When he had a big enough hole to crawl through, he tied two of the bars into a knot. "The Mark of Zorro," he said. "I read it in a comic book."
"Not over Doc Bedoian's shoulder?" Happy said.
Pan was outside his cell by then. "Hardly," he said. He laughed; at least it sounded as though he did. "Silly," he said. "I have retrogressed or devoluted or whatever it is." He reached out and plucked the lock off Happy's cell door. "I should have done this in the first place. But I like exercise, it makes me feel good,".
He plucked Ape's lock away, too, and loped towards the single, barred window, putting most of his weight on his knuckles.
As he pulled each bar out of the window he passed it to Ape. "No use making any more fuss than we have to," he said. "There. Give me your hand, Happy." Clinging to the outside frame of the window with one hand, he reached down and pulled Happy up, let him climb out by himself. Then he pulled Ape up, jumped out himself, and gave the whole window cell to the chief.
Ape landed on the ground with a grunt. They were towards the back of the fake tank farm, near the woven-wire fence. Pan looked the fence over and grunted in imitation of Ape. "No problem there."
"Watch it," Happy said. "It might be electric." He looked around, then pointed at a live oak. "This place is so G.I. neat, well have to chaw a limb off that No sticks or anything around."
"No sweat," Pan said. He clambered up the tree, snapped a substantial branch off, climbed down with it in one hand. "Here, old boy."
Cautiously Happy leaned the limb against the woven wire. When there were no sparks, he said, "Go ahead."
Pan reached out and pulled the fence down to the ground and they walked out over it.
The two sailors stumbled as they went, their black shoes wabbling on their feet. Pan Satyrus led them into the first clump of hammock, the hardwood groves that dot the flat piney woods of Florida. Then he went swinging up into the trees, and, after a while, he came back with a handful of thin vine stems.
Happy and Ape started plaiting shoelaces for themselves. Their experienced hands were very fast at it.
Pan Satyrus went swinging away again. He came back munching a cabbage-heart, from a palm tree.
Ape had finished his shoelaces, was making a belt.
"I dunno much about chimps' faces, Pan, but you look happy."
Pan nodded, rocking on his knuckles, his feet free of the ground. "This isn't tropical," he said. "It's just semi-tropical. And it isn't really forest, just little patches of it. But for the first time in my life, I feel like a real ape, instead of some sort of men's toy."
Happy was stretched out, his back to a tree. "Like they gave you a ship all your own, Ape. No officers, no Department of the Navy to tell you what to do."
"I'm a torpedoman, not a quartermaster," Ape said. "But I guess, at that, I could run a ship. If I had one. But I ain't never going to."
"No, you're not," Happy said, "We're going to be a couple of seamen seconds if and when they catch us. We're AWOL, if not deserters, by now."
A branch of live oak was lying on the ground. It had fallen from the tree against which Happy rested, but it hadn't rotted yet; and it was more than six inches thick. Pan Satyrus reached over and snapped it in two. "You came with me because you were in fear of your lives if you didn't."
"We're carrying out our duty," Happy said. "Now that I think it over. The skipper of the Cooke told us to stick with you. No naval officer since has cancelled the duty. We don't know who those guys back there in that tank farm are."
Rooshians," Ape said. "We thought they was Rooshians. They never showed us no I.D., and if they had, we'da thought it was phoney. Rooshians."
"We're enlisted men," Happy said. "We ain't supposed to have brains, huh?" He stuck out his tongue and goggled his eyes.
Pan Satyrus made the noise that most people, eventually, decided was his laugh. "We can last here for years," he said. "There are all kinds of delicious things in these woods. And we can move south, slowly, until we are in the Everglades."
"They'll turn out every cop in the country," Ape said. "They'll pull out the God-damned Marines, and comb the boondocks till they find us."
"The man doesn't live who could find a chimpanzee in a semi-tropical forest," Fan said. "Why, I can shin up the first palmetto, and hide in the fronds."
"Not man," Happy said. "Men. Thousands, tens of thousands of them. Enough to cut down all your palm trees. And how about us? We're men, not chimps. Even Ape is a man, though he doesn't look like it."
Ape Bates looked at them, and said, "T'anks, pal."
"Maybe you'd better go to a road and give yourselves up," Pan said. "Turn yourselves over to the naval authorities — is that right? — and nothing much will happen to you."
Chief Bates looked at Happy; Happy looked back at the chief, who said, "Where was you born. Pan?"
"The Primate House, Bronx Zoo. That's in New York."
"I know," Ape said. "You ain't never been on your own in your life. It can freeze in this Florida; there's wild dogs and pigs and I dunno what all. We better stick with you."
"Oh, but this is my natural habitat."
"Sure," Happy said. "Sure. Anyway, we haven't any choice. Skipper said to stick with you."
"Let's march," Ape said. "Let's put some more boondocking behind us. Them Feds is likely to call out the dogs on us."
So they slugged their way across the flat country, stumbling into sink holes so covered with green scum that they looked like meadows; disturbing swarms of mosquitoes that took their quick, blistering revenge; once Pan, carelessly, got too near a clump of Spanish bayonet, and a thorn broke off in the palm of his hand. None of them had a knife or even a needle to dig the thorn out; the black, pink-palmed hand swelled rapidly.
There was plenty of water, and Pan Satyrus collected endless quantities of green nuts, ripe and unripe fruits, raw cabbage-hearts. But none of them, not even Pan, was really used to such a diet; the two sailors progressed to the music of their rumbling stomachs, and Pan Satyrus became strangely subdued.
"Them Marines do this all the time," Ape said. He was sitting under a palmetto, holding his ample paunch in his hands. His face was half again its usual size from mosquito bites.
"If I'd wanted to be a marine, I would have joined them," Happy said.
Pan Satyrus said, "If this were Equatorial Africa.. "
"It ain't," Ape said.
"If we'd only brought Dr. Bedoian with us."
"What good would that do?" Happy asked. "Without that little black bag, a doc is just another guy in the woods. Only, we need a doctor, complete with black bag."
Somewhere Pan Satyrus had picked up a large, round fruit. He turned it in his unswollen hand. "I wonder if this is good to eat."
"Nothing's good to eat that isn't right off the fire," Happy said.
"Wit' a blonde waitress to bring it to you, an' a bottle of beer to wash it down," Ape said.
Happy groaned.
"We're ruined by civilization," Pan Satyrus said. "Believe it or not, the soles of my feet are sore. I've never had to walk very far in my life."
"I suppose at home, in Africa, you'd swing from tree to tree," Happy said.
'To a limited extent," Pan told him. Then he shook his massive head. "At least, so I've read. I don't really know. I am just a second-rate man, not an ape at all. In all my seven and a half years, this is my first afternoon without a keeper."
He looked at them. "Not that I mean to disparage you gentlemen. But you've never had instructions in caring for chimpanzees."
"I never really rated Ape," Chief Bates said. "The guys just called me that."
"So we're licked," Happy said. "Night's coming on, we don't even have matches to make a smudge. And we couldn't if we wanted to, on account of the Feds'll have helicopter patrols out, looking for us. So what?"