Page:Hopkinson Smith--armchair at the inn.djvu/257

 been transferred—anyway, he had gone back on us and left us to rot in jail.

"At last we determined to escape.

"We had made that same resolution every day for months and had planned out half a dozen schemes, some of which might have been successful but for two difficulties—the double guard on the outside of the building and the two dogs in the jail-yard. There was now but one chance of success. We would dig a hole in the dirt floor clear under the wall, watch for a stormy night, and make a break for the town and the coast, where we might be able to signal some trading craft and so get away.

"So we started to digging, beginning on the side opposite the door—our utensils being a sharpened bone, my pocket-knife, and a bayonet which had dropped from a sentry’s scabbard, and which I managed to pick up on our exercise walk in the court-yard and conceal in the straw on which we slept. This straw too helped hide the dirt. We rammed the wisps up into each end of the pallets, put the excavated earth in the middle with a dusting of loose straw over it, and so hid our work from view. At the end of a month we had a hole under the wall large enough to wriggle in. I