It was brandy, but brandy in smuggled kegs, and the scoundrels of smugglers had shut him up in the vault with their kegs.
"Well, they have not killed me," he said to himself with a little laugh.
"They dared not try that, and all I have to do now is to escape, if Mr Brough does not send the lads to fetch me out." He went through the whole time now since his landing; thought of what a disgraceful thing it was for a titled gentleman to mix himself up with smuggling, and what a revelation he would have for the lieutenant and the master who had been so easily deluded by Sir Risdon's bearing.
Then he thought of Celia, and how bright and innocent she had seemed; putting away all thoughts of her, however, directly as his angry feeling increased against Ram and this treacherous girl.
He must have been for hours thinking, often in a drowsy, half-confused way, but rousing up from time to time to feel his resentment growing against Ram, who seemed to him now to be the personification of the whole smuggling gang.
By degrees he grew conscious of a fresh pain, one that was certainly not produced by his late struggles, or by stiffness from lying upon an old sail stretched upon the damp floor of a vault.
As he thought this last, he asked himself why he called it the damp floor of a vault.

For it was not damp, but perfectly dry, and below the scraps of stone in the seam there was fine dust.
But the said pain was increasing, and there was no mistaking it.

He was hungry, decidedly hungry; and paradoxically, as he grew better he grew worse, the pain in the head being condensed in a more central region, where nature carries on a kind of factory of bone, muscle, flesh, blood, and generally health and strength.
Suddenly Archy recalled that his legs had been bound, and he sat up to find that they were free now, and if he liked he could rise and go to the grated window and call for help.
"If I do, they'll come down and stuff a handkerchief in my mouth again," he thought, "and it is no use to do that.

I may as well wait till I hear our men's voices, and then I'll soon let them know where I am." He got on his feet, feeling stiff and uncomfortable, and then tried to make out where the grated window was, but the darkness was absolute, and he stretched out one foot and his hands, as he began to move cautiously along, feeling his way till he kicked against a loose stone.
This arrested him, and he tried in another direction for his foot to come in contact with what seemed to be round, and proved to be a spar lying in company with some carefully folded and rope-bound sails.
"The old rascal!" thought Archy, as he mentally pictured the stern, sad countenance of Sir Risdon.
"Why, he must have a lugger of his own, and keep his stores in here." A little feeling about convinced him that the window of the vault could not be behind the pile of boat-gear against which he had stumbled, and he moved slowly of! Again, to stop at the end of a yard or two, feeling about with one foot.
"Why, I'm not shut up!" he cried joyously.

"I'm out on the ledge.