Page:Randall Parrish--My Lady of the South.djvu/227

A REBEL STILL and I swung free, dangling from the gutter. I heard him clamber up on the sill, and saw his head poked out through the opening.

"Stay where you are," I ordered softly, "and if I make it I'll let you cut through the door. Be careful; some fellow may take a shot this way."

It was not a particularly difficult enterprise; a bit of a strain on the arms and ﬁngers, of course, yet, under ordinary conditions, I would have thought little of the danger. My principal worry was that of discovery from below. The distance did not exceed ten feet, and I moved along hand over hand, noiselessly, the supporting gutter not yielding in the slightest to my weight, and my mind becoming more conﬁdent as I advanced. I could see little, but my dangling feet told me when I hung opposite the ﬁrst window. Here a serious difficulty presented itself—the window was closed, probably locked. Yet I had anticipated this, reasoning that the clasp would be the same as that of the room in which we had been imprisoned, a half-circle catch between the two sashes. To reach it with my foot I would have to break a pane of glass, and it must be the right pane. I felt for it carefully, becoming more and more keenly aware of the strain on arms and ﬁngers, located the proper spot, and sent my shoe crashing through the glass. A musket boomed from the black shadow of the grape arbor, the leaden messenger chugging into the wood just above my head: two carbines barked from a window of the lower ﬂoor, their flame showing like a red gash in the night. I stuck my leg through the shattered pane, felt the clasp with my [ 213 ]