Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 4 (1925-04).djvu/163



OE GRISLEY, convicted wife slayer, and more beast than man, was making his escape from a life sentence in prison.

He had served a little more than a year, and hardly for a moment during all that time was his mind free from the thought of escape. Then the knowledge that perhaps he was to escape came to him suddenly, when one day a woman, associate of his in by-gone days, came to the cells and began to pass out small cakes to the prisoners. She was accompanied by the warden, who seemed quite free from any suspicion as to who she really was—a woman of the underworld.

Although Grisley did not know it, the visitor, who had once been his woman, and wanted him again for her mate, had been working for his escape for some time. Posing as one interested in the welfare of prisoners, she had made many visits to the prison with cakes, fruit and magazines, until at last she gained the utter confidence of the warden, and the edibles were not probed into for possible tools for escape, and she was allowed to distribute them to the prisoners herself.

It was after her third personal visit to the cells that Grisley, eagerly breaking open his cake for that which he knew he would sometime find, drew forth a tiny saw with an edge that would bite into the hardest steel—an edge cut into steel itself as hard as criminal ingenuity could produce.

The visits of the woman continued. Other saws came to Grisley, that he might always work with keen tools. He concealed these tiny instruments in the mattress of his bed, when danger was near. He worked only when he was doubly positive that he would not be detected. He covered up his efforts with soap, over which he rubbed dust.

The work on the bars of his window passed day by day unnoticed. And work was slow, for the bars were tough, and even those saws in which so much skill had been used bit only little by little into the hard steel. It was a full month before Grisley had completed the work. The bars of the window on one side had been sawed completely through, flush to the wall; on the other side they had been sawed almost through, so that Grisley knew he could bend them back when the time came to escape.

And now with the prison clock tolling the hour of 2 in the morning, and with the knowledge, conveyed by a note in one of the cakes, that the woman would be waiting not far from the outer wall of the prison with an automobile, Grisley was ready. He knew the woman would be there. He had given her the sign that it would be about 2 o'clock in the morning; had given it to her when she had called late the previous afternoon—the sign she had been waiting for ever since he had got the note.

Grisley had tied all his bed clothing together, and into the crook of the al-