them stirring?” “No! No! Help me!” “Can you slip through the bars?” “No, they’re set too close and firm.” He muttered, “Bart’s sleepin’ on the stair and Martin’s in the hall. The woman’s got the key. Can you reach the roof by the chimney?” “Blocked with brick!” “No other way?” “A manhole in the ceiling. If I could only reach it.” “If you can only break out of that room, I’ll take you out of this. My horse is saddled, waiting. I forgot those bars.” I pressed my face down against the bars and whispered, “If you could raise the ladder, we could pass it through the bars. It’d get me to the trap-door. There’s sure a way out through the old roof. And a coil of rope, if there’s one at hand. Tie that to the ladder.” p. 107Grunting he descended; presently I saw him setting a barrel below the window, and fixing a coil of rope to a rung of the ladder. He climbed on to the barrel, gripped the ladder, and raised its head towards the window. I caught the ladder, tilted it, and presently, rejoicing, had it in the room, with no more sound than the wind should hide from the drunken rogues below. Setting the ladder against the wall, and hitching the coil of rope about my arm, I climbed, and to my joy reached easily the trap-door above me. Exerting all my strength, I strove to force the trap-door upwards. Lord, the shower of dust that descended, as the door lifted, blinded me; broken slate or brick fell with the dust, and the crash on the floor seemed fit to wake the dead. But, blindly struggling upwards, and gripping a rafter, I pulled myself from the ladder, and squeezed under the half-opened trap into the loft above my room. p. 107 An instant I lay in the dust and litter, exhausted,—the rats went scurrying all about me; I heard the flapping of birds under the roof. Struggling to my shaking knees, I forced the trap back into its place, and without pausing to listen whether the fall of rubbish into the room had roused the house, I groped forward through the blackness, my hope being that I should find a
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