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"Jim," said I, "don't you see it may be a matter of life or death with him? Help me in this, and I'll give you another hundred."

"Help you—how can I help you?"

"I'll tell you in a word. Run into the beer-shop there, and bring all the men you can find to these leads. Promise them twenty francs apiece to shout when I call to them. They'll do it quick enough if you say the police are with us on the other side."

"But you, yourself?"

"I'm going to throw these steps across the gap there, and force that window. After that, I'm trusting to bluff."

"You take your life in your hands," said he.

"Don't you trouble about that. You get the men. Quick's the word for this job."

He didn't wait for any more, but tumbled down to the shed again, and when I had waited five minutes and had seen him come out with half a dozen loafers at his tail, I dragged the steps up to the top of the wall, and then used them to bridge the gap which lay between the little window and myself. Luckily, the sill was old and broad; and though the window itself was not more than three feet square, it was unbarred. At any other time, I might have been a bit giddy clambering across that gap, for there was a drop of near twenty feet below me, but there were too many things running in my head to let me think of that, and half a minute hadn't gone before I had forced the window with my pocket-knife and dropped into