Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/275

Rh of the heating system came together from conduits that led to the several buildings.

The man who had helped Drujenin replaced the window-bars in such a way that they would not be noticed except after close inspection, and, after a few moments, all the men returned with the parashas to their different rooms. As the roll-call of the prisoners always took place during the supper hour, the disappearance of Drujenin could only be discovered in the morning. The precaution was taken by his cell-mates to have a dummy, made of his clothes, lying on his boards covered with a blanket.

Once Drujenin had alighted on the ground, he carefully removed the rotten planking over the old well and let himself down, hanging on with his hands, until his feet searched out the opening of the conduit through which the mains passed. Then he carefully scrambled down and entered this narrow tunnel and crawled along it with his sides scraping the walls and his head knocking against the dirty covering. At intervals he saw faint streaks of light breaking into the conduit and proceeded much more cautiously where these showed, for he knew that this light was shining down through cracks in a floor and could not be certain whether it came from rooms occupied by the authorities or from a cell. At one of these places he struck his head against a small bit of wood that had been stuck between the boards and there he stopped, rapped carefully on the flooring and was rewarded by the sound of the slow, heavy steps of a man in irons and by a hoarse, hushed voice which whispered:

"Fly! No one has yet noticed anything."

It was Lapin speaking, he who had found this conduit during his confinement in the subterranean cell and had excavated a branch tunnel in the direction of the wall,