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 closed his eyes and opened them again, for something most unexpected had happened. While his gaze was focused on those distant cliffs of fire, the line of his vision had been broken by a something—a something on the hiproof of the jail, a few feet below his window—a human figure, silhouetted for the moment and then crouching flat. The appearance of a human figure there would have been startling enough—especially since Henry thought he recognized it—but his power to register vivid sensation was temporarily depleted by overuse. He watched this figure casually almost, creeping upward to his window, and flattening there, while hands worked at the sash with tools that presently enabled the man to remove and lay it on the sloping shingles beside him.

"Hello, Adam! What do you think you're doing?" Henry demanded in a low tone. Adam's answer was a grunt and the appearance of a tiny blue flame that appeared to jet almost out of his hand. Some furtive, some perverse instinct of Henry's made him careful to hover close to those bars in such a way that the blue flame would be invisible to eyes peering out at the lurid sky from cells behind, quite as the flattened figure of Adam John was invisible. Along the bars, top and bottom this blue flame went licking, until, lo, at a touch Adam John had plucked out four of them.

"Can beat it now," he whispered laconically in that forever gassy-hoarse voice of his.

Henry, who had been fascinated by the acetylene tongue at its work, seemed to rouse to full consciousness with a bang. "No, no, Adam!" he objected with decision. "Thanks, old man, but—when I go out of here, it'll be through the front door. The