light. “We must hoard the
juice,” she said.
    She continued her deliberations in the dark. “Do you recognise that smell,
Bella?”
    I took a sniff of the faint, acrid odour that filled the place, and said
at a venture: “Poppies.”
    “Right. Call it opium. Feng Lee must deal in it in a big way, and this
will be his store-room. What’s the hook for? Well, if there’s water
underneath, it would be natural to float a boat under and bring the stuff up
through a hole in the floor. The hook is to support the tackle. If my
reasoning is correct, there’s a trapdoor under the hook, Bella.”
    “The floor is perfectly smooth,” I objected.
    “Let’s look.”
    With the aid of the light we succeeded in outlining the trap in the floor,
but it was so snugly fitted there seemed to be no possibility of raising it.
We clawed at it in vain.
    “Save your finger-nails,” said Mme. Storey. “Let me try to dope this thing
out. There must be some way of raising it.”
    “Maybe they push it up from below,” I suggested.
    “Never! That would make it too easy for Feng Lee’s rivals to come and rob
his secret store.”
    With her sensitive fingers she patiently tested each short length of plank
in the trap-door. We saved the light. Suddenly she said: “This piece is not
nailed, though it is set in tight.”
    She got a nail-file out of her bag and set to work to prise it under the
end of the board. It was a tedious job. In the end, when we were not
expecting it; the loose board suddenly sprang up. We hastily lit the light
and saw beneath the false flooring a heavy iron ring for raising the trap,
and two bolts driven into the side beams to prevent it from being shoved up
from below.
    We drew back the bolts, and thrusting the loose piece of board through the
ring, stood one on each side of the trap, and raised it between us. We